501: How to Do Product Management During the COVID-19 Crisis

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to do product management during the COVID-19 crisis. The current crisis is causing a lot of disruption for many companies, and one area in particular that most companies will be affected is in their product development roadmap. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how product development will be affected by this crisis, how this crisis has affected Hiten’s roadmap, if changing your roadmap is a good idea right now and much more.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:29 Why this topic was chosen. 01:19 Questions some companies are having right now. 03:02 How this crisis has affected Hiten’s roadmap. 03:42 How this crisis is affecting Google’s Chrome. 05:08 How most companies still work from offices. 06:10 How most companies don’t know how to do product development properly. 07:51 If changing your roadmap is a good idea right now. 08:15 How product launches are going to be very tricky right now. 09:00 Products that are doing well right now. 3 Key Points: The big question that a lot of companies now have is how is this going to affect our product development roadmap.Google has slowed down or stopped releasing updates for Chrome.Be aware that you may not be as productive as you normally are. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti  [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: and this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we're going to talk about how to do product development and product management during a global pandemic. [0:00:05] Steli Efti:So here's a question for you, Hiten. Most software companies. Let's talk just about product companies and software companies brought up, they had a product roadmap. Very likely that roadmap was spanning over a couple of weeks if not months. Many of them will have one that they had set for the entire year. But usually these product development cycles, they're substantial long and they need a good amount of head time to plan for them and to put things in motion and have a dev team work on things before they can ship things. So now you had this roadmap for whatever quarter two, let's say in quarter three this year and now the world is melting down. We're having with world pandemic, people have to work from home. And the big question that many people have is how is this going to affect our product roadmap and our product development process? There's one bucket of questions that is centered around productivity, right? Our dev team, are they going to be productive working from home with their families there? Are they going to be able to ship on time as our original timelines were how is this going to affect the productivity and the timelines and milestones and all that. And then there's the other bucket of questions that I see floating around, which is do we have to adjust or should we adjust our product roadmap because the world is melting down. Maybe the things that we thought launching to our customer base in a month or two from now would be very exciting and very useful. Maybe it's not useful, exciting right now. Maybe launching product features right now in general is a bad idea because people are running around with their hair on fire and us sending them an email that we've launched a new whatever, settings feature is... Nobody will care about any of this. You have been developing many, many products over the years and you've been studying kind of product habits. I mean it's your email list even in a product in and of itself, dealing with product leaders, product managers. How do you think about this? How much or little should a global crisis like this influence the way you think about your product roadmap and the things that you are building and planning to ship in kind of the short to midterm? [0:02:51] Hiten Shah: Yeah,

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