How we roadmapped our way through Idea Overload

Google “too many ideas” and you’ll find a plethora of self-help articles along the lines of “done is better than good”. Personally, I like “good” too. But how does a creative business full of contrasting viewpoints decide which “dones” will deliver the most “goods”?

In product management there are always many more great ideas than time and resource will allow you to develop. This kind of creativity is, of course, a Very Good Thing. But turning those ideas into a solid product roadmap? There’s your challenge.

At some point you need to prioritise, shortlist and select. Get it wrong and you risk conflict, office politics, hurt feelings, disappointments and potentially bad business impacts.

For us at MPB it proved a much more enjoyable and constructive experience than we might have feared. So I’m sharing the process we used to create a product plan that everyone in our business can understand, get behind and contribute to.

Why is this even a thing?

At its best, roadmapping is a flexible process by which a business plans to meet its long-term goals by giving the right priority to the right short-term projects. Tactics support strategy. Simple enough.

The reality can be rather different. When there are many competing priorities, how do you stop the loudest voices from drowning out alternative viewpoints? How do you prevent Agile Theatre, where leaders are sold on the idea of faster throughput but then mandate pet projects anyway? Can you say no to someone’s considered idea without alienating them? Will your Agile delivery programme really scale?

It’s a well-known issue and there are plenty of solutions out there (WSJF, Value Points etc), each with its supporters and detractors. At MPB, we didn’t feel bound to any particular system but instead borrowed elements from several to create our own bespoke framework.

What’s the plan?

We knew from the off that we wanted to democratise the decision-making process. Everyone’s ideas would be scored on their merits using the same transparent, systematic process.

Of course there would need to be discussions, airing of alternative views, challenges to any particular score. But get the scoring system right, we reasoned, and we could take any emotional heat out of the picture and focus on the business’s needs.

We knew we’d have to put in the hours on preparatory work, but since the point was to save wasted effort in the long run we figured it would be time well spent.

So many ideas, so little time

Ideas come from everywhere, of course — board and team meetings, business as usual, customer interactions, web analytics, random emails, dreams (☺) — but unless they’re captured they can be easily lost.

Fortunately MPB has always had a robust and mature idea-management system. We use monday.com to let anyone in the business add ideas to the backlog and new ideas are assessed and prioritised regularly by the CEO, CTO and Head of Product. We also have a backlog of ideas in our development tracking tool, JIRA.

We quickly had a longlist of more than 40 potential projects, each with a hypothesis statement and linked to one of our business-wide strategic pillars.

Never mind build time, that was too much stuff even to take to our roadmap strategy day — we’d have soon been overwhelmed. So we needed to reduce this down to a shortlist, but in a transparent way that still involved everyone.

First we estimated the effort required to realise each idea. Crucially, we thought about this both in terms of both product discovery (investigation, solution design and validation) and engineering (effort to build in the development phase). We found that some ideas might be super simple to build, but required mountains of user testing and validation, so it was important to factor both these facets into our effort scores.

At this stage we also assigned each idea to one of three “buckets” to ensure we had a balanced portfolio of ideas that would drive innovation whilst keeping us focused on nailing the fundamentals:

• Brilliant basics: “excellence as standard”
• Compelling difference: “significantly better than normal”
• Changing the game: “truly extraordinary”.

Once we had completed this pre-work we were ready to workshop with the Exec team to assign impact scores to determine the potential value of each idea to our customers and the business.

That let us create a matrix that placed each initiative into one of four categories:

• Low-hanging fruit (high impact, low effort)
• Major project (high impact, high effort)
• Maybe (low impact but low effort)
• Money pit (low impact, high effort).

We now had a basis to whittle 40 initiatives down to 12, using regular team meetings to keep everyone looped-in and gather feedback. In choosing our shortlist we focused on high-impact projects, including a range of low-hanging fruit and game-changing major projects.

Working it all out

It was finally time to get our key decision-makers together. We used an external facilitator (our friend Eddie Kenny) and held the meeting off-site so we wouldn’t be distracted by procedure or BAU (this was between coronavirus lockdowns).

We worked together to split each workstream into four or five Epics which could be prioritised against each other and our existing work-in-progress list. To do that we used a Kanban board with columns headed Now, Next, Later, Not Now (without fixed dates — we operate an Agile queue).

Once everything was broken into Epics, prioritised and merged into the WIP list, at last we had our roadmap.

Is everybody happy?

As I hinted at the start, for us it turned out to be surprisingly easy to avoid a bunfight on the day. Taking the whole team along on the journey is key, of course.

The thing that’s always hard in this scenario is to stop people jumping to solutions — the Discovery phase is the right time for that. But often people have already thought long and hard about how they could do something. They may have been patiently waiting to bring their thoughts to the table. And of course, they’re experts in the particular fields.

But we can’t pre-determine solutions at the roadmapping stage. The solution they’ve come up with is almost certainly a good one, but that’s not the same as being the right one.

In the coming months we’ll be looking again at the roadmap, seeing what (if anything) we need to revise or re-evaluate. To do that we’ll be setting up cross-functional discovery teams with engineers, designers, stakeholders and product owners involved, so that we have all our best minds on the subject from the outset.

If we’ve done our job, we’ll have consensus across the business and a yardstick to measure progress on real business priorities we can all believe in. Now there’s a journey worth looking forward to.

Becci Edmondson is Head of Product at MPB, the UK’s leading reseller of photographic equipment with operations in Britain, Europe and North America. https://www.mpb.com