Prioritize a quarterly roadmap for Lightroom

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Adobe is a creative, document, and marketing software company; its products include Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Adobe Express, Firefly, and Experience Cloud.

You are the PM responsible for Lightroom’s next quarterly roadmap at Adobe. Lightroom serves photographers ranging from serious hobbyists to working professionals who need fast importing, organizing, editing, collaboration, cloud sync, preset workflows, client review, and reliable export across desktop, mobile, and web. The product operates in a competitive creative-tools market where AI-powered editing, collaboration, workflow speed, and professional trust are increasingly important.

Your task is to prioritize what the Lightroom team should build, improve, or de-scope over the next quarter. You should assume there are multiple candidate initiatives competing for limited design, engineering, ML, infrastructure, and go-to-market capacity. These may include improvements to core editing performance, AI-assisted workflows, asset organization, cloud reliability, collaboration/client review, mobile parity, professional workflow depth, or integrations with Adobe’s broader creative and marketing ecosystem.

This is an execution-focused roadmap prioritization exercise. The interviewer is looking for how you translate product goals into an actionable quarterly plan, make trade-offs across users and business needs, sequence work responsibly, and manage launch risk without overcommitting the team.

The experience should consider:

- The primary user segments within Lightroom, such as professional photographers, advanced hobbyists, mobile-first creators, and teams or studios

- The key workflow friction points across import, curation, editing, organization, sync, collaboration, and export

- How you would evaluate and compare roadmap candidates using user impact, business impact, strategic fit, effort, dependencies, and risk

- Team capacity and ownership across product, design, engineering, ML/AI, cloud infrastructure, research, data, legal, marketing, and support

- Sequencing of initiatives across the quarter, including discovery, build, beta, launch, and post-launch measurement

- Go/no-go criteria for major releases, especially where reliability, performance, AI quality, or customer trust could be affected

- Rollback, mitigation, and communication plans if a feature causes workflow disruption, sync issues, quality regressions, or customer confusion

- Launch risks related to professional user trust, creative control, AI ethics, cross-platform consistency, and competitive differentiation

Your goal is to present a clear quarterly roadmap recommendation for Lightroom, explain the prioritization logic behind it, and show how you would drive execution from planning through launch while balancing user value, Adobe’s strategic position, team constraints, and product quality.