Good-Smart-Cool: 7 steps to product roadmaps for the real world
As the Cheshire Cat said, if you don’t care where you are going, it doesn’t matter what road you take. Product Management requires a roadmap.
What follows here are 7 steps to create a product roadmap that is both robust and pragmatic, a roadmap for the real world of startups and scaling companies, one that will stand up to the scrutiny from founders, teams, customers and investors and one which you can reasonably hope to follow.
If you like what you read, please try it, and share how you get on. If it works, you’ll know — you will build better, burn less funding and grow faster. If you want help, let me know, that’s what I do. And if you’ve got better ideas, I’m all ears.
Step 1 — The Long List
Make a list of everything you want, need or have been asked to build. This won’t be hard, but it might be long, don’t worry. You can do this alone or with a team. It doesn’t need to be detailed, just a one-line description of each new feature or requirement, anything from “run on AWS” to “fix the home screen”. Put each one on a Post-it, type a line in a spreadsheet or create a card for it in a Kanban.
Step 2 — Good, Smart, Cool
Classify each item on the list as one (and only one) of “Good”, “Smart” or “Cool”.
“Good” is the wholesome stuff. Good is performance, reliability, failover protocols, session persistence, storage efficiency, regulatory compliance, security, scalability, being on the right ‘stack’. Good lets you and your customer’s IT department sleep easy at night. Put another way, Good avoids ‘technical debt’.
“Smart” is feature-functionality. It preaches to the converted — your existing users and loyal customers — and makes their day more pleasurable, more productive, more fulfilling. Smart is what keeps them using the product, coming back for upgrades and recommending you over the competition.
And then there is “Cool”. Cool is what sets you apart, gets you noticed, entices new customers to try, unique enough to make the whole package worthwhile. Cool is novel, innovative and eye-catching. Car manufacturers are the masters of Cool — think adaptive headlights, snow settings, keyless opening. Cool may be a tiny proportion of the total offer, but it gets attention and to the right buyer, it’s what swings the deal.
Collect each of the Post-its, cards or spreadsheet lines so you have three lists.
Step 3 — Ranking and Voting
Rank the items within each list for their impact, important and/or urgency, i.e. if resources were unlimited, what would you want to do first. You can do this as a High/Medium/Low, with points or with voting if you are working as a team*. The critical thing is that you are only ranking Good vs Good, Smart vs Smart and Cool vs Cool, not across categories. Sort the lists with the highest ranked items at the top.
*For teams, one of my favourites is give each member a limited number of votes to assign individually however they see fit, then total up the votes and rank accordingly.
Step 4 — Pebbles, Rocks and Boulders
Working from top to bottom in each list, put a sizing against each item. You might have a way of doing this already — day estimates, story points or T-shirt sizing. If you do, great. If not, don’t worry, all you need is something that represents an order of magnitude because the likelihood is that items will be at very different levels of granularity. For example, small changes that could be achieved within a single sprint of one or two weeks, medium being those that stretch over multiple sprints, and large being those require months or years of investment. Think pebbles vs rocks vs boulders. Be realistic. If pebbles are 5 days then rocks are 15 and boulders are 50. If your list is very long, do the sizing for the top half or less.
Step 5 — Select a Scenario
Now here’s the tricky bit. You have to decide how what proportion of your total capacity you are going to invest in Good, Smart and Cool for your next release or quarter or whatever your planning horizon is.
To help, I’ve outlined three representative scenarios that startups and scaling companies face. Choose the one that most describes where you think your product is “at”:
Scenario A:
I need to make a splash, make some noise, get people interested. I’m making a demo that really engages, a truly minimum viable product (MVP) that a small number of people can use and give me the feedback I need to make it better. I want to get the basics of usability and architecture right, but I don’t need major scale or performance now.
Scenario B:
I’ve got feature and function requests coming thick and fast from my sales team, customers and engineering. I need to turn my early customers into strong references and place my bets on the functionality that will attract new ones and keep the competition at bay. I still need to innovate to achieve our vision, but I have to balance that with scaling. I’m concerned about increasing technical debt but keeping our customers happy is most important.
Scenario C:
We’re about to hit — or have just run into — the wall with our current architecture. We need to rapidly scale or re-platform to meet the demand from our customers, secure a particularly large opportunity or enter a new market. This requires a fundamental shift in our technical strategy but and I’m under pressure to drop everything else to focus on it.
Have you chosen? OK. Now, working from the top of each of your Good, Smart, Cool lists, choose only enough items to fill your capacity for a minimum of two and up to four cycles as follows:
Scenario A: 10% Good, 20% Smart, 70% Cool
Scenario B: 10% Good, 60% Smart, 30% Cool
Scenario C: 65% Good, 30% Smart, 5% Cool
It’s tough, right? And maybe a little surprising. The allocations are designed to challenge. Which brings us to …
Step 6 — Balancing Acts
This is where you get to balance and adjust if you don’t like what you see.
If, for example, you picked Scenario A and find you don’t have enough Cool items to fill 70% then maybe you have more work to do on the uniqueness of your proposition.
In Scenario B, you probably have lots more in Smart that you would like to do. If so, how can you elevate these to really differentiate, so that they move from Smart to Cool?
If you picked Scenario C, you’re probably thinking 100% should go on Good. You could do that, but it’s a high-risk strategy. Is there any way you can smooth the transition or incorporate new features so that the re-platform is like-for-better instead of like-for-like?
Ultimately, you need to determine if the mix of Good, Smart, Cool is right for you, but before simply changing the percentages, try:
1. Swopping items of the same type to get a better balance of timing, e.g. 3–5 “marbles” sooner than one “beach ball”; and
2. Splitting a larger item into component parts so that at least some of it can “fit” in an early cycle (beach balls to footballs, footballs to marbles).
If you do the latter, you may also find you can re-categorise the component parts or reduce them to their essentials.
After all that, if you still feel the percentages are off then adjust them, but do it consciously and explicitly, articulating as best you can (at least to yourself) why your scenario demands it.
Step 7 — Step Forward
The whole point of a product roadmap is that it lets you articulate where you are going. If you followed the previous steps, then you can be confident not only in describing where you want to go but also why you want to go there. Better still, if you have done it as a team activity, you’ll have everyone who was involved on board too. Get your roadmap out there, talk through it with everyone who will listen, listen in turn to their feedback and if necessary, adjust it.
I’ve used Good-Smart-Cool to share roadmaps not only with my own teams and the rest of the company, but with partners, customers, boards and investors. In my experience, it works. I’d love to hear about yours.
Your roadmap is a living thing. Feed it a balanced diet of Good, Smart and Cool and it will grow healthy and strong.
Thank you for reading.
This story is also available at https://www.511north.com/2019/10/good-smart-cool-7-steps.html
