How To Query Your Product Strategy In Roam Research

We use a pattern called Now, Next, Thinking About to communicate our product strategy to our internal stakeholders. The gist is that it’s our way to communicate a “roadmap” that stays as close to the metal as possible and maximizes optionality. It contains three buckets with varying levels of commitment and accountability.

1. Now — What the team is working on in the current cycle
2. Next — What we’re exploring in more detail because we might work on it next
3. Thinking About — What we’re thinking about

The best part about this status reporting concept is that we can query it right out of our Roam Research database!

Templates Are Your Friend

In order to do this, you have to template some of your work. Our database pretty much follows 2 simple rules.

1. Any “raw” thinking belongs in a hierarchy on the current daily page nested under [[your name]] and is “highly linked”.
2. If you create a page that fits into one of a couple categories, you need to go into that page, type ;; and apply the template for that page. (We keep all of our templates directly on the [[roam/templates]] page)

Note: In all the examples below you will want to replace “Product” in a backlink or tag with an actual product name.

As far as Product Strategy goes, one of the templates we use is called the “New Pitch” Template. When something materializes as potential future work, a page is created and the new pitch template is applied. It looks like this. At the bottom section of the template there is a Meta attribute, where the page should be tagged according to current appetite (4 weeks, 1 week, or cooldown). There’s also a todo that says to tag the pitch with a #[[Product Name Cycle #]] tag. This is the key to the “now”, and “next” buckets of our product strategy. If we’re working on [[Product Cycle 10]] right now and [[Product Cycle 11]] is next, then all we have to do is query for those pages. Here’s what it looks like.

- [[[[Product]] : [[Strategy]]]]
  - [[Now, Next, Thinking About]]
    - [[Now, Next, Thinking About/Now]]
      - {{[[query]]: {and: [[Product]] [[Product Cycle 10]]}}}
    - [[Now, Next, Thinking About/Next]]
      - {{[[query]]: {and: [[Product]] [[Product Cycle 11]]}}}
    - [[Now, Next, Thinking About/Thinking About]]
      - {{[[TODO]]}} Scroll through some daily pages, add block refs to higher level things you're __actually__ thinking about!

This template is then added to the daily page on the day that the cycle changes and we commit to another 4 weeks of work (the new now). We also have a page called [[Product Pitches That Need Work]] that contains a single query.

{{[[query]]: {and: [[Pitch]] [[Product]] [[Needs Work]]}}}

We use this page to determine what we need to further refine in the next 4 weeks and tag them with the next cycle. If you want to see how our product strategy changes over time you can go to [[Now, Next, Thinking About]] and look at the linked references.

That’s it! Querying product strategy in Roam.

I write more generally about product, teams, design and engineering at Long Pressed. If you want to be an editor or writer of this publication, DM me on Twitter.