On Product Vision, Strategy and Roadmaps
“Every good idea and every disruptable idea at a company is sitting there right in front of you. You just have to find it.”
— Prabhdeep Singh, Global Head of WeWork Labs
Product management continues to grow as a profession. Savvy product managers are in great demand, and this is expanding at all levels of an organization. Committed to keeping a strong passion for the product, we have now seen product managers with not only a seat at the table, but elevated to executive positions within traditional corporate entities.
For product managers, the one major alignment needed to ensure product success involves product vision, strategy and roadmaps working in unison along the product life cycle. Unfortunately, roadmaps based on the product vision and strategy fail more often than we’d like to admit.
According to Alpha’s 2020 Product Management Insights Report, up to 53% of respondents cite a failure to find enough time to dedicate to product strategy and roadmaps as a major concern. We see this as only one of a few reasons this needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Clearly communicating the product strategy to stakeholders, in addition to gaining their buy-in, would also factor in as possible barriers to dedicating enough time.
“Flexibility is a really important piece. A roadmap is a living prioritized sequence of research and problems that you’re trying to solve. When creating a roadmap, it’s really essential to take a product management view at the start and think of who the audience is that the roadmap is for and to understand what the message is you’re trying to do around a roadmap.”
— Ashton Therrien, Account Manager at Respondent Inc.
Roadmapping roadblocks
Assuming you’ve been a product manager longer than 15 minutes, you know it can be a messy role. It doesn’t really make any difference how organized you are, or even how focused you are on keeping everything working smoothly and prioritized correctly; chaos will find its way.
Yes, you will do your best to keep your product roadmap sitting in its proverbial Zen garden of working materials, but alas, this is rarely ever the case. This document must serve as the one strategic guide for your product and act as your organization’s only stop along the life-cycle path. It is your go-to document at any time to find a clutter-free, calming reminder of a single set of priorities.
Taming the chaos of distraction and dedicating time to the roadmap is critical to align the organization and move toward the same outcomes.
The need for time to develop vision, strategy, roadmaps
Just as there are many ways to peel an orange, the same can be said for roadmaps. There are, though, in general, five key components to an effective roadmap:
- Product vision: Product vision is your guiding principle.
- Business objectives: Business objectives help you measure progress.
- Time frames: Broad time frames avoid over-commitment.
- Themes: Themes focus on outcomes rather than output.
- Disclaimer: The disclaimer protects you (and your customer), mainly because anything in the roadmap is subject to change.
Source: Product Roadmaps Relaunched, C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, Michael Connors
Without enough time dedicated to roadmapping, product teams will attempt to fill in any gaps with the equivalent of jazz improvisations of some sort that, unfortunately, will not bring cohesive alignment to the product as a whole. In the report, of the 6% who actually did make time, their biggest complaint was they actually had too much time devoted to strategy and roadmapping.
The disparity is clear, as the risk to completing even just the five components of an effective roadmap poses major concerns to timely and valued product success.
Product challenges: experimentation
Roadmaps are very much affected by production activity, and the reverse can also be true. Frequent experimentation — not just when a product’s life cycle is in the new-product phase or growth phase, where teams and resources are often stretched to their limits —is key to turning insights into potentially actionable solutions. Often, the challenge is that experimentation is not a simple endeavor, and successfully executing appropriate testing largely depends on dedicating (shifting) the resources needed.
The report noted a staggeringly high 71% of product managers and leaders frustrated at not being able to spend enough time on experimentation. What’s even more concerning is this represents an increase from last year.
This lack of time spent on experimentation may indicate the constant need for PMs to shift their focus from one fire to another, as a reactive yet natural part of a PM’s tasks. They must be able to jump in and out of reactive and proactive (strategic) work. Without enough dedicated time carved out for product vision, strategy and roadmapping, there will be areas in the production process that will either be missed, neglected or not given the weight they require.
There’s the danger here that the team isn’t aligned on the product vision, that the roadmap doesn’t reflect the vision, and that the product isn’t reflecting the business vision.
Your product teams gain insights on the business and customers, as they learn and develop. This is only because experimentation is iterative. It must be allocated time and left to continue along the whole product life cycle.
Roadmaps are the living, breathing answer to prioritizing the research steps to find solutions to the challenges faced right now and those anticipated ahead. It is essential that roadmaps take the views of the product management team and reflect the business/market knowledge/strategy of today, including the flexibility to react to future business — and customer — market insights. This balanced contrast is guided by the product vision.
It seems there is still a significant need in 2020 for product managers and leaders to have the opportunity to address the need for dedicated time to making a product vision, strategy and roadmap accurately representative throughout the project life cycle.
One concern remains top of mind regarding collaboration, as only 2% of product managers noted they planned to prioritize more collaboration with research teams. This is a cause for concern, given the increased pace of decision-making in an organization today. This lack of collaboration focus may eventually silo insights/knowledge and hold teams up in the long run, if companies do nothing to get ahead of this problem.
