How Our Product & Engineering Teams Plan Ahead at Dashlane

Originally published:January 30, 2024|Last updated:January 31, 2024|Frederic Rivain

Planning the work of Product & Engineering teams is always complicated. There are as many ways of doing it as there are companies, and it depends on culture, history, leadership styles, and the type of product.

On one hand, you want enough predictability so the organization can operate with some level of consistency and anticipation. On the other hand, you don’t want to go overboard estimating ahead and getting into false precision—when the act of planning takes more time than actually getting things done.

Let’s start by talking about notions of time, which is at the heart of planning.

Time is a key component to any business, particularly for startups and companies that aren’t yet profitable. It’s a limited resource and a constraint in product development. It’s a concept that can benefit or harm you, depending on how you use it. Winning in a competitive market is, after all, a race. However, time is not a fixed and unique concept. Its meaning and understanding vary a lot, and there’s such a thing as the elasticity of time.

In the triangle of project management, time usually appears as one of the constraints.

Software development projects are challenging because you need to find the right balance between:

In the center is quality, which is a constraint because you should only want to ship work that has the appropriate level of quality.

At a company level, you need to factor in different types of deadlines and milestones. For example:

In any activity related to delivery, it’s good to estimate how long activities will take and organize the different steps through a roadmap, timeline, or project plan.

Roadmaps help the team sequence the effort and understand when they expect to ship key deliveries. It gives a sense of accountability and helps coordinate and communicate across the organization.

Estimating work is a complicated exercise, so you need to be aware of the exercise’s limits. Adapt the precision and time spent using estimates depending on the level of unknowns in the project. Start with high-level estimates and roadmaps at first (t-shirt sizing is enough at this stage). Then, as you progress, use finer and more precise estimates and roadmaps.

You want to work in small increments because it reduces risk, generates value sooner and faster, and makes it easier to build roadmaps without estimating too much ahead of time with false precision.

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We often see time as a constraint imposed on us. We talk about "time pressure" and "impossible deadlines," but since time is a reality you have to live with, how can you adjust your mindset and instead see time as a positive force that helps you achieve greater things? How can you change that pressure into a positive energy? We'll never have as much time to do something as we'd like. So, let's work with that assumption to leverage more proactive and realistic outcomes.

Use time as a stimulator. We all know how exciting it is to get to the moment when it happens: The big moment we have all worked for when the stars line up and we deliver successfully according to plans. You should use the adrenaline and psychological stimulation induced by those moments to generate a positive driving force for the team. When you get into a regular cadence of those moments, it’s a virtuous cycle for teams. It also requires teams to invest in their own internal promotion, which helps build the engagement of both the team and the rest of the organization.

Working on tight timelines isn’t easy, but we don't really have a choice. Time can be used as a positive force that helps all of us to achieve more with stronger ownership. It requires us to be proactive about how we manage time and forces us to communicate even more to make sure we all have the same understanding of timelines, deadlines, and constraints.

Now, let’s look at how we handle planning today at Dashlane. This is a living practice. It was different yesterday, and it will keep evolving in time.

Here’s a breakdown of how we think about roadmapping.

When looking two quarters ahead, we aim to provide visibility to the organization. We want to paint the broad strokes of the Themes we intend to focus on in 3 to 6 months. Providing that visibility is what matters. We’re not looking for precision and certainty of our plans at this stage.

Our Themes are directional plans based on our appetite to solve certain customer problems and address identified opportunities driven by our goals and strategy. At this point in the process, we have low confidence in a specific solution, as we haven’t yet done the required Discovery work.

Teams must have a plan to increase their confidence progressively. If the target has to change, it has to be properly communicated or validated, depending on the initiative’s criticality. It’s important at this stage to be comfortable invalidating and canceling ideas if discovery results in a high level of viability, feasibility, or usability risk.

We've seen positive outcomes from using the combination of an internal roadmapping tool and customer portal (we use ProductBoard) to better visualize the Product Lifecycle internally and communicate upcoming features to customers externally.

Planning the next quarter of work is essential to building trust across the organization in the Product & Engineering teams’ ability to deliver.

At this stage, the expectations for teams are as follows:

Teams sometimes get imposed commitments from external stakeholders, either because of market demands, regulatory requirements, or product opportunities we simply can’t miss. These are sometimes referred to as high-integrity commitments.

The way we manage those are as follows:

Finally, let’s look at the current quarter, in which teams are executing their plans. Back to our notion of time, this is where slicing initiatives into increments matters.

We want to execute in increments:

In parallel, we run continuous discovery initiatives, which:

Putting it all together, you can find the big picture on this Google Slide.

This is a short description of how we plan product work at Dashlane. We keep iterating on this process in the same way we iterate on our product to continuously adapt to our changing business needs and keep raising the bar. I hope this was insightful and an inspiration to others.

Want to share your feedback or reaction? Post on Dashlane’s dedicated subreddit, r/Dashlane.

Frederic Rivain

Frederic Rivain has been Dashlane’s passionate Chief Technology Officer since 2015. He is eager to learn, innovate, and have fun with the engineering team to ensure it efficiently supports Dashlane and offers the best service to all Dashlane users.

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