In this article we’ll look into our plans and commitments for the rest of the year. This will be the first post of our Public Roadmap series, where we will announce ideas and ask for feedback.
I have recently got a new senior product manager role at a new company: EV Connect. One of my first tasks will be to create my 30, 60, 90 days plan. These plans are a great way to make sure you have something to show early on the role. It’s very easy to get bogged down into day to day work, spread yourself too thin by taking in multiple unprioritised tasks, or simply lose focus over what would make your role sucessful for the company. I’ll be writting a post on the first 90 days of a product manager soon.
While thinking about what I wanted my early days at EV Connect to be, I realised I had done very little planning on what I wanted Idea Shortcut to be on the short term. It was too late to think about the first days of the blog, but I figured it would be great to make some plans and commitments for what I want to achieve with Idea Shortcut until the end of the year.
Initiatives
This is the first time I’m doing planning and roadmaps outside my work as a PM. Doing this exercise alone is interesting as I’ll be acting as judge, jury and executioner of most of the initiatives. This means valuing the initiatives, accessing the priorities, running the estimates and most importantly understanding capacity. This last point will be interesting because as I mentioned on my previous article Innovating after 6 p.m., as important as Idea Shortcut may be, it still comes after Family and Work.
The roamap for this year is highly influenced by the idea of documenting the process. Both Idea Shortcut and its Founder are still in their infant entrepreuneurial days. Admitedly there’s loads to figure out, but I believe the journey is rich in learnings. This idea of Building in Public is something that Ali Abidaal talks about frequently in his vlogs, which has also been a source of inspiration.
Here’s what we plan to until the end of the year:
1. Idea Shortcut Mindmap and Site Restructure
As I mentioned in a recent LinkedIn post, in addition to joining EV Connect as a contractor, I am also creating a company named Idea Shortcut. So I guess we can say that beyond being a blog, Idea Shortcut will also be a tiny consultancy company. Understanding what Idea Shortcut is and will be is becoming increasing difficult to understand (even for me). This quarter I want to take a step back from our original “press release” and run some mind map exercises over what ideashortcut.com should be. We’ll be documenting the process and probably re-structure the website to make it easier for users to understand what it is.
2. Grow Audience and Establish Trust
We want to keep the momentum and have a channel with periodic points of contact with our audience. This quarter we will focus on weekly blog posts on Mondays/Tuesdays. We’ll be communicating possible post titles in advance to collect feedback for the most interesting topics. Here’s our current list:
Week 1 – Public Roadmap: IdeaShortcut’s Q4 Plan
Week 2 – AWS Analytics Specialty Certification: first impressions
Week 3 – My 30, 60, 90 days plan on a new PM role
Week 4 – 13 Business Case PRFAQ questions to ask
Week 5 – AWS Analytics Specialty Certification: 50% milestone
Week 6 – Learnings gathered from launching music-cutter.online
[…]
Week 16 – Founder’s Birthday
Week 17 – Retrospective of 2021
As strech goal on this topic we’re also planning of starting an youtube channel to improve distribution and diversify the format.
3. Learning
As you could guess by some of the titles of the blog posts above, I have decided to take an AWS Analytics Specialty Certification. This will be a major challenge as I have no base certifications from AWS (or any other cloud provider), I have little to no experience on AWS, I haven’t been on any software development or architect roles for 4 years and I am trying to shorten the duration of the course from 8 to 12 weeks…
Notheless, I believe this is a good way to bump up my game on my new role. The role is intented to be for a techinical PM and I want to make sure I keep a similar level of subject matter of expertise, as what I had in previous roles as an advertising focused product manager.
4. Groom Micro Ideas for 2022
I want to make sure I recenter on the mantra of Idea Shortcut next year: “Bringing Ideas to Life in Shortest Time Possible”. Beyond learning skills quickly I also want to make sure I dedicate time to get the hands dirty.
Before the end of the year I’ll be circulating ideas and gather feedback about things to build next year.
5. Improve and Optimise [stretch]
I also want to make sure I give enough love to the Cool Tools we have already delivered at Idea Shortcut:
(PR) FAQ Generator and Product Glossary “by the book” will be the main priority. Product Glossary “by the book” in particular as it still a work in progress and we haven’t officially launched it yet.
Nonetheless, this initiative will be a stretch goal and we’ll be working on it in best effort mode (unless we get other inputs).
Public Roadmap: Prodcamp
To manage this public roadmap we will be trying out a new product management tool: ProdCamp.
Prodcamp is a tool that allows Product Managers to share their roadmaps publicly with their users and ask for feedback. Feel free to go to ideashortcut.prodcamp.com to comment on our ideas and suggest new ones! We’ll be updating our roadmap frequently.
1 comment
Comments are closed.