2016 is going to be an exciting year for us here at LiquidPlanner. As the company continues to grow, I’m often asked two questions:

What’s on the engineering and development horizon?
What big trends will change how people work in the future?

Here’s my simple answer to both questions: People want to succeed at work, but they need help doing it and that’s how we help them. As far as I know, there’s no roadmap for how to be great at work. That’s why our product, and ultimately our company success is tied to showing our customers a new, more realistic way to work while providing them with the tools and technology needed to be more effective than ever before.

When it comes to our product roadmap strategy, it’s really quite simple: We’re going to continue to share everything we know about the future of project and work management, while we continue to learn more about the issues and challenges our customers face on a daily basis. Since the sky’s the limit on what we could create in 2016, customer interactions and research help us focus our efforts.

In fact, we’re prioritizing our roadmap and engineering efforts around this idea:

We’ll build only what customers need to solve their most pressing problems.

As an agile team, this has always been a theme, but over the past year, we’ve collectively embraced a customer-driven approach to our work. From sales and marketing to dev and support, everyone is focused on helping our customers solve difficult project management challenges and get the very most out of the product.

With this framework, there are a number of categories we’re keen to improve in 2016:

• Deeper Resource Management capabilities
• Better access controls and filtering
• Integrations
• Data Visualization enhancements
• Expanded collaboration features
• Application speed and scalability enhancements
• Mobile enhancements

With our development and engineering priorities set for 2016, the second part of the question is worth addressing:

What big trends will change how people work in the future?

It’s a question that many people are trying to unravel. Will Kelly did a great post on our blog about seven project management trends of note for 2016; Forbes.com author Jacob Morgan has devoted his professional life to thinking about the future of work.

Here are three things we think will impact project managers and more broadly, the companies they work for in 2016:

• Speed is life in digital business. In 2016 executives will finally arm their employees with the tools necessary to move faster, be more efficient, execute quicker and take ideas from plan to market in a fast, effective manner.
• Even the most stalwart companies adopt Agile development principals. Agile thinking will finally extend beyond IT and dev. Seriously, it’s 2016—gone are the days of quarterly software release cycles and big, stale planning automation, continuous delivery, and daily or weekly software updates are the name of the game. The only way to get there is with daily planning, a customer-driven roadmap, and tools that capture and help you report on work progress as it happens.
• The role of a project manager is changing quickly and will eventually merge with a product manager. Project managers bring a ton of process and rigor to work which is great. Merge this rigor with product management and you’ve got an ideal employee capable of managing the creation and evolution of a product on time and on budget. This is the future. Savvy project managers will learn more about product management to prepare for it.

So, there you have it. That’s what 2016 will be about for us—working with customers to deeply understand their most pressing work issues, then building the most powerful tool to help them solve those issues.  

We’re excited about the future, and we’re thrilled to have you with us! I look forward to your comments, concerns and any questions you might have.

Predicting the future of IT projects is tricky business. To learn how to address scheduling uncertainty in technology projects, download our white paper, Tackling Uncertainty in IT Projects.