Elevating Your Product Roadmap with Storytelling Techniques
Product Roadmaps are arguably one of the most common artifacts Product Managers need to create, update and discuss with stakeholders and peers. Intended to be a high-level representation of your product vision, strategy, and immediate tactical direction, they are an amalgamation of the chaos around your product’s objectives, features, and metrics. As Product Managers, we aim to optimize alignment around our roadmaps to provide a clear and consistent view of the strategy and help rally the company toward common goals.
What sets apart an average product roadmap from an exceptional one? Storytelling helps builds consensus, buy-in, and forward actions.
By incorporating storytelling techniques into your product roadmap, you can bring your product vision to life, make emotional connections with your stakeholders, and create a compelling narrative that captures the attention and imagination of your audience. A story is more than just a sequence of events. It’s a powerful tool for conveying information, creating empathy, and inspiring action.
“Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.” ― Jean Luc Godard
Start with your Vision
Defining your product’s vision is an essential prerequisite to building your product roadmap. A well-defined vision is the backbone of your story, allowing you to refer back to it to remain focused.
A strong vision statement is ambitious and aggressive and clearly indicates where your product is headed in several years. It showcases a shared objective upon which you can rally your troops.
Remember that your vision is distinct from your product and the strategy used to create it. Rather, it should act as a source of inspiration. For example, consider Google’s vision to “provide access to the world’s information in one click.” Each of their individual products contributes to achieving this broader vision, like building blocks, but is not necessarily a direct reflection of the vision itself.
When crafting your vision, remember the problem your product is solving and its impact on your customers. Think big, keep it short and brief. You intend to inspire, and this vision is the first chapter of your story.
Highlight Milestones
Milestones are the building blocks of your product roadmap and should be prominently displayed to create a sense of momentum and align everyone toward incremental outcomes. Think of milestones as sections or chapters in a good story.
While some readers may prefer a book summary, others may prefer reading the whole book. Similarly, milestones allow you to control the information’s granularity. Certain stakeholders may only be interested in your key milestone dates, whereas others may want to go deeper to understand the element that leads up to these milestones.
Milestones could include product releases, # of subscribers, partnerships, market launches, etc. Each milestone should complement your story and bring you closer to realizing your vision.
If you’d like to know how to present your roadmap to different audiences, check out this interesting talk with the Head of Product of Commercetools.
Customer Stories
Incorporating customer feedback into your roadmap effectively demonstrates the rationale behind your outcomes and decisions. Your end users’ pain points, desires, needs, and wins allow you to signify the weight of your roadmap within your story. This is a powerful tool for building an emotional connection with the audience and connecting the dots within your story.
This does not have to be limited to areas of improvement; in fact, you can include success stories from your customers as well. Your product may be built to serve a purpose, and once that purpose is served, you bring about some positive difference within the lives of your customers, capture that and make it a key pillar within the story you are telling.
Values & Principles
An excellent product roadmap is a comprehensive overview of your product’s strategic direction. In an ideal world, your product roadmap would be a starting point for any stakeholder with levels of depth regarding the information they are looking for. Another crucial part of your story is how your roadmap aligns with the values and principles defined within your company.
If your business revolves around recycling and selling refurbished technology (like BackMarket, Momox, and Rebuy), then values such as efficiency and thoughtfulness should reflect within your proposal. By doing so, you ensure that your roadmap is inspiring, and you prove that as a Product Manager, you are diverging enough to think about global company principles while also converging into your product’s objectives with your thought process.
Supplement with Data
Data on its own may not be the most exciting, but when combined with your story, it can bring your narrative to life. Collect data from various sources to visualize the value of the problem your product is solving. Using data visualization, you can provide evidence to support your story and create a functional and inspiring roadmap.
Think beyond the vanity metrics and look into insights that catch your stakeholder’s attention.
Vanity metrics are defined to be statistics that may look interesting but, deep down, do not drive any meaningful results for a business.
Your story is about connecting the dots. Include metrics that indicate the problems your customer face while also showing the link between how they impact your business. If you have yet to launch your product in the market, you can always conduct competitor research within your landscape to better understand the key metrics.
If you are working with OKRs, this talk might interest you.
Remember: avoid telling a story around your data; instead, use your data to tell a story.
Summary
Incorporating storytelling into your product roadmap can help to bring your product vision to life and create a more compelling narrative that engages and motivates your team, stakeholders, and customers. By using key milestones, analogies, customer stories, and data visualization, you can build a functional and inspiring roadmap. Remember, a great product roadmap is not just a plan — it’s a story.
Learn More
This article is based on our experiences as Interim Product Managers during the past few years serving clients from Series A+ to Publicly Listed companies.
At Product People, we work as Interim Product Managers and have helped 80+ clients and 200+ cross-functional teams in various industries. We share our knowledge generously through our community with multiple talks, articles, and content.
If you’d like to know how we can support your team, contact us today.
