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 this feature, saying they’d buy a ton more licenses if the product made it easy to move the data.

But with Bruce’s Themes, the product strategy team would research why customers want to move their data to Salesforce. How does it make their life easier? Might it be even better if the data could move in both directions? How up to date does the Salesforce data need to be? What happens after it gets into Salesforce? What’s the bigger problem that needs solving?

That last question is quite interesting. By understanding how having the data exported to Salesforce contributes to solving a bigger problem, the team may uncover interesting alternative solutions. Maybe Salesforce is just an intermediate stop along the way to becoming something bigger? If so, maybe there’s functionality the team could add to the product (or even better, might already exist but is currently hard to find)?