Themes: A Small Change to Product Roadmaps with Large Effects

I’m in love. I’m in love with an idea. A quite simple idea, really. But one that has amazing effects when put into motion.

It’s Bruce McCarthy’s idea. Bruce is a product manager’s product manager and one of the smartest people I know. He told this idea to me. And now I’m telling it to you.

Bruce and I were talking about product roadmaps, which describe features the team commits to ship over the next few releases. For most organizations, everything revolves around the roadmap.

Marketing uses the roadmap to plan the stories they’ll tell to entice new customers (and get existing ones to upgrade). Customer support uses it to ensure reps are trained to help with new features. And, of course, product development uses it to allocate resources and to speed future development.

It was while we were discussing roadmaps that Bruce shattered my world with a single word: Themes. Themes are an alternative for features. Instead of promising to build a specific feature, the team commits to solving a specific customer problem.

Themes are a Promise to Solve Problems, Not Build Features

A typical roadmap feature might be a data export capability to Salesforce. Customers may have even asked for…