A year of writing Roadmap Weekly
I’ve learned a few things and shared a lot of advice over the past year of writing the Roadmap Weekly newsletter. Thank you for joining me on this journey, here’s to another year!
It has been one year since writing the first post for Roadmap Weekly. Before starting this newsletter, I posted infrequently on Medium for a couple of years, but this has been my first year of consistently writing and my first time publishing a newsletter.
I've loved writing about product management. It's a relevant topic, especially since I do it daily. I started writing this newsletter after a couple of years of coaching other product managers and realizing there were a lot of similarities between the challenges all of them were facing. My articles started as a way to summarize my thoughts on these issues and share them with my mentees as additional material for our mentoring sessions.
Over the last year of writing Roadmap Weekly, I've learned a few things:
There are a lot of product managers out there in the world, and I'm amazed that some of you have subscribed and care to read my writing or listen to the audio version of my posts.
Most of us struggle with many of the same issues, regardless of how far along we are in our careers, where we work, or what we specialize in. I've talked with CEOs, VPs, and early career product managers, and the themes remain constant (although the scale of the challenges may change).
Writing is hard, especially writing a consistent newsletter that's not too long, informative, engaging and relevant.
In the last year, I've done what I consider to be a lot of writing:
I've written and published 48 posts (today's post makes 49)
I've also published three resource templates
This works out to more than 50,000 words published in the last year!
The astute might have noticed that I missed a few posts. I'm okay with this. I aim to publish every week, but sometimes, it's just not in the cards.
So, after so much writing and more coaching, you might ask what my top advice to product managers is. You were going to ask, right?
One year of advice summed up in just a few bullet points:
Use data (when you can) to help drive your decisions
Keep making improvements to processes wherever there is friction
Finding a job is hard; treat your career much like you would a product, iterate, gather feedback, take charge
Communication is possibly your most important skill, whether it be roadmapping, managing stakeholders, or soliciting feedback
Products evolve and aren't something you build overnight. Steady progress and delivering value consistently is what wins the race.
Over the last year, I’ve had a lot of variation in my posts, and some have been viewed a lot more than others. Here are my top 6 posts according to number of views
Check out the post archive to see all of my posts, including my writing from before this newsletter started.
I'm taking a few weeks off from writing to plan out the direction of this newsletter for the next year, but I'm looking forward to continuing Roadmap Weekly for another year. See you in your inbox in November!