Roadmapping at FutureLearn Pt 2: Defining the problem space:

In the second post in our series about roadmaps at FutureLearn (see the first), Reema Mehta, Product Manager, discusses how we get to know our users and how we translate their needs into opportunities to meet our goals.

A roadmap should define the problem space for your product

In his introduction to this series, Simon outlined the job of a product roadmap. I find the following definition from Roman Pilcher useful, that a roadmap is a tool to: “define how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product.”

In this post, I’m going to focus on the first part of this definition (later posts will talk more about aligning team members and stakeholders, and communicating your roadmap). A big part of, ‘defining how your product is likely to grow’, is ensuring your roadmap defines the ‘problem space’ for your product.

By ‘problem space’, I mean identifying the central problems or challenges for your team to solve (these could be user-generated), and the related issues (these could be market insights) you need to consider in order to find a solution. I’d recommend these articles about how the concept can be applied in digital development and solving big world challenges.

I’ll outline how we define problem spaces at FutureLearn by asking three questions:

1. What are the needs of our target users?
2. What opportunities do these needs give us to achieve our desired business outcomes?
3. Which are the most important opportunities for us right now?

1. What are the needs of our target users?

At the start of this year, our user research team conducted a comprehensive piece of research to understand who our learners are. The team segmented our learners based on their motivations for learning with FutureLearn, creating seven user archetypes (you can find out more about ‘archetypes’ here). Based on data about these archetypes (including population size, loyalty to FutureLearn, and likelihood to purchase), we defined our target users — made up of three closely related archetypes.

This work has been hugely valuable for product teams. As product managers, we’ve pored over the insights about our learners to understand their needs. It’s important to remember that these needs could be stated or unstated, for example, a stated need of one of our learner archetypes is to have access to work-related courses with clear outcomes. Our research also indicates that a large proportion of these learners live in Asia and around half don’t have broadband access, indicating other unstated needs that learners might not realise they have.

It’s our job to use behavioural, attitudinal and demographic information about our learners to track user needs and build the problem space for our product. Additionally, segmenting our learners into archetypes and deciding which archetypes our product is primarily for has created an agreed hierarchy of user needs. This has allowed us to narrow down what FutureLearn should focus on to best help learners.

2. What opportunities do these needs give us to achieve our desired business outcomes?

As Simon outlined in his introduction, at FutureLearn, we work in six product teams which each have a defined mission and metric. I work in the Learner Sales team, whose mission is about creating products and services learners pay for that help them achieve their goals and celebrate their learning.

For me, the most valuable thing about organising ourselves in this way is that each team has a clear business outcome that it can use to organise and prioritise a long list of user needs. I look across the user needs I’ve derived for our three target user archetypes, and convert them into opportunities to improve our paid-for products and services and so improve the Learner Sales team’s metric.

We always ensure these opportunities are framed from a user’s perspective, and don’t define specific features — for example “I want further learning materials”, or “I want to be rewarded for purchasing”.

To structure and visualise these opportunities, I’ve started using a tool called an Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres. (As an aside, you should watch her talk from Mind the Product London 2017.) I’ve found this tool really valuable in helping me:

• visualise the different ways we can achieve our team’s outcome in one place
• make visible which opportunities our existing ideas address — and whether we’re considering solutions that don’t actually address any of our opportunities

The key thing is that opportunities represent problem areas to work on, based on user data, research and insight. They don’t prescribe solutions, these come later — when we’re coming up with ideas and experiments.

3. Which are the most important opportunities for us right now?

Before starting to come up with ideas, however, it’s important to narrow down the opportunities for your team to focus on. I’m currently trying to focus the work of the Learner Sales product team to a maximum of two target opportunities per quarter.

In order to narrow down our opportunities, we’ve developed an Opportunity Assessment Template, deriving in part from this Marty Cagan blog post. It’s a simple checklist including questions such as:

• What problem is this an opportunity to solve and what evidence do we have of user demand?
• How will addressing this opportunity help us improve our metric?
• What’s the potential market size and revenue impact?
• Why FutureLearn, and why now?

As Teresa Torres points out, compare and contrast decisions lead to better outcomes than whether or not decisions. With this template, we’re not asking “is this a good opportunity?”, but “which is the best opportunity for us right now, to achieve our desired outcome?”

Once we’ve decided on our target opportunities for the quarter, it’s important to rally the team around these opportunities, and actively involve them in generating ideas for solutions. Later blog posts in this series will talk more about how to prioritise solutions, and how to involve the team in roadmapping.

Building and narrowing the problem space in this way, to get to a small number of target opportunities, forms the core of my roadmapping process at FutureLearn. The main benefits are that it:

• ensures we’re looking at the right problems, based on evidence of user need
• ensures the opportunities we’re focusing on will help us meet our business objectives
• allows us to widen our lens to avoid fixating on single solutions (as any single problem can have several solutions and we want to stay open to finding the best one)

In the next post, Polly Holbrook and Harriet Patterson will talk about how we prioritise, including balancing smaller improvements against larger features, and choosing the best prioritisation process for your team.

Read the next post: Prioritising and making decisions through collaboration