Product, roadmapping & my invisible disabilities group in 2024…
Now that I’ve pulled you in with a random article title and an image created by AI (anyone else addicted to typing in random statements and tweaking it over and over to produce an image, it fascinates me each time the detail it goes into and how so often you get such a great image created. I have also had some really weird ones and see if you can spot the spelling mistakes in the image too!)
I will now explain how on-earth for me Product and Invisible Disabilities are linked.
In my 23 years at Holiday Extras (how time flies…), I am very proud of so many things but I am especially proud of the Invisible Disabilities Group @ HX that I set up.
I started it a while back as many other community groups were set up such as Women@HX, Men@HX, and Anxiety Warriers@HX to name a few. It all started following a time in the office on crutches as I struggled around following a fall and as my joint issues continued and I was diagnosed with my 3rd syndrome! I started to wonder how I could help others in a similar situation and learn more myself.
The goal of our group is “To bring awareness to HX of the numerous invisible disabilities that many employees suffer with daily and a lot of the time you wouldn’t even know. But to also provide support for those employees and family members to have a safe space to share any thoughts or resources and also just make people smile.”
It has grown over the years but 2024 is the year I am most excited about as I am now in a team of 3 and we have 65 members in the group as well. So in true product style, I feel it’s time to start a product roadmap for the year.
We have had an ideation meeting part 1 to brainstorm ideas and plans, and had so much to talk about we have part 2 coming soon.
Then we have a planning meeting scheduled for the kick-off of our first meet-up to set the requirements and discuss who will be the stakeholders and own different roles for the meet-up we have planned and the details we want to cover in our talks (and of course who is bringing the cakes 🧁). Luckily I feel much more prepared talking in front of people now with my product skills extended as we demo our work every 3 weeks, so this no longer seems such a daunting task.
We want to do customer research in our first meet-up, have a suggestion box for ideas for future meet-ups and find out what our audience would like to know and what we can do going forward. Plus researching external sources to provide up-to-date information and guidance where possible as well.
We can also have a retrospective on our first meet-up to see what we can improve for the next one.
So it’s surprised me how much of what we do in Product relates to other areas of your working life and the general principles can be applied to other scenarios and the benefits of planning ahead and setting up a roadmap can make it seem less of a mammoth task.
I’m excited for what 2024 will bring for my group, and how the roadmap will continue to grow, alongside building out the product roadmap for my actual product as well.
This post was originally published by the author here.
