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January 3 - March 19, 2021
Staying in touch with your users helps you understand trends and anticipate new needs.
direct contact with the customer is as important as it was in Sam Walton’s early days.
expected needs, normal needs, and exciting needs.
Desirability Desirability indicates the value to your customer of solving a problem, providing a feature, or performing a function.
Feasibility indicates how easy it will be for your organization to solve this problem, build this feature, or perform this function.
Viability indicates how valuable this solution is for your organization, often measured in revenue or profit.
Value is the benefit the customer or the company gets out of a proposed feature or other change. Effort is what it takes for the organization to deliver that feature. If you get more benefit for less effort, that’s an idea you should prioritize.
Value = Customer’s Needs + Organization’s Goals
The second part of the ROI equation, effort, is whatever is necessary to meet your customer’s needs and achieve your organization’s goals
when your proposed feature list is long, there are multiple factors to consider, and the answers are not obvious to everyone at first glance, the ROI scorecard approach can add just enough rigor to help illuminate and quantify subtler differences in priority.
MoSCoW is a method for categorizing your prioritized list of requirements into unambiguous buckets, making it clear what your release criteria are.
Must-haves are requirements that must be met for the product to be launched.
minimum-to-ship features
Should-haves are not critical to launch, but are important and may be painful to leave out.
Could-haves are features that are wanted, but not as important as should-haves.
Won’t-haves are requirements deemed “out of scope” for a particular release.
It’s useful to agree on these items up front to avoid misunderstandings about scope, rehashing scope mid-project, or what is often called scope creep.
Numerical prioritization methods are controversial,
a scorecard approach tends to “distract the team from a singular focus on delivering the product’s unique value proposition.”
introducing the structure of a scorecard often forces a team to clarify, articulate, and align on their strategy and the value proposition so that they can effectively pick the right columns for the scorecard.
no one should be a slave to a formula. Frameworks like these should be used as an aid to decision-making, not as the decision itself.
Value/Effort = Priority
Companies that consistently prioritize and focus on a few highly leveraged initiatives invariably learn faster, grow larger, and become successful by getting everyone pulling in the same direction.
Don’t fall into the trap of prioritizing by gut feel or outsourcing your decisions to your customers, competition, or industry analysts.
how you order items on the roadmap will reflect your priorities, and make them starkly clear to your customers and other stakeholders.
You can create the best plan ever conceived, but it will work only if the people who fund it, execute it, and receive its output believe in
What C. Todd created with this spreadsheet was not a product roadmap, but rather something more akin to a release schedule. Schedules are great. As humans, we love predictability:
Alignment This is a concerted effort to help people understand the issues and what their respective roles are.
People with differing opinions can still align on their intentions. Alignment is not consensus.
this means a group of people reaching a mutually agreed-upon decision.
Collaboration This is when individuals cooperate to accomplish a common goal or outcome.
you do not need consensus to get your roadmap in place, nor do you need it to update your roadmap.
Shuttle diplomacy involves meeting with each party individually to reach decisions that require compromise and trade-offs.
identifying the individual’s goals, priorities, and other considerations is the key to managing by shuttle diplomacy.
use the simple acronym GROW to guide your conversation: Goals What are they trying to accomplish in the next X months? Reality What’s on their plate now? What’s recent? Options What do they think will help them achieve those goals? What options have you already discussed that need to be revisited? Way forward Which of the options helps them achieve the goals they described earlier in the conversation? Which options are at the top of their list and why?
track their desired outcomes, why they have those objectives, what metrics they use in achieving those outcomes, and what their top product priorities are.
Once a shuttle-diplomacy process has been completed, pulling everyone together for a cross-functional meeting or workshop can be a very effective way to obtain final buy-in across the group of stakeholders.
The workshop needs to have a clear plan and outcomes before you hold it.
Your outcomes are to finalize the roadmap for the upcoming period (year, quarter, etc.).
Hopes and fears Hopes and fears is a simple exercise where each individual writes their hopes for the product’s future on one color of Post-it note or index card and then writes their fears on another color
many types of visions (hopes) and roadblocks (fears) surface that otherwise would remain hidden or unsaid.
A world where the [target customer] no longer suffers from the [identified problem] because of [product differentiator] they [benefit].
To [benefit realized] by [product differentiator]
Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo (O’Reilly)—you
we don’t believe voting is a good way to prioritize. It is, however, a good way to narrow your focus to a manageable list for discussion.
Each ticket was a dynamic version of a problem statement so as we continued to identify key learnings we were able to evolve our problem statement effectively around a what we were trying to measure, the measure of success, the impact of what we were doing and our expected return.
This weekly meeting makes minor course corrections to a larger meeting that occurs quarterly, where decisions that have greater consequences may occur.
Shuttle diplomacy involves meeting one-on-one with each stakeholder.
Co-creation workshops, by contrast, bring everyone together in a structured, intense session focused on alignment.
Every stakeholder will benefit from a view into what’s coming, and an opportunity to contribute
