🚀 Product Managers in software companies that struggle: you are not incompetent but simply misaligned!

As a PM, the best way to solve misalignment with your peers, leadership and other departments, is creating a business case for your roadmap initiative(s).

A business case explains the impact on business and financial goals.
It also provides a clear view on uncertainties and how it relates to other initiatives when prioritizing. They are, above all, a communication tool.

We identified three levels in a business case:

1️⃣ Communication not accounting
We call this a 'Back-of-a-Napkin' business case. It's a simple impact calculation with an investment, return and impact on business and/or financial goals. Often used in the discovery phase to create alignment with sales, CS and other departments.

2️⃣ Roadmap ready
At this stage we understand the uncertainties of our initiative. Based on the scope we can derive approximately how much capacity we require and even list the roles we need. We also have buy-in from the other departments at this stage.

3️⃣ Execution ready
We have gotten rid of many of the uncertainties in the business case and have a good understanding of the risks. We have connected one or more metrics from our ecosystem (e.g. Hubspot pipeline conversion, Amplitude page views, etc.) and have added a timeline for our initiative. Fully ready to execute and track what is happening with the impact.

🚫 Do not make the mistake of having business cases for everything. Some things just need to happen. Who wants to create overhead for a bunch of tickets that take a couple of days. Just ensure you take 10-25% of the available time for that kind of work.

With ProductHub, product managers can create business cases for their own initiatives and get the alignment they seek. It's an easy to use add-on for your existing workflow in tools like JIRA, DevOps and others. On top of that, you get easy tracking and reporting.

Interested? Get in touch with us and we'll be happy to provide you with a trial account!