Product Roadmaps aren't Delivery Plans
Hello fellow punks!
Welcome to the 48 of you who have signed up for this since the last issue. It’s great to have you on board. Hopefully you’ll stick with me while I figure out what this newsletter is all about.
Here’s this week’s issue ⬇️
I love it when a delivery plan comes together 📋

Product roadmaps aren't delivery plans.
Here's why:
A product roadmap is a way to articulate your strategy—it's your best guess of the bets you need to take to move your product forward.
A delivery plan, on the other hand, is your short-term approach for implementing the features you're currently working on to place those bets.
When you think of roadmaps as strategy and delivery plans as tactics then you begin to see the difference.
Roadmaps are conceptual and should be closely linked to your product vision and goals.
Delivery plans should be closely linked to what your engineers are working on now.
Roadmaps are dateless.
It's fine to bucket your bets into time horizons (now, next, later), but you shouldn't tie your strategic objectives to deadlines.
Delivery plans, on the other hand, are all about dates—when are you going to launch the new feature you've got in QA?
As a PM, blurring the line between roadmaps and delivery plans can cause a lot of headaches for you, your team, your stakeholders, and your customers.
Roadmaps and delivery plans are valuable tools to help you execute, but make sure you're clear about what you're using them for.
Resources to help you create useful roadmaps 🚘
Some of my favourite resources to help you build better product roadmaps:
Your product roadmap isn't a dumping ground for feature requests.
Here are 10 tweets guaranteed to help every product manager create roadmaps that are actually useful 🧵 ⬇️
— Toby Rogers 🚀🤘 (@tobiasrogers)
Aug 8, 2022
My favourite tweets of the week 🐦
I had a week off to hang out with the family last week so wasn't online much. I still managed to find some awesome product management-related tweets, though 👇
Characteristics of highly effective product managers
What does it mean to be a successful PM?
From ruthless prioritization to making decisions, great PMs are like swiss army knives.
10 characteristics of highly effective PMs I know:
— Jen Yang-Wong (@Jenyangwong)
Oct 28, 2022
Looking at everything through a product management lens
What's holding you back from executing
The twelve things getting in the way of your execution:
— Aakash Gupta 🚀 Product Growth Guy (@aakashg0)
Oct 26, 2022
As a product leader, don't be afraid to challenge
We are often afraid to challenge others, to ask difficult questions, to persevere until we feel we have all the answers. If you want to be a product leader, you should start doing this right now. Otherwise, you must either very often revise your decisions or accept mediocrity.
— Stephanie Leue (@stephanie_leue)
Oct 26, 2022
Achieving a revenue goal is not a strategy
not sure who needs to hear this...
but achieving a revenue goal is not a strategy
you would think this is common knowledge
..but I believe that a certain operator-forcefield renders normally smart and curious people powerless
e.g. "I don't care WHAT you do...that's the goal!"
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish)
Oct 27, 2022
What I've been reading 📚
Elon Musk finally bought Twitter. What that means for the social network (and humanity) is anyone's guess right now.
Here's the best article I've read on it so far:

Elon Musk now owns Twitter — and a huge number of impossible political problems around speech, content moderation, and trying to make money.
One of my big goals at the moment is to level up my product leadership skills.
I've been doing a lot of research into how to make the transition from product manager to product leader, but one of the most useful pieces I've read so far is this post on transformational leadership:

Product management is a humbling responsibility, as it revolves around human needs, wants, and desires.
As a product manager, I'm always scanning the edges of technology for new ideas. This one, though, is a little bit creepy:

Technology that lets us speak to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? | MIT Technology Review — www.technologyreview.com
Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve.
That’s it!
See you next week (probably).
Toby
The Punk PM
P.S. Feel free to share this with anyone else you think would find it interesting.
I’m still playing around with ideas for content and format for this newsletter, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new structure. Go ahead and shoot me an email with ways you think I can make it better.