Finally, a place for strategy in ProductPlan.
ProductPlan has long been your single source of truth for the what, when, and how behind your product. We’ve helped you map out your major initiatives and prioritize what to build next. More recently, we’ve helped you crowdsource new ideas from customers and stakeholders alike, and create a consistent GTM process for every new launch.
Now, we want to help you capture your product strategy.
Today, we are launching the Open Beta for a new strategy space in ProductPlan. It is designed to help you capture and communicate your organization’s major objectives, track OKRs, and visualize how planned work maps to the big picture.
Many of our customers are candid about their struggles to connect initiatives planned in their roadmaps to the broader goals they support. We want to build a world where both the product strategy and its execution can exist in the same platform, where:
- A product leader can quickly create a big picture view of progress made towards major goals.
- A product manager can make smarter decisions faster and justify those decisions by connecting them to the overarching “why.”
- It’s easy for anyone in the organization to see how the product strategy drills down into every roadmap.
Strategy at ProductPlan is the first step towards building a better way to align your teams. The Open Beta for Strategy will last through the end of August. We’ll use the beta to fine-tune functionality, add new enhancements, and, most importantly, hear directly from you about what’s working and what isn’t.
But first, let’s take a quick tour of how strategy works in ProductPlan.
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A clearly defined space for strategy
Roadmaps serve as a great plan of action. They detail the major initiatives planned over a given amount of time. They visualize what you’re building next. They map how different projects support each other.
However, as a tool for communicating product plans, a roadmap often isn’t the right place to summarize high-level goals. We’ve spoken with many customers who have a separate document for their product strategy. It lives in a PowerPoint or spreadsheet, untethered from the work happening across the roadmap.
Our first step in supporting strategy within ProductPlan was to create a designated space for it. You no longer have to cobble together a view of your strategic priorities by utilizing your Lanes or Legend. These features are now free to help you visualize other important information on your roadmap, like team ownership or status.
Instead, we now have a new space in ProductPlan to capture your product organization’s major objectives. These can be measurable outcomes you’re hoping to achieve, broader themes or areas of focus, and other product-specific goals.
Give your team easy access to the product strategy at any time. This allows the strategy to stay front and center whenever your team needs to plan new initiatives or prioritize what to focus on.
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A straightforward way to map strategy to execution
“Why are you doing what you’re doing?” is a question product people get time and time again. It’s a complicated request. It requires a product manager to account for a variety of determining factors, from resource capacities to customer feedback.
But at the heart of every new product, release, or initiative has to be a thread connecting it to the organization’s goals. The best way to justify work is to show how it supports the product strategy.
You can now easily map initiatives represented as your roadmap bars or containers to company objectives. With this ability, you can give each initiative a true north star that guides decision-making. You can also create a roadmap view by company objective in seconds, making it easy to present how you plan to execute your strategy.
Show progress toward goal completion at a glance
Finally, we want to help you report on progress. Any good product OKR has a series of key results that help you quantify the success or failure of a particular objective.
We first want to help you answer the questions, “How close are we to reaching our goals, and what’s left to do?”
ProductPlan can now show you how many of the initiatives mapped to your objectives are complete out of the total. This can be great for ‘at a glance’ assessments of progress. See which objectives are falling behind and which are ahead of schedule. Then drill into your roadmaps to understand what’s left to do.
While this is where we’re starting, it’s not where we want to end. There’s more to measuring success than reporting on completed outputs. As we develop Strategy further, we look forward to building out our reporting capabilities. What would it look like to track the cost of investment, for example?
As you use the new tool, you’ll see an option to provide feedback on what other kinds of reporting you’d like to see. We’d love to hear from you.
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Available now in Open Beta
If you’re a current ProductPlan customer on either a Professional or Enterprise plan, you can try Strategy in ProductPlan today for free—no need to switch anything on. Simply log in and head to the new Strategy space in the left-hand sidebar.
If you’re not a ProductPlan customer but would like a tour, request a demo. Our team will be in touch shortly to walk you through our platform.
Bonus: navigate ProductPlan with ease
Speaking of the left-hand sidebar, you’ll likely notice a completely revamped navigation system in ProductPlan. We want to help you easily discover new features (like Strategy) and quickly traverse familiar territory (like Roadmaps) within the ProductPlan platform.
So we’ve added enhancements like bread crumbing to help you better keep track of where you’ve been and make it easy to go back.
Looking forward
As an Open Beta feature set, Strategy in ProductPlan is just the beginning. As we move through the beta period, we’ll continue to refine and add new functionality rooted in your feedback.
Looking forward, we want to focus on connecting strategy to more than just roadmaps in ProductPlan. We want to see it cascade to the discovery process, prioritization, and launch. We also want to build more robust key results capabilities.
