VSCO Innovation, Technology & Agility

How do you make sure all teams are on the same page when creating a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is an ever-evolving communications document; a strategic map that outlines how a company’s vision will come to life over time. Product priorities, milestones and features across various lifecycles are included in this. As a communications document, it’s meant to express the strategy, align stakeholders, aid in prioritization decisions and manage expectations. The best way to ensure all teams are on the same page is to create a single source of truth that’s readily accessible and easy to consume. 

But that’s not all; it’s also important to communicate over and over again the “what” and “why” of the roadmap, call out changes as they are made and make space for teams to continuously ask questions and provide feedback. For example, we spend a lot of time at all-hands meetings and in other companywide channels sharing the roadmap with an emphasis on the next three months. Then, I spend time regularly with individuals and teams alike, getting into the weeds of what’s on the roadmap. My goal is to achieve buy-in. I determine if I have achieved this if team members begin advocating for parts of the roadmap themselves.

How do you maintain this alignment throughout the development cycle?

There are three forms of roadmap alignment that I constantly try to maintain through written and oral communication. The obvious one is alignment with teams. This starts with the team of engineers and designers working with me to bring a feature to life and extends to leaders and other cross-functional partners across the organization. The aim is to keep all stakeholders abreast of what we have committed to and why we have committed to it in addition to progress, learnings and any changes. 

The second form of alignment is alignment with our users. What we build should solve people’s problems. As we build, we talk to users to learn or validate assumptions we had made about them that either boosts confidence in what we have prioritized or makes us rethink what was once agreed upon and committed to as development work. Regardless, this type of alignment is necessary to increase our chances that users will use or buy what we build. 

Finally, it’s key to ensure the roadmap aligns product development with business goals. Yes, I want to build cool things. But most of all, I want to build a lasting and sustainable business. Because it’s through that longevity that we get to really bring the company’s vision to life.

Do project needs change during the development process? When this happens, how do you reprioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?

Project needs sometimes change during the development process. This is usually a good thing. More often than not, when this happens, it’s because we’re responding to real-time learnings or other inputs that steer us in a different direction. Changes can be small, such as changes to specifications of a feature. They can also be big, such as shifting gears to another project altogether. The decision-making behind a change most likely considers impacts to both the user and the business and opportunity costs of doing one thing versus another. 

Regardless of the type or size of a change, expressing the “what” and “why” behind the change broadly is key. The threshold I like to hold myself accountable to is not if my teams know about the change, but whether they understand it or, even better, believe in it. This usually requires what feels like overcommunication of the change, the context behind it and the vision. Along the way, I also make space for teams to ask questions and vice versa to ensure they’re brought along successfully.

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
I work at VSCO, a platform committed to helping photographers thrive, and we use AI in a number of ways. Firstly, like a lot of technology companies, we’re increasingly using AI to improve the work we do day to day. We are also using AI to build new and differentiated product features to delight our community of photographers.

While our use of AI has emerged recently, VSCO has been around for over a decade, which means lots of data. While access to a vast corpus of high-quality photography has been an asset for us, we’ve gotten the most value by focusing on our creators and the challenges they face. AI can be a powerful tool, but to advance a business, that tool must be aligned with the needs of the customers. The story of AI at VSCO is one of being relentlessly obsessed with the needs of photographers across the world.

What are you most excited about in the field of AI right now?
My feeling is that the speculation that advancing AI technology will lead to the demise of software engineers is overstated and wrong. What we’re seeing is that AI can be a multiplier on the impact a software engineer has. By helping think through the trickier aspects of problems and handling the repetitive or time-consuming aspects of coding, software engineers and technologists can think more about their work at a higher level, thinking more about the forest and less about the trees. That elevation in perspective means more impact and value to our community.
In the same way, AI also has the potential to be a great help to the photographers who rely on our platform. We’re inspired to build a new generation of AI-powered tools to help the photographers who use VSCO thrive. By streamlining the more repetitive or time-consuming aspects of the photographic creative process, helping photographers looking for work connect with those looking to hire photographers and providing a vibrant creative community, AI can elevate and empower photographers to a higher level.

What challenges did your team overcome in AI adoption? 

The technology ecosystem is changing so fast that it’s difficult to keep up. AI and LLM-based assistants have been a huge accelerant to our work, but each new tool is a change. Making space to explore new advances and identify new tools has been critical. It’s also important to give time to learn and adjust to the new ways of working that AI tools provide. To take the greatest advantage of the evolving ecosystem, we need to emphasize flexibility in how we approach problems and make sure there’s time to learn and adjust as our tools change. The world of AI is also a bit of the wild west, and it’s important that we understand the risks and benefits when adopting new technologies.
This fluidity of tools can be a mental shift for technologists — professionals who often have a strong connection with the tools they work with — but the results, the impact of new AI on productivity, is undeniable. Show-and-tell has been a key driver in socializing awareness and inspiration. It’s so motivating to see a colleague demo for the team how they used an LLM coding agent to make their hard problems incredibly easy — and you can do it, too.