As head of the product team, I was facing endless feature requests, customer ideas, and conflicting internal pet projects. Having inherited no structure as it related to product management cycles, we were defenseless against projects we knew weren’t going to drive our business forward. As I observed the slow creep of technical debt, the cycles of doing and undoing work, and the struggle to deliver features based on whimsy, I knew we needed a change. I implemented a new framework, collaborated with my team and my peers to adapt the system to our needs, and upended our process for roadmap and feature requesting. Read on to learn how we stopped the conveyor belt of meaningless feature-building.

The IdeaCloud platform started out as a single-use project-based digital agency deliverable. As it began to spark interest with other customers, it became clear that the software needed to quickly and effectively scale. I was brought on board to help grow and evolve the platform, starting with a focus on user experience. From there, the platform evolved to create new tools, features, and products to meet the customer demand.