Consulting Case Studies

Taming the Roadmap and Priorities

The Challenge: A startup had a very small engineering team, but long list of ideas. With large competing features and no clear framework, the development was haphazard and poor in quality. This resulted in poorly shipped features and discontent between founders and engineeers.

The Solution: I worked with everyone to establish a unified prioritization framework, a language that everyone could use. It framework wasn't just RICE, but how to consistently have a structured conversation, quickly handle disagreements, define priorities, and execute.

• Facilitated meeting to agree on how to run prioritzation.
• Created a centralized repository in Notion for all feature ideas.
• Instituted weekly, then bi-weekly priortization discussions and decision-making.

The Outcome: The new process brought clarity, improved morale, and incrteased collaboration.

Facilitating Difficult Conversations

The Challenge: The relationship between the product and go-to-market (GTM) teams was strained. The product team felt features were "dropped on them" without warning, while the GTM team felt product was suggesting and building features that wouldn't sell.

The Solution: I implemented a new meeting cadence and format designed to build empathy and create shared understanding. The goal was to move from conflict to collaboration.

• Replaced the "product update" read meeting by having product explain the "why" behind features, not just the "what".
• Introduced a "How to Demo" section where PMs taught the GTM team how to best showcase new functionality, including the customer pain point it solved.
• Setup a process for GTM to request product to join calls and listen to direct potential customer feedback.

The Outcome: Trust between the teams increased significantly. The GTM team felt better equipped to discuss new features and GTM also had more insight into how product was thinking.