This article presents some ideas and tips to do a better product management presentation for your internal stakeholders. We’ll talk about the product management update and a few words on the regular update on your product roadmap.
You might think that you’re a magician and you can do it all. However, if you do product development for quite some time or you want to learn the first steps without failing too many times, then remember the following.
Educate, inspire and guide everyone involved in product development.
There are many people who are involved in product development in a direct or indirect way. You should give them the confidence that we’re building the right product for customers and help them share the excitement to ship value!
Create a regular conversation with your stakeholders, try different formats, approaches and techniques to make them care about your product.
If they don’t care about WHY you’re building it and HOW, understanding WHEN (when it’s built and why not right now), how do you want to you succeed with customers (WHO).
Product Management Update / Review / Demo
We have stakeholders, all the people who support us in the product development (before, after and during the development). They can be project sponsors or colleague who convey the product value to the customers who benefit from it and pay for it. We can have internal stakeholders or clients.
As product managers it’s our job to make them feel engaged with the product and get them to believe in it. So next time you talk to a consulting client, don’t miss to do a demo or a short presentation to them.
Continuous collaboration is key in the digital services world. It’s also vital when you are in-house.
Please, don’t leave your internal stakeholders (account management, sales, research, customer support and customer success, market managers) in the darkness.
It can take many forms and you can call it as you want depending on the methodology you follow or don’t fall, we have the ‘Sprint Review’ or ‘ Product Management Update’ or ‘Product Demo’ or ‘Product Review’, just make sure that you do this regular update for your product. I’d recommend you to arrange as the cadence you’re following with a specific development methodology (e.g. sprints, every 2 weeks) or if you have a big release. It’s up to you, no strict rules here 🙂
In any case, you can always keep two product updates, once after each sprint AND one for big releases.
Separately, you may definitely want to schedule an update on your product roadmap twice a year to mark the adjustments which need to be made and other important updates.
How to structure your product update
Audience first
Who will be attending your product review / update? What are their goals, what’s their daily work and how your updates can relate to it?
Adapt your product content to your audience. How does the released feature help them solve issues better (CS side) or sell better by conveying the value to clients?
Last sprint
Provide an overview of the work done (bugs vs features).
You can avoid difficult questions by simply getting a breakdown by bugs and features. Your stakeholders want to know why the team worked on some many bugs and less feature-related tasks. Make sure you provide the % breakdown just to give an idea about the distribution and provide some context.
Don’t overwhelm the audience with the small details, give them the big picture and good understanding of the breakdown.
KISS U = keep it short, simple, sweet + understandable
Structure (feature / benefit / demo + key points)
Include a slide for features only. I don’t recommend going into detail about bugs, you can all group them on one slide with a nice table. Like:
| Bug ID number | title | description | status |
What you need is to highlight the status (in progress, done, being tested, generally available or in a test environment).
Additionally, you’d want to show the % distribution of the work done on features and bugs (e.g. 50% on features and 50% on bugs). If the bugs predominate, make sure that you explain why and what happened. Your audience should understand concepts as scalability, reliability of the software, we cannot ship, ship all the time without making the system stronger. The only way to coach them is to subtly mention it in your chats with them 😉
As it comes to features, include one slide per feature and include the feature description and its benefit for customers. Why did we build this? What is it? How would it solve the customer’s pain point?
- Feature
- Benefit
- Demo – snapshot, video or show it live to achieve more interactions
Human brains prefer visuals over text, so demo that or prepare a screenshot of the feature. We are naturally inclined to follow steps, so mark with 1, 2, 3 etc. all the steps to make a feature work as expected. If a specific configuration or enabling is needed for something to work, don’t save this info for yourself 🙂
- Include links to other resources or mention where more information can be found if someone wants to understand the feature in detail.
Please, leave the details for another time, keep it straight to the point and use less words.
Visuals are your good friends. Use them. Visuals can be images, nice emojis just next to the title of what you present.
I’m a big fan of emojis and animated gifs when it makes sense to use them. Don’t overuse, though 🙂 Hey, if you want to draw, then draw and improve your visual storytelling.
Next sprint
If you already know what you’ll be working on next sprint, don’t hesitate to provide some info about it. If you’re unsure, though, refrain from overpromising or setting wrong expectations. You can just briefly explain a couple of things which are still in the works.
You can skip this part altogether and use your time to provide a teaser for a future item 🙂
Build globally, conquer locally
Don’t be afraid of saying that your release or a single feature is focused just on something for one of your core markets. No regrets, we should get market share in certain markets. Share this with your stakeholders and try to tie this back to the company’s strategy (to avoid any disappointment and be transparent).
Go to market tips
If you’ve the time and you can afford to include some more info or speak a couple of minutes more, then highlight WHY this was built, WHO it was built for and HOW it will solve the customer’s problem.
How would you do the roll-out to engage your target segment(s)? What do our stakeholders need to know when we roll it out? Is there any battle card that they can use when we release, something that will help them introduce the feature to the market and beat the competition? Don’t assume that they will know, this is your job to help your product reach its full potential and enable your colleagues to shine with it!
Bonus tips
Use brand colors
This can sound straightforward, but keep the brand colors, use your product identity, logo, name, everything that makes a connection to your product.
Wording and language
Try to use their language, avoid any fluff and fancy way to describe things. If there is a specific terminology in your industry, make sure that you refer to it and keep it simple. Shorter sentences can be better 🙂 I’m still working on this one 🙂
Before and after
Even if you don’t write it down or you simply mark it in your presentation, please, mention whether the feature depends on switching it, what is the configuration, how to do it, what’s the default behavior of the system without the feature. What does it change if we enable it?
Color coding
Color coding is your friend. Be it for the status of a task or assignee or anything else you want to highlight.
Compare this:
In progress
Done
Blocked
AND
In progress
Done
Blocked
This also helps you give some more context around what’s in progress or blocked. If you feel like it, you can briefly mention the impediment for a blocked task. Again, less is more, don’t overwhelm your audience with obsolete info.
Kudos
Give credit where credit is due. We don’t operate in silos (well, if you work in squads, it’s even better :)), give the credit to your coworkers even if they indirectly helped for a new feature or increased efficiency.
A line or two and a nice, positive message can make a big difference.
Interactive presentation and being vivid
Do you remember the last time you messaged your mom while listening to a presentation? Were you sleepy or simply not interested in the subject?
Your presentation needs its life, it should be vivid and keep the audience engaged. In the spirit of using images, visuals, I’d remind you about the power of storytelling (this we’ll cover in a new article) and including small details.
Read what you’ve written in your presentation and give it a try to rewrite it with less words, replace words with schemes, flows (you can just draw the flow of how the system is supposed to function and avoid the wordy stuff), emojis (I’m a big fan of them 🚀😎), replace checkmarks with emoji checkmark to make it more interactive.
Hope that some of my experience has helped and don’t hesitate to drop me a line and share how your product updates improved 😉 I’m curious and always happy to chat over fresh ideas 🙂 Stay strong 💪