Yes, you can get your idea on the product roadmap as an engineer
By Marty Bacik
But it will take a bit of finesse
User-generated playlists has been the number one requested feature since I joined Calm 2.5 years ago. However, it was never prioritized high enough to make it onto a product roadmap. To my non-Product Manager brain, it seemed worth taking some time to implement playlists to delight our customers. So, like a naive kid new to the corporate world, I set out on a journey to make playlists happen. How hard could it be?
Well, a full year after starting to work on playlists as a side project, it’s finally in the app. Why did it take a year? The engineering side of playlists was straightforward, but getting the feature prioritized on our team roadmap against other planned work that directly impacted our growth objectives was not. In this post I hope to share how I navigated the competing priorities of consumer app requests, how I got playlists on my team’s roadmap, and tips for how you too can gain buy in from stakeholders to get your idea prioritized.
Code Wins Arguments
My VP of Engineering would always say the phrase “code wins arguments” to me. In truth, I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant until I saw it happen in real time with playlists. In the past, I have worked primarily on backend code, but for this prototype I wanted to demonstrate how it could work in our app end to end. To accomplish this I had to learn enough swift (iOS) code to create create a low fidelity prototype. I knew I couldn't pull time from our iOS team members to help me with my side project, so the only way to create a prototype was to do it myself.
Once I had coded just enough in my prototype to give a functional demo of what the feature could be, I recorded and sent a video to a few co-workers. All of a sudden I had people saying ‘hey I saw your playlists video, when are we shipping it??’. These were people I hadn’t even sent the video to initially. My casual video had the side effect of building hype around the feature, and the momentum ended up being critical.
Roll Up Your Sleeves
Any sort of guerilla or side project inherently needs to be scrappy. For me, I had to leave the comforts of backend engineering and cry while looking at XCode for a few days. Struggling with learning a new domain truly was the only way that I ever could have shown that playlists was possible.
Side projects also have to prioritize simplicity and action over everything. If you try to make your project perfect, it will probably die in the process. The entire intent here is getting to something you can show people with as little effort as possible.
Align to Business Objectives
It took me a while to understand why our most requested feature (playlists) was never prioritized. And no, it’s not that our product team doesn’t care about our users. In engineering we work toward our own objectives all the time - code coverage, latency reduction, security. The Product team also has their set of objectives that they work toward with limited engineering hours. Taking the view of a Product Manager, if my objective was to increase the number of users who start a trial, I probably would also choose to prioritize trying a new 14 day trial over playlists. Taking this view, it became more clear to me why playlists hadn't been prioritized to be built yet.
I began to draw connections between user-generated playlists and my team's specific goal of increasing users who remain with Calm after their trial. The central argument was if users could create a playlist during their trial period, then they would be more likely to remain with Calm after their trial in order to continue using their playlists. By aligning a playlists feature to my team's key metrics, I was able to help make the case alongside my Product Manager that the feature should be implemented. Ultimately, all features should serve to further business goals. If you are able show the value to the business, your argument for adding a feature to the product roadmap becomes much stronger.
I like to think I used the right tactics to navigate the business landscape of the company in order to make playlists happen. In actuality, people may have just let me do it so I would finally shut up after a year of talking about playlists. Either way, hopefully, this is at least some inspiration to get started on that feature you’ve always wanted to give your customers. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Thank you so much for your help, it was easy to understand, and have already created a playlist, used it last night, and slept for 8 hours, first time in 3 years .
