Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

by Roman Pichler

Get the Features on Your Roadmap Right Most product roadmaps come with features—with good reason: goals alone are usually not enough to understand what needs to be done to successfully deliver a release. To get the features on your roadmap right, start by making them high level. Ensure that they are product capabilities or deliverables; examples include “track what I eat” or “evaluate the food consumed” for my healthy-eating app. Don’t make the features on your product roadmap too detailed. Otherwise it will become difficult to see how your product should evolve, and your roadmap will overlap too much with the product backlog. Don’t mistake epics or user stories for “features.” A feature is a product capability. You can think of it as a group of epics. Goal-Oriented vs. Feature-Based Roadmaps On a goal-oriented roadmap, features exist to meet a goal and generate a benefit. You should therefore state the goals first and then derive the features from the goals. To put it differently, goals come first, features second. As mentioned before, I recommend that you don’t use more than five features per goal, and avoid adding features altogether when your planning accuracy is low. When you work with a feature-based roadmap, however, features are first-class citizens that you directly add to the appropriate releases. They may originate from customer requests, user forum messages, or solution interviews, for example.