Why Strategic Roadmaps are key to keeping your Product Teams focused on Outcomes not Outputs

TL;DR

• Don’t let roadmaps become a tactical release plan
• Change the conversation from outputs to intent and direction
• Remember, roadmaps are only part of the story — establishing the right product culture and empowering your teams are just as critical.

The output-led thinking trap

Let’s set the scene: it’s coming up to a new quarter, and you’ve just spent the last couple of weeks crafting your roadmap and aligning it with other product leaders. Today, you presented it to the Executives and got that buy-in to push ahead. You’re raring to go.

Fast forward a month: you’ve completely missed the mark on the first major milestone. You discover that the solution is a lot more complex than when it was first conceived. Frustration is growing around you. Nonetheless, you rally the team to push harder and eventually ship that feature. A few weeks pass, and no real change is observed on your north star metric. After further investigation, you realise that the recently shipped feature only yielded 5% adoption. It’s taken almost two months to learn this. Meanwhile, your team continues to push ahead with shipping the next feature. With such low adoption, team motivation starts to dwindle as does their trust in you as a product leader.

Now, you’re probably sitting there wondering, how has this happened? You analysed the product data you had access to, listened to customer feedback, and took onboard the opinions of Executives. You even produced a solid plan.

The reality is, when you misplace a roadmap as a tactical release plan it can create a false sense of confidence. Just because you have a solid plan, it does not automatically guarantee success nor does it prove actual desirability for the product. When you find yourself in this tough spot, it’s easy to start questioning your decision-making and even blame product execution. However, it is more likely that you are working in an output-led product culture that encourages and rewards feature delivery over achieving outcomes.

An environment that amplifies output-led thinking

• Gantt charts reign riot — detailed plans to the nth-degree are celebrated
• Executives don’t invest in setting and communicating a clear product vision and instead focus conversations around product execution
• Product teams are seen as a delivery vehicle and not truly empowered to discover and solve ‘real’ problems

Does this sound familiar? If so, you are not alone. As a company grows, the innate desire for greater predictability and control starts to creep in and further perpetuates an output-led product culture.

Changing the conversation to outcomes

Now, whilst I agree there is no silver bullet for building great products, there are countless examples of tech companies who have successfully scaled using outcome-led thinking at the core of their product culture.

“If you want people to think, give them intent, not instructions.” — David Marquet

A good roadmap should act as a conversation starter and a tool to help communicate intent and direction. To achieve this requires a change in conversation from product execution (“How will I build this?”) to product strategy (“How do we bring the product vision to life?”).

So, how do you get started? I will share a framework that I’ve found helpful in aligning teams to a product vision and helping them retain focus on what matters most — outcomes.

A simple approach to promote an outcome-led product culture

Create intent with a Product Vision

The one thing that rarely seems to exist in an output-led product culture is a clear and transparent product vision. No wonder Product teams all too often veer off course and make seemingly poor decisions. I’ve seen first hand how difficult it is to keep teams aligned as a product organisation scales up. In lieu of a product vision, it is easy for a company to lean more towards imposing a greater level of governance — which only serves to further disempower teams.

There is no simple fix for this. This is for your Executives (CPO if you have one) to make happen.

Marty Cagan recently published an article on product vision vs. mission that is a great read on the topic.

Create alignment with Product Strategy and Goals

Building a product with no product strategy is essentially like baking a cake without the main ingredient — flour. Product Strategy is one of the hardest to get right but the single most important thing you can do as a product leader. Invest time in it and don’t be afraid to fail.

Great, you have a product strategy. Now what? No strategy can replace good product execution. Rather than focusing on features, try shifting to an objective-based goal-setting approach. A popular framework that many companies adopt is Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). I personally found this to be an effective way to rally my team around shared goals. Though I must admit, it can take a bit of time to really get into the groove of it and forge the right habits.

When setting objectives, I found a collaborative effort involving the entire team most effective. It is also worth noting that OKRs can only be successful if they are ingrained into your day-to-day operations. That means having regular check-ins and bringing them into every conversation.

For more guidance on OKRs, Felipe Castro’s blog is your haven.

Create focus with Priority

Okay, fantastic. Now comes the fun part: translating the product strategy and goals into a roadmap. The good news is that this is actually the easy part. In a traditional roadmap (think tactical release plan), time horizons play a critical role. In an outcome-led product culture, roadmaps move away from time-focus and towards priority-focus. One popular approach out there is the Now, Next, Later framework.

Now: Ideas that are actively being worked on.

Next: Ideas that will be explored in the near future.

Later: Ideas that may be explored at some point in the future — they require a bit more discovery or research. This bucket is volatile and is subject to change frequently.

Completed: Each team has its own definition of ‘complete’. In some teams ‘complete’ might mean launched in the market and in others (maybe a greenfield product team), it might mean validated with Beta users.

Now some of you may be wondering, but what if I really need to know when things launch? You will likely face scenarios where external commitments are made or where a new product launch will need to be coordinated with the Sales and Marketing Teams. This is where it could be useful to supplement your roadmap with some form of launch plan. Just remember that it is important to treat this as an independent artefact and not blindly attribute time horizons to Now, Next, Later.

Remember roadmaps are only part of the story

A roadmap is, well, just a roadmap at the end of the day. Without the right environment and product culture, all this effort can be futile. A good product leader is not only able to let go and empower their teams, they are able to create the conditions for them to experiment, learn, and continuously improve.

Quite honestly, I could do an entire blog post on this topic alone!

Final thoughts

Iterate, iterate, iterate. You will not get this right the first time around. This approach is not intended to be prescriptive, so do change and adapt it to suit your environment and needs.