KISS Product 02 : The road to Product Roadmap
“ Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln
Well, product managers couldn’t agree more. As for them building a roadmap is generally half the work done. Then, there’s hustle, push, rush, block and run to implement it- which in itself is a big challenge. But this would become even messier, if the roadmap is not clear and goals are not defined and agreed with stakeholders precisely.
The road is not easy but worth exploring. So buckle up and let’s roll right into it.
The Starting Point
Why do we need roadmap ?
To understand this, we need to think beyond the tech behind products to the larger business that it serves. It tells the story how product will help business succeed & win over customers. It gives information to different stakeholders so they can collaborate & plan their efforts.
Who all does it help?
There can be many internal and external stakeholders that seek information from the roadmap to plan their work.
- Customers — Whether you are a B2B PM or Internal PM, customers would want to see your roadmap before making their purchase/investment decisions on manpower, new infrastructure or the product itself.
- Customer Facing teams — If you are a consumer PM , then teams like Marketing, Delivery, customer support, Sales will need to develop content & training to support the initiatives.
- Business Leaders — They would need roadmap to estimate future costs, benefits & plan their financial & resource commitment. They are the ones who will put out the business goals & strategy for the organisation.
- Analytics — Business & Data analysts would want to understand what should be the key focus areas of design, process flow & analysis.
- Engineering — Engineers, Designers, architects need to know the bigger plan so their high level design and implementation plan is scalable and performance focused rather than piecewise & short sighted.
Apart from them, other departments such as HRs who need to plan hiring, Procurement who need to plan purchasing, Legal in case of contract revisions , internal operations -in case SOPs has to be modified and so on will need information through the roadmap to plan their actions. So now you see, why a Product roadmap is pivotal to all departments working in harmony.
The First Step
So, What is Product Roadmap?
“It’s a Strategic document that combines the company’s business objectives to the vision of the product.”
Look at Strategic — it highlights that it’s not your Daily to do list of most burning issues but a high level summary of the different stages of product development required to meet product goals which in turn will help meet company’s objectives.
It will include most if not all of these:
Product vision — what you want your product to become in the future.
Strategy — an execution plan detailing what your company is going to do to meet the vision.
Goal — a time-bound objective that can be measured by a specific metric.
Initiative — broad themes that unite features that must be implemented to achieve a goal.
Feature — an actual piece of a product that’s either part of functionality or a third-party application.
Time-frames — dates or time periods for a certain goal or feature to be finished. As a rule, a product roadmap suggests only an approximation.
Status markers — used to track the progress of work.
Key Metrics — assistance in the measurement data-driven goals, e.g. bounce rate , visits, conversion.
The Second Step
What matters in a Roadmap?
Well, let’s just say what does not matter first ?
Formats , Superficial Content & Unaligned Fancy ideas portrayed as Goals does not matter at all.
Alignment matters !
The only thing that matters is that the items put there are aligned among the stakeholders of the product. After all, everyone needs that roadmap to guide their actions. if it’s not aligned — the it’s a wishlist for some and for others it may not matter at all.
Creating a roadmap with correct milestones on the right release dates having everyone aligned to it and tied to the product strategy is challenging and sometimes may not be achievable in the first attempt.
Big company, Small Company — Different roads to roadmap
For large companies, we generally have products with established core set of customers, well thought business model, market strategy and product strategy to keep the engine running.
We probably will have a Product backlog that is still not finished by Engineering team. Can we use that backlog to develop our Roadmap ?
No, backlog is essentially a prioritised list of development tasks having user stories, bugs, technical debt, performance improvement tasks, product maintenance tasks already planned but do not have a release date yet.
We will need a Product Roadmap with new milestones for our stakeholders which will get broken into prioritised set of smaller tasks and form part of Backlog for development team.This way, the efforts of development team is aligned to needs of the stakeholders & product strategy.
What about roadmaps for small ones who are still exploring their target customer & their needs, businesses ideas and markets ?
Startups may not have a clear product strategy. Ideally , the PM will run a lot of hypothesis tests to establish product market fit which he can then use to create the product strategy and the roadmap thereafter to serve that strategy. He will have set of core customers, business model to serve them and product features that support the business goals. Before even thinking of a fancy deck, PM should focus on whiteboard list to validate the business models & hypothesis.
The Journey Begins
Why is the process so important ?
The process itself is the end result — all stakeholders aligning on what we should be developing for our business to grow and customers to be satisfied and loyal to our products.
The more we involve, discuss, fight out, rationalise ideas/thoughts coming from different parts of the organisation — more clearer is the road tying up the product to the business strategy. Nobody wants to be the bad guy in meeting room or at office, but being too polite to question the rationale will do more harm to organisations & careers alike than couple of heated discussions/debates.
If we build a roadmap on half baked ideas, not aligned with any stakeholders & without estimating effort — it is going to fail certainly.
The roadmap has to be aligned with all important stakeholders like Tech, Design, Analytics, Business, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service & Operations — whichever department has an impact or will get impacted because of the ideas under discussions -should meet & agree on efforts required to realistically achieve the milestones and make the Product Strategy a success.
Business Strategy v/s Product Strategy or Business Strategy = Product Strategy
As the jargons get used more often, understand the clarity is like a cloud there :P
Product Strategy is how your product will help the business achieve its goals & win over customers.
So , What is Business Strategy? Answering a lot of questions
Who is my customer ? The organisation generally understands the market it is operating in. It will know the total available market of customers and the ones they are interested in addressing. It will do customer segmentation to clearly map out its target customer group.We’ll detail this in coming articles.
What does he need? It will know/research the personas & archetypes of their target customers.Many a times qualitative & quantitative research, interviews or surveys helps answer this easily.
What are their options? How are they meeting those needs- through their product, competitor’s products, on their own, not solving at all.
How will our product help them? The Gap analysis till this point will help you address the product market fit.It will also put your objective clearly — whether its focused on customer service or Revenue, Innovation or Value offerings, New customers or Retention , Business growth or Profitability.
A SWOT or 5S analysis can sometimes be very useful to validate the gaps in business strategy.
The harmony in the customer needs & our offerings will channel our business goals — translating into revenue goals, customer goals, service goals — and would need systems & products to develop functionalities that help them achieve this realistically and in estimated time as competitors will be doing this same exercise as well.
In this journey, you will learn a lot about the organisation & business goals, the customers, their needs, the competition & industry, challenges & gaps still unaddressed, resources still unmet, opportunities still left behind & history still to be made.
Where’s the Destination?
But What has to be made & When will it get made ? Will it change in between? What if something new comes up?How can I be sure we are making the right thing?
All this & more coming up on the next episode. Till then, dream on as to how you’ll go about it & let me know as
possibilities are endless & reality is a dream away.
