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January 3 - March 19, 2021
Roadmaps are a powerful communication tool that benefit not just the product people and their immediate team, but the entire company and how it communicates.
“It’s all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it’s not only about implementing a solution; they must ensure that solution actually solves the underlying problem. It’s about results.”
If your job includes strategizing about where your product is going, contributing to alignment around a shared vision, or developing a plan to execute, then we hope this book will be relevant, enlightening, and useful to you.
this book was designed as a reference you can keep handy to refresh your memory on the intricacies, options, and pitfalls associated with each step along the way.
Design Sprint (O’Reilly).
A traditional roadmap is not flexible enough for the lean and agile methods many teams have adopted, and it is often light on the strategic context necessary for teams to understand the overall vision.
A good roadmap is not so much a project plan as a strategic communication tool, a statement of intent and direction.
a product roadmap describes how you intend to achieve your product vision.
It focuses on the value you propose to deliver to your customer and your organization in order to rally support and coordinate effort among stakeholders.
it’s about creating a shared understanding of where you’re going and why.
A product is how you deliver value to your organization’s customers.
We use the term stakeholder to refer to all the internal and external colleagues and partners who are involved with the product being developed, marketed, sold, and serviced.
We use the term customer to refer to the recipient of the value your product provides,
the first roadmaps were created to show how to bike from one part of New York City to another.
In the 1980s, Motorola began using the term roadmap to align technology and product development.
These roadmaps were created to inform stakeholders of when major upgrades were coming so they could plan their purchases many months in advance.
agile teams complain they spend so much time focused on the next few weeks that they lose sight of the reasons they are doing all this work.
A product roadmap should: Put the organization’s plans in a strategic context Focus on delivering value to customers and the organization Embrace learning as part of a successful product development process Rally the organization around a single set of priorities Get customers excited about the product’s direction
The roadmap is a critical—and frequently missed—opportunity to articulate why you are doing this product, why it’s important, and why the things on it are absolutely vital to success.
“This is our vision of why we’re here and what we’re trying to accomplish for clients, and here’s the roadmap that’s going to help us progressively get there.” Matt Poepsel, Vice President, Product Development, The Predictive Index
A good place to start in defining your product vision is to link it to your organization’s reason for being.
start with the mission, strategic intent and only then devise the plan from there.
Your product roadmap should slot right in between your company vision and your more detailed development, release, and operational plans.
“A lot of people think a feature release schedule and roadmap are synonymous,
a roadmap is a series of statements that communicate WHAT you’ll help customers accomplish and WHY those goals are important to their success.”
The traditional product roadmap is really more of a project plan focused on efficient use of resources, maximizing throughput, and hitting dates.
entirely leave out discussion of what is expected as a result of all this effort.
does being on schedule make any difference if you have no effect on customer behavior or business results?
we recommend starting with the chunks of value you intend to deliver that will build up over time to accomplish your vision.
Often this is a set of high-level customer needs, problems, or jobs to be done, which we call themes.
keep dates as vague as possible in order to maintain flexibility.
The roadmap should clarify plans, but without providing false precision that someone else might be banking on.”
experienced product people have learned to turn it around. They ask “Why?”
The smartest product people are trying to understand what problem that stakeholder is trying to solve.
If you can create a relationship of trust, though, by being really honest about what you know and what you don’t, customers will understand when you have to change directions or priorities on the roadmap.
The roadmap must align all the stakeholders around a common product plan.”
Organizations that don’t align well around the roadmap miss market opportunities because it takes months for marketing and sales to catch up to what the product team is putting out there.
A roadmap conversation with a customer is an opportunity for a product person to verify their understanding of market needs before actually building the product.
the roadmap (in Steve Blank’s words) is merely “confirming the mutual understanding” of these needs.
If your team has a track record of missing commitments, there’s likely a prioritization and even an estimation problem—that
Let the teams determine the solutions, and allow them to solve the problem
A roadmap is a strategic artifact, whereas a release plan is a tactical artifact about execution.
The issue is that we go right to the solution (output) rather than do what experienced product pros do, which is focus on the problem (outcome).
A roadmap is not a project plan.
Properly done, a product roadmap can steer your entire organization toward delivering on the company strategy.
A good roadmap, though, is not so much a project plan as a strategic communications tool, a statement of intent and direction.
By first establishing guiding principles (including a product vision tied to your company vision and goals that will help measure your progress), by focusing on outcomes rather than features and dates, by prioritizing based on return on investment (ROI) in meeting your goals, by using input from all of your stakeholders to drive alignment, and by planning for and clearly communicating ongoing change, it’s possible to set clear direction and simultaneously embrace the uncertainties inherent in product development today.
Product Vision Is Your Guiding Principle Whether they call it a mission, a vision, or a purpose, organizations usually have guiding principles that offer direction toward the proverbial North Star.
Business Objectives Help You Measure Progress What are the goals your product will accomplish? The outcomes? What will be measurably different for your organization?
Broad Timeframes Avoid Overcommitment Focusing on dates as the primary measure of success diverts attention from the iterative and uncertain process of innovation so critical in new product development.
