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

by Roman Pichler

Once you have found the primary success factor, you must protect it. If it’s on-time delivery, for example, then do everything in your power to ensure that your product is shipped on schedule. Consider the first iPhone. In order to ensure that the product would be released on time, Apple was prepared to partially implement some features and to increase cost by adding more people to the development effort. The very first release shipped without the ability to send text messages to multiple recipients, for instance, which is something every ordinary mobile phone at the time could do. As this example shows, protecting the primary success factor requires you to relax at least one other factor.

The Iron Triangle and the Secondary Success Factor A handy tool for illustrating that release contents, date, and budget cannot be fixed simultaneously is the Iron Triangle. Traditionally, the triangle looks at scope, time, and budget. To optimize it for developing a roadmap, I have replaced scope with goal or features in Figure 41. FIGURE 41: The Revised Iron Triangle The Iron Triangle states that one of its vertices must stay flexible and act as a release valve to account for unforeseen events. You cannot lock down all three factors—unless you compromise quality, which is not advisable. Compromising quality may give you some short-term benefits, like an increased development velocity, but it will hurt you in the long run. If your product suffers from poor qualit...