Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
Welcome to being PM -- this <i>is</i> the job.<p>And this is exactly what the agile&#x2F;sprint process is extremely helpful for.<p>Every two weeks, check in with the business team to bring them up to date with development and get them to prioritize&#x2F;rank the features they want.<p>Then hold a big meeting with your team and use planning poker to estimate how long the top-ranked items will take. Inevitably it&#x27;ll add up to 2 or 3 months of work.<p>Then go back to the business team with the realistic estimates for each task, and get them to pick what is <i>actually</i> most important to deliver or make progress on in the next 2 weeks.<p>Then work on those for the following two weeks. Rinse and repeat.<p>The key thing here is that there is an objective process. Nobody can blame you or any single developer -- there is a <i>process</i>. And after several of these iterations, the process will build <i>trust</i> among everyone, instead of blame or suspicion.<p>Also, you might think this leaves you with no room for input of your own. And in a way this is true -- welcome to being a PM. Your job is to manage and balance other people&#x27;s priorities, not your own wishlist of features. But it is <i>crucially</i> your job to advise well and point out inconsistencies&#x2F;dependencies -- e.g. sales wants feature A but the CEO wants feature B... but if we deliver B before A then together they&#x27;ll take half the time, or will enable feature C earlier, or whatever.<p>And it&#x27;s also your job to keep your eye on the long-term goals, which will generally be set by the CEO or management team -- sometimes you have to deliver feature X that management requires by the end of the quarter, over <i>anything</i> the sales team wants -- which you just gently explain to sales.