(66) How to present your roadmap features in multiple formats and delight your stakeholders?

If you have been a product manager for some time, you must have learnt how important stakeholder communication and engagement is as part of your daily job. Over years I have had to present roadmaps multiple times to different stakeholders and functional heads, often to get organisational buy-in. However, over time, I have found the exercise to be dull and listless. Presenting to an audience a plain list of new features, which only you are familiar with in the room is uninspiring.

Over time, I have realised that you can spice up your roadmap presentation in multiple ways. Most times, a single format roadmap is insufficient to showcase multiple perspectives that might have gone into building a roadmap. A little bit of effort and creativity can help win over your stakeholders, influence them, delight them and steer the conversations towards the most important elements of the roadmap.

Below are the different ways to present the roadmap features:

A traditional themes based roadmap

This is the most common format of product roadmapping that is often shared with stakeholders, where the roadmap is primarily split into three timezones:

• What are we working on now?
• What will be develop in the near future? — 3 to 6 months
• What will be develop in the distant future ? — 6 to 12 months.

Sometimes roadmaps also showcase multi-year timeline but that is rare and suited for a different audience like board, investors or analysts etc.

In recent years, a popular change has been towards theme based roadmapping, where instead of listing the features, you list the problems that you are trying to solve. I have written a separate post on theme based roadmapping before in detail.

However, experience has taught me that this format is never sufficient to get buy-in, especially from Marketing. Displaying a list of problems to solve in a timeline is good but they need to have more information than that. They need to know which of these items are delighters, which of them will make the customers drool and persuade them to buy or update their product.

Candy, Vitamins, or Painkillers

I am borrowing this analogy from the VC world in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley love to ask this question when they’re getting pitched by a new startup:

“Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?”

They divide business plans into three categories: candy, vitamins, and painkillers. They often throw away the candy, look at vitamins, and really like the painkillers.

Candy

Candy features as the name suggests are low in the value chain but sometimes are necessary to grab attention for your users. Most relevant for B2C features, but you will find them in B2B products as well. UI overhaul and modernising interface often falls in this category. This as such doesn’t add any business value but becomes important to stay relevant in contemporary industry design standards. If you’re building features that’s like candy, you’ll likely need to make it free to first get users hooked. People don’t know a feature is candy until after they start using it, so the barrier to try it must be low.

Vitamins

Vitamin features also are not “urgently needed” but they have a positive impact over time. One example I can imagine is capturing usage data of your users. Not very important need for the users, but if they are provided with usage data, they could it find it useful to shape their usage behaviour and drive productivity. Vitamin features could mean increasing user productivity by reducing a few clicks to finish an existing tasks etc or improve performance by a few notches.

Painkillers

If you’re feeling physical pain, you tend to focus on finding a painkiller. You want it right now. You’re not going to waste much time doing research or price shopping.

Painkiller features are just that. If you provide a painkiller, users will latch on to them. This category of the features bring the maximum bang for your buck.

Innovation Matrix

Products are value creating vehicles. In order to generate value, a product has to offer something new; it has to innovate to a greater or lesser extent. Innovations range from small incremental steps, such as improving the user experience for your product to big, bold ones. The Innovation matrix is a great visual format to gauge how far are you pushing the envelope when it comes to innovation.

Spread your features on the Innovation Matrix to present your roadmap’s innovation potential.

Core innovation features: Optimize existing products for established markets, they make incremental changes to current products. They generate today’s revenues. Most of your features are likely to belong to this category.

Adjacent innovation features: Such features allow you to open new revenue sources, and require fresh insights into customer needs and demand trends.

Disruptive Innovation features: Disruptive features leverage cutting edge technologies, create a new market and crucial for enabling future growth.

Feature benchmarking with industry standard

Most times when you plan your features, you are either catching up to an industry standard, or breaking new boundaries and setting the standard. Mapping different feature areas to its equivalent industry standard provides a great graphic to measure your roadmap’s potential.

Here is a perfect example for iPhone when it was released in 2007. As you can can see it was below industry standard in different factors like keyboard, video and email integration. But it was ahead of industry standard in touch screen, style, and ease of use.

Kano model

Constantly introducing new features to a product can be expensive and may just add to its complexity without boosting customer satisfaction. On the other hand, adding one particularly attractive feature could delight customers and increase sales without costing significantly more. The Kano model captures this well. Do read more about Kano Model here.

Persona Vs Licensing canvas

Mapping your roadmap features to the personas it caters to is also an effective way to present your roadmap. This is particularly relevant to the marketing department who may have to design specific campaigns targetted to different personas.

So, next time you need to present your roadmap to your stakeholder, add all the above formats to your slides. You surely will delight them by providing so many varied perspectives. You and the PM department will earn a lot of credibility and respect for putting together this work. This will trigger the right kind of conversations that will only strengthen your product thinking and make better feature prioritization.

Do let me know if there are other tools and models that also can be used.

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