Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

As Product people, we all know how important our product roadmap is. It allows us to connect product strategy to a timeline, outline what’s coming when and clarify why you are doing things. But we heard from many of our customers that they expect for more, so we’ve revamped the roadmap. Now, it doesn’t only tell everyone what you’re planning to do, it also keeps track of the actual progress of your development teams so everyone is informed on what actually happened.

It’s clear that feedback can – and should – be a critical part of the product management decision making process. When planning your product strategy it is essential to find out what real users think and then strike a balance between coming up with your own innovative ideas, reacting to market trends and taking customer opinions into account.

Decisions, decisions! Life’s full of them – from life-changing choices such as if you should accept that enticing job offer or relocate to another country to those smaller things like what to have for lunch! And decision-making is a central aspect of the product management role: the success of the product depends on the ability to make the right decisions at the right time and then communicate them effectively.

In project management, there is a constant struggle at identifying the best approach for work: the classic Waterfall methodology or the more flexible Agile methodology. It’s hard to find an organization that only follows either one of these. Though there may be scrum purists who would revolt against the idea of integrating Waterfall and Agile approaches, a hybrid process is often what many teams prefer.

When it comes to online tech products Google is the undisputed world leader – almost everything it launches turns to gold, swiftly becoming the industry standard. From Search and Gmail to Chrome, Docs, Maps, Translate, Drive and Google Plus the massive successes have far outweighed the failures. It only makes sense then that any insight we can get into the processes used by Google Product Managers should be treated as a great reference for how to deliver high quality products.