4 Top Ideas From Reforge for Mid-Career PMs
I recently completed “Mastering Product Management” from Reforge. Since more than 10 people were curious, I want to share some key ideas I learned.
You’ll want to learn more about how to execute these ideas right away. They’re no-nonsense & powerful additions to your toolkit. Your next 3 months at work won’t be the same if you try them.
Now, let’s dive in.
4D Roadmaps
When someone mentions roadmaps, at least 20 product people will have a lot to say. Often, it’s textbook stuff.
I didn’t learn how to generate powerful roadmaps “with this one weird trick”, but I loved the idea of the “4 lenses”.
PMs should brainstorm objectives and initiatives from 4 different lenses:
Strategy — furthering your product along its strategic dimensions.
Vision — developing product closer to the vision narrative you created.
Customer — solving problems users have surfaced through feedback
Business — improving your target KPIs as fast and deliberately as possible.
Feedback Rivers & Feedback Systems of Record
“Great PMs use feedback management systems.” Reforge
You have customer requests via email, Zendesk, social media, NPS surveys, etc. Then you spend hours collating the data & more time getting your team to grasp this knowledge. You can over-react to the most recent requests for the sake of “quick wins”.
So send live feedback in 1 central feed so everyone on the team sees the data as it comes in. (Feedback River). Create a database that persists counts of feedback instances, to avoid recency bias. (Feedback System of Record)
When you build the roadmap, shared context is easy. You also know what problems have more objective weight.
Vision Narratives
If you even have a vision for your product, it’s probably a pithy statement.
Such statements end up less memorable and less likely to get true leadership alignment. You lose important context summarizing the whole vision in a short and pithy statement.
Going with a more expanded vision narrative creates high leverage for everyone on your team.
It has 3 parts:
Aspirational problem
Detailed and opinionated solution
User-centric resolution
Stakeholder-Forum-Style Approach
This one trips me up every time in 2 ways:
Don’t always socialise the vision live (hoping people will read it)
Skip explaining the vision when I get a chance (hoping to avoid getting in the weeds)
I learned a structured way to map stakeholders to places where I can reach them & the 6 persuasion styles to use.
The Framing style is my favorite. Risks are usually mentioned as the exhaust, a vector into nowhere. But you can reframe them as the key to achieve ambition. Explain how you’ll mitigate downside risk, but frame it in service of ambitious results.
I hope you get a promotion once you try these.
There’s more nuance to everything as always so if you have any questions, ask away.
And if you can afford Reforge, sign up.