As a Product Manager, shipping and launching are always on my mind. Here are a few techniques I’ve used over the years to create momentum and keep the team excited about making progress and aligned on our ship dates and goals.
The big conference launch
I don’t love the “hit a date” tactics in product management but have used a big conference launch to generate steam successfully a few times. We did this with the launch of the CMS Blue Button API last year. When you have a big opportunity to generate press, attention and a bunch of new users / customers, it’s worth it. If you take this approach, make sure it’s a team decision and be ready to compromise a lot to get things shipped so you hit the date. You need to fundamentally appreciate how much teams hate having a date dictated to them and be an equal member in the quest. You are in this together. Also, be ready for tons of other non-software type work like doing press, building conference materials and being in a bunch of meetings making the various executives and stakeholders feel comfortable that the launch is on track.
Iterating towards the big vision
I know agile development is all about shipping working software, incremental pieces of the big vision. Sometimes it’s hard to get this train rolling. One of the approaches I’ve used a lot is getting the basic deployment pipeline setup early to deploy “hello world”. Once this is going, don’t be afraid to deploy tiny pieces. It will gradually build momentum.
If your product is stuck in some frustrating planning or architecture phase, try to find a way to keep moving forward. Can’t decide on a complex architecture? Try shipping a super simple user survey you can circulate around. How about shipping a basic piece of plumbing you are sure will be used in the product. Especially in the enterprise, my experience has been this really matters. Go a few cycles without shipping anything and the team will slow down to a crawl and morale drops. You’ll be having conference calls to plan the next conference call.
Intrinsic motivation meets good product goals
Luckily, most of the teams I’ve worked on over the years have a common understanding of the product goals and are motivated as hell to see the vision realized. In this environment, a PM needs to clearly articulate the goals and talk about how they are realized over time to give the team a good sense of the road ahead. If the team stalls, it’s usually the PM’s fault. Some decision is not being made and the path forward is not clear for the team to execute.
Summary
Good luck in 2019, I hope you build amazing things for people. As a PM, you know when the momentum isn’t there. Maybe you feel it yourself, the passion is gone and you aren’t obsessing about the product you’re building. Maybe the team feels broken and there are a million reasons why you can’t make progress. Hopefully if you find yourself in this state, you can use some of the techniques above to create momentum and ship!
Additional reading
The definition of “going live” – lessons from PivotDesk in 2012
Featured image from Undraw.
Kelly Taylor's Blog 