KISS product 03 : Building a Product Roadmap

Defining the right milestones is a lot about Off the (Road)Map Navigation

Hey welcome , this one did take a while. There is so much to product roadmaps that summarising in a 5 -7 minute read may not be enough, but let us start just like we’ll do with our roadmaps without the clear vision initially. Alignment is the key- remember this , we will revisit it again.

As we discussed in the previous episode , roadmap is a strategic long term plan that communicates to stakeholders about what we are going to develop so they can coordinate their future actions. It provides estimation to our stakeholders about future goals.

The roadmap can be presented with milestones distributed chronologically like quarterly, biannually, annually or just High level Milestones based Plan map depending on the maturity of the product/business and information available for creating the roadmap.

The more mature your product is , the more predictability it can give into the future of the product because of the mere business cycles product has seen.So , a word of caution for all the business to business(B2B like Alibaba) and business to consumer (B2C like Lyft) startups -if its an early stage product-don’t strategise too much into the future.

Step1 : Validate Hypothesis

Nobody knows better about the science of curiosity than the human race

1. Learn about the markets first — understand industry , suppliers , customers , pricing , market dynamics , economics , operations etc.
2. Look for the Product-Market fit ( Need Analysis , What problems we solve , who are our current customers and who will be our engaged customers in future). The key is to ask them , listen to them and understand them.
3. List down strategic options , parameters on which you will rate those options and customer knowledge you gathered from primary & secondary research in the first 2 steps to define your competitive advantage.
4. You should know who are our target customers , what are their needs and key benefits they will get by using our product.

At the end of the first step , you will understand that customer knowledge is the most valuable tool that helps the PM to accurately map out his product strategy.

Step2: Revisit your Business Strategy

Sometimes, just looking is enough.

1. Meet your business stakeholders in sales , customer success , internal teams like UX research , marketing and operations , executives and check their interpretation of business strategy.
2. Find out their goals, key measures and its alignment with company goals.
3. Research about the key competitors , their core customers and their business strategies.
4. At the end, combined with Step 1 : You should know what will be your business strategy and how do we intend to serve the customers.

Whether it is cost leadership , economies of scale or differentiation-you should be absolutely clear at this step about the key focus of your product strategy.

Step 3: Recheck your Product Strategy

Mostly it’s not really fun on what you find

1. After the first 2 steps, you should know your business strategy and your target customers, their needs, key benefits to given.
2. Recheck your product strategy against the business strategy , market research and the target customers. Is the product strategy helping company achieve the business goal ? Is the focus accurately on target customers ? What are its key differentiators? Are there any benefits/features served by competition which our product cannot support currently ?
3. List down the product gaps and barriers to product. Product gap will be like “customer want to adjust their profile picture into their account but we do not allow image cropping”. Product Barrier can be like “ Customers want more online e-wallet based payment options but we do not have a e-wallet license”.

After these steps , you along with all the stakeholders should be aligned on the product strategy . e.g. It can be “ for the upcoming year, our focus is on Core Customer Engagement and hence the product strategy is to drive engagement of core customers through personalisation, gamification and other high engagement driving features like loyalty promotions etc.”

Step 4: Determine Milestones for your Product Strategy

Being ready with strategy is good , maybe check once if you have thought the right one.

1. Product Strategy has to be broken down into meaningful sequence of milestones.
2. Every milestone should have a strategic objective it supports which can be summarised in 2–3 lines. e.g. “Integrating with new logistics service to lower the cost of delivery to customers” and thereby impacting Cost Structure.
3. You have to research on your own ideas, look into idea-product strategy fit , check on market research and target customer’s key needs and your product benefits. You have to meet with the stakeholders to align the product strategy and get their new ideas in one on one meetings.
4. Each milestone should have a strategic objective it supports , description in 2–3 lines highlighting what is required , why is it required and possibly a proposal on how to approach(optional) , having details at the level of product requirements/business requirements documentation would be great but not necessary. The next step is to know how much effort will be needed to achieve them.

Step 5: Determine Timelines for your milestones

Truth is it can be very taxing to get even rough estimates, forget commitments

1. Once, the milestones are known , one has to estimate the development effort it will need.
2. You will need to collaborate with Engineering /Development leader to understand the development capacity and effort estimation for milestones.
3. Development capacity is usually measured in developer weeks or developer days to understand effort required by engineering in terms of resource bandwidth available.
4. Out of total engineering bandwidth available — some will be reserved for product support (15%-20%) , some for technical debt to improve product performance/quality/response time(15%-20%) , some for bug fixing (10%–15%) and the rest is allotted to roadmap milestone development which will typically be (45%-60%).
5. Then, based on the description of milestones , their impact to product strategy , details available-the development team will give their best estimates on each of the milestone. It can be as precise as number of sprints it will take , T-shirt sizing of various milestone based on developer count and sprint length to roughly how many development quarters/months it can take.

Step6 :First Draft and Roadmap Reviews

Reviews can go on and on and on…

1. Based on the impact each milestone has on product strategy , you can sort the milestones in order of value.
2. Based on the estimates give by the development team, you can schedule the deployment dates when the milestone will be complete and usable for customers.
3. You can create the milestone schedule to show milestones planned to be delivered monthly , quarterly or annually.
4. Then, set up meetings with business leaders and key product stakeholders to walk them through the draft version and seek their feedback.
5. In the meeting , the focus should be to align all on the business goals and product strategy clearly.
6. Once aligned, quick review of the development capacity of team, milestones and their timeline review should be shared so that every one understand what’s there in the draft plan.
7. There will be feedback , complaints , suggestions from participants which should be discussed and recorded.
8. Always ask for more time to go over the feedback and modify the roadmap and setup follow-up meetings.
9. You have to clearly communicate the trade-offs between milestones , development capacity limitations and milestone’s scope so that at the end of such meetings , every one is aligned on the development plan.
10. The reviewed roadmap will be more refined and detailed with clarity for at least the next 1-2 quarters , if not more.

Step7:Roadshow and the Road Ahead

Roadmaps are exciting but their presentations not so much.

1. Once the final version is ready , the roadmap has to be presented to all the stakeholders of the product to align them to development plan and seek necessary support for its success.
2. All the stakeholders should understand the top business goals , target customers and product strategy to win them.
3. Once they understand this , the roadmap with the list of milestones and timelines should be presented and their prioritisation should be explained.
4. Stakeholders should be clear about the rationale behind set of priorities on the roadmap and tradeoffs that the product team had to do to align product strategy to our business goals.
5. You have to seek alignment from each of the stakeholders , if required in one-on-one meetings , to understand that they support the roadmap plan and in case of any concerns/misalignment , you have to review it back with key stakeholders , development team and other key decision makers.
6. It’s an iterative process and dynamic one as well. Not everyone needs to be agreeing to all the part of plan at the same time. It never happens in real world. But alignment should be communicated well before the development team picks up the milestones for development.

The Last Step :Embrace the Change

Change is inevitable

Once you have a roadmap plan, you have to check for its relevancy to business. Maybe for a startup the goals and milestones change every 45 days while for a big company it doesn’t change for the next 2–3 years. It will depend on the changes you will observe in the industry, market dynamics, customer behaviour and needs, competitor’s strategy and development cost versus quality. You have to understand the reasons leading to different priorities at different point in time and adjust the roadmap accordingly.

With this, you will have your product roadmap ready, but remember it’s not the plan but this entire process that matters !!

“Alignment is the key to any successful roadmap and not fancy features.”

Happy Roadmapping :)

Roadmap — you can plan , Surprises are inevitable.