How to Build a Stellar Product Roadmap— An event by Advancing Women in Product (AWIP)
Credits: Advancing Women in Product Team — Nancy Wang, Roshni Uppala, Karissa Barnett, Chris Sperandio, and Aakrit Prasad
Product roadmaps are essential for setting product vision and creating an execution plan as a team. The product roadmap is the Swiss army knife for any product manager, so we thought we’d get some advice from the experts. On June 14th, Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) hosted an interactive road-mapping workshop sponsored by Workday, and featured Savi Arunlanandasamy (Manager, Product Management at Workday), Tiantian Zha (Product Manager at Google Life Sciences) and Sandhya Pujari (Manager, Product Management at NetSuite/Oracle). Here are some key insights and tips we took away from the workshop to guide you in the process.
You have a new product idea.. where do you begin?
You have a new idea for your product and you are ready to bring it to life. Where to begin? A great first step is to conduct customer feedback sessions to help feed requirements into your roadmap. The product requirements or needs of the customer can vary significantly depending on the customer segment, industry, location or any number of factors for both product and target audience. We recommend focusing on a segment of customers that fit a specific description.
Start with a solid cohort of target customers that are willing to give you feedback consistently. Hone in on their specific needs which will allow you to have a pulse on the industry, trends, upcoming changes and what your team needs to target. This will help you validate your requirements early on before you start building. In general, you should partner with this set of customers in 2 ways:
- Gain feedback from them on your long-term strategic roadmap and try to review this with them on a consistent cadence.
- On a daily (or otherwise regular) basis, when building a new feature for example, get constant feedback from this set of customers throughout the development process. Then ensure their feedback is incorporated back into the product before critical milestones.
In addition to customer feedback sessions, before you begin building your roadmap you should conduct solid secondary market research. First, ask around to see what resources your company already has for you to utilize. Many companies have partnerships with market research firms or have purchased access to quality market research data. If you’re seeking more data, look to government sites that have rich information ranging from population trends to lists of upcoming released products. Many government websites publish a breadth of free or inexpensive information; for example, sites like the U.S. Census Bureau and USA.gov website.
“Start off with building a focused roadmap that targets a specific customer segment; gain as much user feedback as possible from that targeted segment”
Building your product roadmap: What are your goals and risks?
When you begin to build your roadmap you need to translate your overall goal into something very actionable for the team. Begin by defining your goals and identifying your risks — then prioritize your roadmap to optimize for these goals and to minimize risks.
Identify what absolutely needs to get done for your product. This will vary based on product maturity, timeline and what goals you are targeting. For example, if your product is new and in the early stages of creation, your goal may be to get customer adoption. So you may focus on building small features to get people trying the product and giving feedback.
It is crucial you begin by identifying your goals and your absolute must-haves. This is not just for picking your features as you may start out with a feature that has 10 actions under it. Within these 10 actions, prioritize your must-haves. Focus on what you need to get done to ship your minimum viable product (MVP).
How to measure your roadmap success
When considering measurements for success, always try to tie your metrics back to your goals. A practice some companies use is to follow HEART: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task success.
When measuring user happiness an example could be implementing a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge your user’s happiness — what is the likelihood of this particular user promoting your product? These metrics can vary based on what is important for your product. Identify and define metrics for each category and begin tracking as soon as you start collecting data.
Every metric should help tell a story about the behavior of your customer. Is the customer using the product the way you anticipated them using it? Or are there other unexpected ways they are using the product? Each metric chosen should be able to directly impact your roadmap and your team’s actions based on the metric’s insights.
Roadmap Exercises
To help readers visualize, we decided to give our panelists a real-life example of 2 product roadmaps that PMs might create. Board Directors Chris Sperandio (PM at Segment) and Aakrit Prasad (VP of Product at Applitools) have provided us excellent examples, which are linked below.
Consumer Product Example
Prompt: Self-driving car for the disabled
- Vision: enrich the lives of traditionally underserved riders through seamless mobility
- Team: unique expertise in voice-first interfaces and machine learning
- Goal: arrive at the must-have requirements (e.g., P0s) of an MVP
View the Roadmap on Trello here.
Enterprise Product Example
Prompt: Employee expense reporting software
- Company: a market leader in accounting/HCM in Europe
- Vision: To build an industry leading expense reporting software used all around the globe
- Goal: International expansion — U.S
View the Roadmap on Trello here
Additional Resources
- AWIP’s Founder and CEO’s post on Building the Perfect Product Roadmap (published on HackerNoon)
- Product Roadmap Relaunched Book
- Steve Johnson’s just published an ebook all about roadmaps.
- Marty Cagan is hugely respected in the industry and always has me nodding along to his articles. Here’s some good stuff by him on roadmaps.
- Martin Eriksson (hat tip for introducing me to the concept of roadmapping without dates) founded ProductTank events for product managers and knows his stuff. He’s written a very useful article on prioritising.
- And finally, there’s MindTheProduct.com, where a bunch of other smart product people write. Here are some posts about roadmapping.
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