Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
Welcome to being PM -- this is the job.And this is exactly what the agile/sprint process is extremely helpful for.Every two weeks, check in with the business team to bring them up to date with development and get them to prioritize/rank the features they want.Then hold a big meeting with your team and use planning poker to estimate how long the top-ranked items will take. Inevitably it'll add up to 2 or 3 months of work.Then go back to the business team with the realistic estimates for each task, and get them to pick what is actually most important to deliver or make progress on in the next 2 weeks.Then work on those for the following two weeks. Rinse and repeat.The key thing here is that there is an objective process. Nobody can blame you or any single developer -- there is a process. And after several of these iterations, the process will build trust among everyone, instead of blame or suspicion.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's priorities, not your own wishlist of features. But it is crucially your job to advise well and point out inconsistencies/dependencies -- e.g. sales wants feature A but the CEO wants feature B... but if we deliver B before A then together they'll take half the time, or will enable feature C earlier, or whatever.And it'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 anything the sales team wants -- which you just gently explain to sales.