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

Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti. And this is Heat and Shop. And today on the start up chat, we're gonna talk about how to do product development and product management during a global pandemic. Heat, we like talking about more than just sales and marketing. We just wanna bullshit and chat about business and life. And hopefully, while we're doing that, provide a lot of value to people. The world's best business podcast. Oh. Oh, shit. We did it. For people trying to get shit done. Yeah. We don't wanna give you feedback that's bullshit. Yeah. We want you to do your best. So here's a question for you, Heaton. Most product teams had a most software companies let's talk just about product companies and software companies broader. They had a product road map. Very likely, that road map was spanning over, you know, a couple of weeks, if not months. Some many of them will have one that is, you know, that they had set for the entire year. But, usually, these product development cycles, they're 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, like, the dev team work on things before they can ship things. So now you had this roadmap for, whatever, quarter two, let's say, quarter three this year, and now the world is melting down. We're having this global pandemic. People have to work from home. And the big question that many people have is, how is this gonna affect our product road map and our product development process? There's one bucket of questions that is, centered around productivity. Right? Our dev team, are they gonna be productive working from home with their families there? Are they gonna be able to ship on time as our original timelines were? Like, how is this gonna 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, should we do we have to adjust or should we adjust our product roadmap? Because the world world is melting down. Like, should we 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 or 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 the news, whatever, you know, settings feature is nobody will care about any of this. You know, you have been, you know, developing many, many products over the years, and you've been studying kind of product habits. I mean, it's 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? Like, how much or little should …