Product managers often place the cart before the horse. We love to think about the product, the features, how “cool” the UI is, and how we can make the product better.

Steve Ballmer was once quoted saying, “The lifeblood of our business is that R&D spend. There’s nothing that flows through a pipe or down a wire or anything else. We have to continuously create new innovation that lets people do something they didn’t think they could do the day before.”

I recently worked with a great product management organization—great in the eyes of the management team that assembled them, at least.

This inbound team of heavily technical PMs was responsible for the 2-3 year product roadmap for the company.  As a result, their main constituents were the entire engineering community and, more specifically, the software and hardware architects interspersed through that community.

“Roadmap” is the most overused word in product management because everyone asks for one. Every stakeholder wants a roadmap because it addresses different needs for different people. Executives want to know the strategy, sales want to know the timeline, and what no one seems to realize is that a roadmap doesn’t solve a problem or deliver a requirement.