Jiaona Zhang: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's easy to visualize the roadmap of a spreadsheet to help people visualize what you're suggesting there. What does that actual artifact look like? Is it a doc with maybe an ancillary spreadsheet of the actual prioritization? Is it a deck? How do you actually deliver this to you with like "JZ, here's our proposal for our team"? Yeah, I'm a big fan of docs and decks are obviously helpful if you're talking live, but I do think in a remote-first culture or lots of us are in hybrid remote cultures it's hard because decks typically require a voiceover. And so we have been doing a big push even on my teams where I'm like, "Write it down and document. Force yourself to write the pros because when you write the pros, you can actually add that level of granularity." So very much so the same way like "I'm a roadmap is a story. You're telling themes, you write a story in a notebook, you write a story on pages," and so a doc is definitely preferred. And even in the doc just being like, "Here's what we're trying to achieve, here are the big areas I want to invest in, here are my big themes." And then going into each of those themes and being like, "These are the big projects." And then linking out, again, not even to a spreadsheet, but linking out to the artifacts and the systems that your team actually uses. So if your team uses Jira, go ahead and link out to Jira because so often docs get out of... Or spreadsheets get out of date, because they're like a snapshot of whatever it is that you needed at that point in time. But instead you link out to the actual things that your teams are working out of, you can always be like, "These are the themes. I will edit these if I learn major things that would change my themes. And then let's go link out to the Jira where you can just see the snapshot of the roadmap at any given point in time." Do you have a template or common structure you suggest to teams for laying out this story or is it just depends on the quarter, it depends on the year?…

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