Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty

by C. Todd Lombardo

Before being released to the public, products generally pass through several steps in the development process. Different industries and individual organizations use their own terms, but commonly there is a discovery, market research, or R&D stage before stages like design, testing, or prototyping. These are then followed by stages with names like development or pre-production.

Communicating Confidence

Identifying Target Customers

Tagging Product Areas

Product areas can be labeled on themes and features in a similar fashion to target customers or stage of development by using color coding, text labels, or separate rows on the roadmap.

showing her our prioritized list of initiatives and—this is the important part—the underlying strategic goals that informed it.

I put her idea through this model and, although the effort was small, it didn’t contribute to our new strategic goal of capturing larger customers, it would probably hurt our conversion rate, and it was unlikely to make much of a dent in our overall revenue picture.

Milton Friedman (and Robert Heinlein), there’s no such thing as a free demo.

you can never get everything done you would like or even might think is minimally required. Resources are limited, priorities shift, executives have ADHD,

you have to be very sure you get the most important things done before something changes and yo...

Always assume you may have to stop work at any time.

Eric Reis. In his book The Lean Startup

the reason most startups fail is that they run out of money before they find a viable business model.

Opportunity cost is when you never get the chance to do something important because you chose to work on something else instead.

What the startup CEO sees as responding with agility to opportunity, the development team secretly refers to as shiny object syndrome.

there are a lot of hidden costs to any given development effort.

Every feature you build has a carrying cost. For each new feature, you may have to: Retest (and fix if necessary) the feature with each new release and in each supported environment Document the feature Produce training material for the feature Handle support requests from customers (and train the support team to handle them) Figure out how to incorporate the feature into your pricing Figure out how to demo and sell the feature (and train the sales team) Figure out how to position and market the feature (and train the marketing and channels teams)

duplicate this effort for small numbers of customers in a variety of nonstrategic customer segments.

Adding all of this overhead means each individual effort slows down. The added overhead means that doing two things in parallel makes each take twice as long—and usually even longer due to communication, coordination, and mental switching costs.

the more features your team develops, the longer it seems to take to develop the next one?

the testing matrix is a large contributor.

this is commonly called regression testing, and unfortunately the size of this test matrix grows exponentially with the number of features (or modules or compatible third parties).

the numbers begin to rise rapidly from here, roughly doubling each time you add a feature. (For the math nerds, the progression is 2n – 1.) The test matrix for 5 features is already 31. For 10 features, it is 1,023. And to make your product go to 11 requires 2,047 test combinations.

The inverse of (and antidote to) shiny object syndrome is focus.

If you focus as an organization on one set of problems for a strategic set of target customers, you minimize the increasing drag of bad decisions and seemingly small diversions.

Figure 7-1. The size of the test matrix grows exponentially with the number of features

letting others define your strategy is one of the most common mistakes we’ve seen in product planning.

Prioritizing solely on your or some other executive’s gut instinct can be a killer for team productivity and morale, and it usually results in high turnover, low productivity, and subpar results.

First, the lack of rigorous analysis means that the executive in question is very likely to change their mind, confidently proclaiming that X is the future, only to make an equally confident claim for Y a few days later.

Second, while your CEO or other founding member of the executive team may have once been close to customers (or even been one at some point), their day-to-day experience is likely different n...

A product person must learn to take executive gut opinion as input and apply some rigor to it, understanding what problem the executive is trying to solve, whether solving this problem aligns well with the product strateg...

You probably know more about your business and your customers than industry analysts do, and it seldom pays to substitute their judgment for your own.

outsourcing your product strategy to your customers is a mistake in nearly all situations.

rank feature requests by frequency or size of customer.

customers can’t often articulate what they need f...

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

A roadmap made up entirely of customer requests generally results in a product with no focus, unclear market positioning, and poor usability.

understand what underlying problems motivated your endless list of customer requests, you and your team can usually devel...

Marty Cagan says, “Your job is not to prioritize and document feature requests. Your job is to deliver a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.”

asking for input from your sales team is smart—they have insight into how buyers think and what will get their attention—but prioritizing based on what will help close the deals in the pipeline this quarter is short-term thinking.

serve a market rather than individual customers.

customer support team is a terrific source of insight for product people.

good data for prioritizing enhancements under the general heading of usability, and it makes a lot of sense to prioritize work here if usability is one of your key goals.

The quickest way we’ve found to reduce the value of your product is to get into a tit-for-tat feature war with your competition.

Much better than trying to match the competition feature for feature is to differentiate yourself with capabilities perfectly matched to your chosen customer’s needs and which your competitors can’t or won’t match.

Critical Path

Chapter 5 ~page 91

user journey map provides an opportunity for product professionals to tease out various dimensions at each step in the customer’s journey, including their emotions and state of mind during each moment. Negative emotions can help you uncover key pain points and home in on those that are causing the most distress.

a product person needs to understand the major struggles in the customer’s journey and offer the right solution at the right time.

“What is the one thing (or set of things) our solution needs to get right?”