Outcome-Driven Roadmaps
Outcome-based or outcome-driven roadmaps have become an increasingly popular way to ensure teams are focused on the success of their products and not just delivering features fast.
Discovering the Why
For years as a product manager, I created roadmaps to show how we were evolving our product and executing on our strategy. One year, I was challenged by a senior manager to show how much of my roadmaps we actually delivered over the past few years, because he didn’t believe that we were delivering on what we committed. While I was easily able to show that we had delivered 90%+ of our features (though not necessarily all on time), I had missed the point of the challenge. We were so focused on delivering the features on the roadmap, we had lost sight of the goal of changing customer behavior, and thus we had not helped the company achieve its ultimate goals.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the concept of outcome-driven roadmaps. Now, as I support my current client, is the first time a customer has been truly accepting of this new way of looking at roadmaps.
Being Outcome-Driven
As product managers, we focus on solving customer problems, relieving customer pains, and enabling customer gains. Outcome-driven means focusing on the outcome instead of the output (feature) and measuring whether our work actually changed the customer behavior and achieved the goal. Outcome-driven Roadmaps focus on the measurable changes in customer behavior, such as increasing use of integrations by 20%, which should lead to the ultimate goal, such as increasing customers renewing for a full year.
When we focus on the outcomes, we tend to work more effectively to achieve direct company/product goals, because the approach helps to:
- Maintain a focus on the big picture goals.
- Justify pivots and reduce the friction of pivoting by focusing stakeholders on the outcomes instead of specific feature “commitments”.
- Enable autonomous product teams by giving them problems to solve instead of telling them what to build.
- Force teams to track success and respond if success is not being achieved.
- Make feedback and validation loops a necessity instead of an afterthought.
Getting Started
Changing from feature-focused to an outcome-driven approach requires organizational change, because management and teams alike need to embrace the uncertainty of the market and what it will take to drive customer behavior changes. Product teams will need a clear vision for the company and product as well as well-articulated strategy, because the outcomes need to drive the business goals in ways that match the strategic themes.
While major organizational change is challenging and requires investment and commitment from the C suite, product managers can start moving toward outcome-driven roadmaps with some simple changes:
- Quantitatively measure the impact and effectiveness of your product and new features.
- Use customer conversations to understand the impact of features you have just built on their pains and gains (qualitative measure).
- Honestly assess the effectiveness of each feature and use your customer conversations to qualitatively understand why.
- Add outcomes to your roadmap and link features to them. Show the impact metric for features after they hit the market
- Be transparent with your roadmap’s evolution to drive stakeholder conversations.
A Few Notes
Many product managers have touched on this topic over the past few years. One article that I have referred back to many times is one posted by Jason Doherty (along with Kelsey Stevenson and Thomas Vela), called OUTCOME BASED ROADMAPS : Unleash the Power of a Shared Vision and Purpose. He provides a great outline for thinking about outcomes and an interesting presentation deck.
Good luck!
