Why you need “never” in your product roadmap

One of the most important — and empowering — roles of a product manager is saying “no” to ideas, features or directions of travel that subtract from what your users’ value, and the vision that drives the product’s proposition.

When it comes to getting everyone pointed in the right direction, particularly in the early stages of product development, taking things off the table helps. However, they often find their way back on the table (or in to the roadmap or backlog, in this case).

The idea that product strategy is about saying no isn’t new, Dan Olsen has been saying it for years, and the folk at Intercom celebrate saying no to things on a regular basis.

I’ll introduce a way of incorporating that in to how your team sets direction by adding a simple tweak to a tried-and-tested roadmapping framework.

The priority buckets: #now, #next, #later

#now, #next, #later is a simple and lightweight tagging system to prioritize a roadmap. It introduces a common language that works just as well on a whiteboard for a high-altitude product roadmap view for the whole company, or in a project management tool like Jira or Trello.

This approach first saw the light of day at Foursquare circa 2014, and I’ve been using the #now, #next, #later framework for a couple of years. It works. It’s great for getting teams going quickly whilst also being a really good way of communicating the direction of a product or service to the rest of the organization. Noah Weiss, former SVP of Product at Foursquare, describes how this framework helped the team as it scaled:

When your company has fewer than 20 people, written roadmaps are overkill. There are a handful of projects, everyone talks at lunch, and you don’t have the runway to plan more than a few months ahead.

As we near 200 people, we’ve finally found a system that feels great and is lighter weight than anything we have done before: #now, #next, #later.

Adding the #never bucket

The #never bucket is not part of the original framework, but I’ve found that adding it works well as a way of helping new teams identify what are not shared values or priorities. The approach also gives veteran teams a way of clearly reconciling a complex backlog against a product or service’s original vision.

These are my suggestions for what those buckets mean when you add #never in to the mix:

#now

What we’re working on right now (the next 2–4 weeks).

#next

What we’re working in the next sprint or two (the next 1–3 months).

#later

We’ve not estimated this yet, or we’re not certain about its value so we’re capturing it for review another time (3+ months from now).

#never

We’re never doing this. As a team, we firmly believe that this has no value to us, our users, and is something that is contrary to what we’re trying to achieve.

Empowering teams and reducing ambiguity

Part of the role of being a product leader is about setting direction whilst embracing uncertainty or ambiguity. Conversely, good product leaders should strive to remove avoidable ambiguity for their teams wherever possible.

Adding a #never tag to your roadmapping framework is a tweak to your product management approach that gives you a chance to have your team collaborate on capturing all of those important “don’ts” in a meaningful and visible way.

Making an artefact of the things your team has agreed don’t align with the vision, or don’t add any value for your customers has benefits and helps everyone align on the direction of the roadmap while decreasing avoidable ambiguity.

Saying “no” to things is a key part of product strategy, and it feels empowering when you practice it as a product manager. Now you can share that feeling with the whole team.