If everything feels harder than it should, it might not be your process—it might be the invisible blockers hiding inside your roadmap.

We work with a lot of product managers—both leadership level and folks on delivery teams. The reality is that product management is a relatively new discipline, at least in the way it has manifested over the last decade.

We’ve witnessed many teams struggle with sustained, high levels of friction, frustration, conflict, etc. In many cases, we see folks resigned to their realities, not seeing where things are going wrong, and in all likelihood, unaware that there is anything they could do to make things better.

A few of the challenges faced by Product Managers (effect and cause):

• Low rates of product adoption and poor product-market fit: Line-item requirements are driving the bus. User needs and market truths (uncovered during research, interviews, and collaboration with users, etc.) have been relegated to the back seat (or the cargo compartment!)
• Blindness to emerging technologies and their impact on a product’s or service’s value proposition: It’s not easy staying on top of technology trends. You need to have insightful partners who live and breathe the future (both near and distant). You want to strike a balance between investments in differentiation and table stakes. Missed opportunities can leave you in the dust. Pivoting too early and too hard can drain the bank and sink the ship.
• Competing with the backlog for dev resources: It seems like it’s never early enough to start communicating with and getting estimates from your engineering organization. Without a clear plan and a long runway, dev orgs balk at big asks (time and $$$!). This means broken promises to customers and under-delivery on commitments to leadership.

We’ve learned to spot challenges like these early.

Helping product teams align with the BEST best practices is at the heart of what we do as design strategists (Read our founder's article on why you shouldn’t settle for a desert island).

Learning to see and diagnose the challenges you’re facing will help your team deliver a profoundly better product.

If you find yourself constantly rolling a rock up a mountain, only to see it tumble back down, you can be assured that you’re not alone in this experience.

Evolving your approach (with a little help from a great partner) will streamline your team’s experience and make success less happenstance and more the norm.

This takes adding just a few, straightforward, collaborative, and fun practices. To name a few:

• Build a panel of great users with whom you can collaborate to better understand their needs, values, and priorities. It’ll help guarantee that you do the right stuff in the right order and will be a game changer for your adoption and CSAT numbers.
• Leave room for new technology. Align with people who live and breathe the future. Don’t wait for every new technology to become a commodity before adopting. Be opportunistic and act wisely. The right new technology can help you leapfrog your competition while surprising and delighting your customers/users.
• Develop robust channels of communication and collaboration with your technology partners. Bring them in on the strategy and design process (early and often). Their participation will help you to become more confident in planning and delivering on your roadmap and help to ensure that budget spent isn’t budget wasted.

Ramping up on these is smart money well spent.

You’ll start getting it right the first time, every time.