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January 3 - March 19, 2021
the sequence communicates what’s important now and what can wait awhile.
Themes Focus on Outcomes Rather Than Output Answering the question “What would need to be true for our product to realize its vision and attain its business objectives?” is the best way we’ve found to organize the work and deliverables of your team.
The Disclaimer Protects You (and Your Customer) Most roadmaps contain some sort of caveat just to make it absolutely clear that anything in the roadmap is subject to change without notice.
there is no one roadmap format that will suit every product and every organization at every stage of growth.
We start with the company vision, the reason we are developing products at all. This provides the grounding for everything that comes after
most important to achieving this vision
Work with potential customers should reveal the most important problems customers face in achieving their goal of perfectly-watered landscapes
This set of problems could easily form a set of themes to guide your development efforts—and form the backbone of your roadmap
Features and solutions are the specific deliverables that will fulfill the needs and solve the problems identified in the roadmap themes. These details are the new features, capabilities, quantities, enhancements, updates, or optimizations you will deliver.
Stakeholders seeing labels like “discovery,” “design,” or “prototyping” on a roadmap should understand that the product is in a very early stage of development.
The goal of gathering inputs is to make sure you have all of the relevant information and context you need to make good product decisions.
Your roadmap in this phase of the life cycle should be used to outline and drive the creation of the first version of your product.
It seems obvious that to build a successful product, you need to comprehend the business ecosystem in which you operate, but in practice this understanding is frequently missing from product teams.
In our opinion, every member of the team should have a basic understanding of the business environment.
Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas
Lean Canvas is very effective for startups or new products,
Business Model Canvas works well for existing products or growing businesses.
Steve Blank’s Customer Development Model
Customer Discovery, which supports the criticality of understanding customer problems and needs.
Often what a potential customer thinks is the problem is just a symptom of a much larger problem.
The Customer Validation step requires you to prove that at least some of your target audience is willing to pay for your solution.
Customer Creation, is about demonstrating your early success will lead to growing demand and a more sustained sales pipeline.
Company Building happens when product and sales are strong enough to justify the expansion of the initial team into a more established com...
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identify who your customers are, and then to truly understand and empathize with them—their jobs, wants, needs, obstacles, frustrations, emotions, and more.
user roles focus on jobs and functions.
user type addresses how a user will interact with your product,
users use the product and buyers buy the product.
A persona is often defined as a representation of a user that embodies the characteristics, feelings, and preferences of a user set.
Roles help us categorize the different customers our product will help, and personas allow us to take our understanding to a deeper level.
“Each customer-facing team creates their own top-10 list and then all those teams merge their lists together to come up with an overall prioritized list representing the Voice of the Customer,”
the more information you have about the space in which you are operating, the more effective you will be as a product leader.
A product vision should be about having an impact on the lives of the people your product serves, as well as on your organization.
A mission is not what you value, nor is it a vision for the future; it’s the intent you hold right now and the purpose driving you to realize your vision.
There are four key elements to a well-crafted mission statement: Value What value does your mission bring to the world? Inspiration How does your mission inspire your team to make the vision a reality? Plausibility Is your mission realistic and achievable? If not, it’s disheartening, and people won’t be willing to work at it. If it seems achievable, however, people will work their tails off to make it happen. Specificity Is your mission specific to your business, industry, and/or sector? Make sure it’s relevant and resonates with the organization.
A company vision should be about a longer-term outcome that has an impact on the lives of the people your product serves, as well as on your organization.
A solid vision statement will address, at minimum, these two aspects: The target customer—the who? The benefit or need(s) addressed—the why?
Values are also intended to guide behaviors.
culture—how people behave when no one is watching.
Values are often referred to as your compass.
Your vision is your ultimate destination, and your mission tells you which direction to follow in order to reach that destination.
Product vision clarifies why you are bringing a product to market in the first place, and what its success will mean to the world and to the organization.
It’s likely that someone, somewhere in your organization, has a product vision. This does nobody any good if it remains stuck in that person’s head.
starting with Geoffrey Moore’s “Value Proposition template”
“When done well, the product vision is one of our most effective recruiting tools, and it serves to motivate the people on your teams to come to work every day. Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision; they want to work on something meaningful.” Marty Cagan,
An internal vision like this is just as important as an externally motivated one. They work together symbiotically to make something great.
Your product strategy is the bridge that connects your high-level vision to the specifics of your roadmap.
crucial that you use product strategy as a starting place for your roadmap.
High Output Management (Vintage).
Christina Wodtke, author of Radical Focus (Boxes & Arrows),
Here are a few guidelines on OKRs as they apply to product roadmapping: Everything on the roadmap must be tied to at least one of your objectives. Stick to a manageable number of objectives; from our experience and research, fewer than five seems to be most effective. Focus on outcomes, not output.
