Roadmapping your Product Vision
When you hear the term “Roadmap”, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?
For me, it was the maps that give you paths from point A to B. You start from one point with nothing but a direction to reach your destination B. Nowadays you can’t live without Google Maps or for some Apple Maps. Being in the IT industry, definitions have changed. Now for me, a roadmap is a strategy that is designed to achieve a goal (Not much simple life anymore! right?). Just like maps, roadmap make sure that you don’t deviate from your ultimate goal and follow the right direction. Before we start talking about the star of this article, let's first talk about a product vision.
What is a Product Vision?
A product vision describes the overarching long-term mission of your product. Vision statements are aspirational and communicate concisely where the product hopes to go and what it hopes to achieve in the long term. — Product Plan
A product vision is a crisp one (sometimes two) liner statement which tells you what your product looks like in its final stages. Vision needs to tell a story about, What you’re building, for whom it is for, and Why it matters. Vision will impact every single aspect of your product so it is important to be thoughtful when you are crafting your vision.
Let’s see some of the visions of successful companies:
Our vision is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. — Google
We strive to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation. — Philips
To help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. — Microsoft
Can you notice any similarities among the above visions? All visions are:
- Inspiring
- Ambitious
- Easy to explain
- Something the company believes in.
It’s not just for companies or products, even you can have a vision for yourself. Do try it out, it’s inspiring. It can add meaning to your life (I promise this is the only life lesson in this article). Now that we have an idea about product vision, how do we accomplish it?
How to define a Product Roadmap?
Roadmaps are evidence of strategy, not a list of features. — Steve Johnson
The roadmap is an iterative communication tool that defines the high-level priorities of the product. Many organizations, confuse the roadmap with an excel spreadsheet that lists down all the things to do. But it's more than that. It is not a one-man task, it is a collective approach in which the product manager team up with leadership and stakeholders to define an ideal roadmap. Depending upon the organization, you might need to modify the details for the audience.
Step 1: Define input data points and analysis
It is really important to collect inputs from sources directly liked to your product. These can be stakeholders, leadership, team members, advisors, etc. Input typically includes feedback, insights, analysis, and requests.
Once you have consolidated all the data points, now it's time to analyze the request and prioritize based on your goals/OKR’s (If you want to know about OKR’s, do check out one of my previous blogs, OKR’s Guide). At this point, you might want to ask questions for each data point.
- How does building this help us achieve our goals?
- What problems does this solve?
- What happens if we don’t do this?
- What evidence do we have to suggest this will succeed?
These questions will give you an overall idea about the characteristics of each feature. These characteristics will help you further in the process to prioritize the features based on the product releases.
Step 2: Prioritization
Once you have all the desired data points which adhere to your vision goal and strategy, it's time to prioritize them. Prioritization is one of the biggest challenges in the modern product management space. The product manager deals with stakeholders, customers, sales team, marketing team, leadership, etc. and everyone has their feature which is required ASAP, on priority. To resolve different kinds of conflicts, a prioritization framework is one such method to prioritize among all the alleged priorities. There are many kinds of frameworks, but I will focus on only a few.
2.1 Impact-Effort Matrix
One of the basic prioritization frameworks is the Impact-Effort matrix or Benefit-Effort matrix in which the features are plotted based on the efforts required and the benefit they bring to the product.
This will create a chart (as shown in the image above) that can help you prioritize the features. For example, the features F8 and F1 can be your high priority since they required fewer efforts but generate great benefits. Also, you might want to think again about the features which provide less benefit and takes a lot of effort.
2.2 MoSCoW Prioritization Technique
It is one of the easiest yet powerful prioritization techniques in which the features or ideas are categorized into mainly 4 buckets.
- Must-Have: These features must be non-negotiable and without them, the product will fail.
- Should Have: These are high-priority features but not necessary to the launch.
- Could Have: Desirable Features. I like to call them leisure features.
- Won’t Have: Features which as of initial releases are not required but maybe they can be added in the future releases.
Step 3: Create your roadmap
Finally, we are here! We have the prioritized features, we need to pick a roadmap template. These templates will provide a visualization of your prioritized features and will be easier to communicate. There are many kinds of templates but make sure to choose the one which suits your product, team, and stakeholders. Also, make sure to keep it clutter-free and simple.
3.1 Gantt Roadmap
This is one of the basic charts in which each feature is added based on its priorities. There are not many restrictions on the template and you can feel free to make changes based on your feasibility. Some use colors to depict the progress of the feature, i.e. if red, it means the feature is delayed.
3.2 OKR’s/ Goal-Based Roadmap
In OKR based roadmap, Goals are defined in the topmost part of the document in a particular color. The features need to be categorized based on the OKR’s which are defined and should be marked to the same color. This kind of roadmap designing helps in accessing the progress of the actual work based on the defined goals.
Step 4: Communicate and Spread
Once you have created a roadmap that best suits your product, it's time to go back to the stakeholders and leadership and share the roadmap with them. Once the road map is designed, it must be communicated to all the stakeholders, to ensure it is diligently followed. It is more about managing expectations than it is about managing your product. In addition to this, your engineering team should be well versed with the roadmap so they are aware of what’s coming next.
Step 5: Iterate
That’s not it. As I said before, a roadmap is an iterative process. Plans are never constant, things change with time. For example, there can be a case of resource crunch, change in requirement, etc. where the timelines can move a little bit, which is absolutely fine. It is very important to not design and keep the roadmap in the archive folder, but to keep modifying the roadmap based on inputs. The best way to do this is to have collaborative sessions with stakeholders, teams, and customers every month or quarter to discuss the progress and modification required.
To summarise, a roadmap is a great tool to stick to your vision and strategy of the organization or product and it provides a clear path on how to reach your destination just the way you planned. When you collaborate with all the stakeholders of the product, the roadmap will be less prone to any conflicts of interest. These ideas are further drilled down to priorities which provides a clear picture of what the product will look like in its initial releases. This process will provide a base to create your final roadmap.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and i will spend first four hours to sharpening the axe. — Abraham Lincoln
Did you find this article helpful? Do you want to see your topic in next week’s edition? Let me know what you think. Do reach out to me on Linkedin or Twitter. I will be happy to connect with you. Until next time, Peace!
