Product Roadmapping: Navigating the Nuances for Success
There have been many articles written exploring the intricacies of crafting a product roadmap. I’ve created a wide range of roadmaps myself. Some roadmaps focus on envisioning a 3-year trajectory for nascent products, while others delve into iterating on existing products. In this article, I aim to share my insights on the art of roadmap development and communication, with a special emphasis on incorporating invaluable stakeholder feedback.
Since my experience is mainly in consumer-facing software products, I will refer to the end users as customers and other cross-functional partners I am accountable to, such as marketing, sales, and operations, as stakeholders. By adopting a holistic perspective, we can ensure alignment with both user expectations and internal objectives.
Why Do We Need a Roadmap?
Imagine your product as a fearless explorer, venturing beyond the current quarter. A roadmap is like an old trusty compass, chartering a course for a year, three years, or even five. The horizon depends on a number of factors such as market dynamics, the pace of technological advancement, and the intricacy of implementation efforts.
A longer-term roadmap aligns your product vision with lofty business goals, impresses stakeholders with your strategic prowess, and lets you allocate resources like an orchestra conductor as resource needs differ at various stages of the product lifecycle. Without a roadmap, we are merely clueless wanderers lost in the forests. Beyond a navigational tool, a great roadmap is the cornerstone of product and business success.
Steps to Build Out a Product Roadmap
These are the fundamental steps involved in building a roadmap. Below are the key steps:
- Articulate the product vision that aligns with the company goal
- Describe the desired outcome — what does winning look like? A helpful approach is to write a press release as if you were launching the product tomorrow. What key messages do you want to convey?
- Define the target metric to measure success for users and for the business
- Identify a path to reach that desired outcome
- Categorize features into different priority levels (P0, P1, P2) through a set of criteria. I begin by considering these factors: 1) user value and impact, 2) feasibility, and 3) urgency.
By following these steps, you can effectively build a product roadmap that aligns with your overall vision and goals. However, it’s important to note that building out a robust roadmap involves additional nuances and considerations which I’ll address below.
Striking the Right Horizon: the Value of a Multi-Year Roadmap
As a software product manager, I typically map out a roadmap that extends into the future, typically spanning 18–24 months. However, in a changing landscape with fluid market dynamics and evolving customer preferences, it is crucial to regularly reassess and re-evaluate the roadmap’s direction.
As you build out your roadmap, you want to make sure you can clearly convey: 1) capabilities at each stage of the lifecycle, 2) learnings captured with releases or experiments, if ML models are involved, 3) the final product features or how we plan to iterate on ML models from our learnings.
I often include a section titled “Future Considerations”. This allows me to capture additional “crazy” ideas that could be explored once we have built out the foundation of our product. The purpose of including these ideas is to ensure that they are captured and acknowledged. Often stakeholders often toss out similar ideas and ask “What about X?” By proactively documenting these ideas, I can demonstrate to stakeholders that I am thinking ahead while also maintaining focus on the present objectives. This also has the benefit of empowering the engineering team to architect a platform that anticipates and accommodates future capabilities.
Define Your Minimally Delightful Product
Your initial release doesn’t have to address everything under the sun. It’s not about launching with a complete set of functionalities right from the start. Instead, focus on defining a minimal set of features that can genuinely delight your customers.
“Each journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” — Lao Tsu
Once your customers start using your product, it becomes crucial to observe their usage patterns through analytics or user research. Capturing consumer insights will help you reassess and re-evaluate your product direction.
Themed and Phased Releases
Once you have defined your initial product, you should have a number of customer requests or features you didn’t get to in your backlog. I typically like to phase upcoming releases by giving them a “theme”. That doesn’t mean every feature necessarily complies with that theme. Some themes include analytics & reporting, feature extension, performance optimization, customization/personalization, integration with external systems, and security & privacy enhancements. Each area undoubtedly warrants its own article for further exploration.
Speak as One with Your Partners
The most effective atomic teams I’ve seen are the ones where technical and product leaders speak as one. They can represent each other at larger meetings because they have aligned in private and can therefore present themselves with a cohesive voice in public.
You can only achieve that if you, as a product manager, collaborate and review the roadmap with your technical counterparts. Your engineering or data science counterparts should have a strong voice in helping you prioritize the product roadmap because they will be implementing those features! When people believe in the mission, they will work with passion!
Get Feedback from Your Stakeholders
Once you have a good draft roadmap in place, schedule a “roadshow”. Think of them as town hall meetings where your congressperson connects with her constituents.
If your product roadmap has dependencies on other teams, you’ll want to make sure you align with them before making a public commitment on behalf of another team. Do not take a shortcut here. You will need to align with your dependent teams to ensure that they can support you in the appropriate timeframe.
In a recent project, I also needed to understand upcoming marketing campaigns to ensure that non-trivial changes would not conflict with major sales events. This requires aligning with key marketing partners within the company. As someone who’s spent time in a number of e-commerce companies, launching an A/B test on an e-commerce site during major events can be risky and is typically avoided. This is a no-no because of several reasons: 1) You will see user behavior not representative of typical patterns during sales, 2) The increased traffic during sales promotions days can skew test results, 3) If a new feature or a new model introduces negative user experience, it could potentially result in revenue loss given the increased traffic.
Reassess and Re-evaluate
As a product manager, you must frequently revisit your roadmap. Many companies do quarterly planning, so that’s the minimum cadence. I typically revisit my roadmap monthly. A few things I consider as I look through my product roadmap:
- Have the company goals changed recently? Is the focus new customer acquisition or customer retention? Or revenues?
- Are there new customer needs that have emerged?
- Do I have new information from my dependent teams that affect the timing of my deliverables?
- Are there new risks and what mitigation plans can I put in place?
- Does our team have the resources to support the upcoming quarter or half-yearly commitments?
No one wants to be surprised. Should you determine that you will not be able to deliver your upcoming commitments, figure out how you’ll address them. You can reduce the scope of your delivery, adjust timing, or if possible, recruit more people onto the project. More importantly, you need to communicate this up the chain early and succinctly. I find that if you can identify risks early enough, you will not be “killed” as the messenger of bad news.
Final Thoughts
Beyond building out a comprehensive roadmap, there are some key considerations for your roadmap to be more defensible and flexible.
Engaging with stakeholders in your roadmap development process can help enhance its credibility and increase buy-in. You effectively make your roadmap more defensible through the transparency of your process. In gaining buy-in, you have to share your rationale. In prioritizing features, you need to articulate the trade-offs and reasoning behind prioritization. Through stakeholder interaction, you essentially create a sense of ownership with your stakeholders. The resulting roadmap reflects a collective understanding and agreement. Along the way, you will have picked up many allies who will help you advocate and deliver.
