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January 3 - March 19, 2021
Every department—from sales to marketing, from support to finance, from manufacturing to operations, from engineering to business development—will benefit from a view into what’s coming, and an opportunity to contribute.
One of the chief functions of a product roadmap (and one of the key skills of a successful product person) is to get everyone excited about the future.
If your why (aka product vision) is compelling, and your how plausible, you’ve got people hooked, and they’ll be happy to discuss how they can add their particular what to the plan.
In product-driven organizations, the roadmap forms, or at least informs, the planning of activities all across the organization.
Getting everyone pulling in the same direction and with the same timing is like coordinating the rowers on a crew team: it’s critical to moving forward swiftly.
they had a hand in putting it together. It’s the same with roadmaps.
“The reason the product team has a roadmap is partly because it’s a sales tool, a communication tool to help customers understand what’s coming so that they can plan for it. We actually could not land contracts without some level of comfort developed in the customer around that.
Osborne Effect after sales of the Osborne 1 computer fell sharply in 1983. Founder Adam Osborne had pre-announced new models that would outperform the existing model and dealers canceled existing orders for the first model in anticipation.
Sasha Dass, Technical Program Manager at Analog Devices,
Samuel Clemens, VP of Product Management for InsightSquared,
Bill Allen, former Product Manager for Bose,
Janna Bastow
In general, the further away from your core product development team you get, the less detail about features, functions, and dates you should provide,
build the specifics each group wants to see on top of the common foundation of your vision, strategy, and themes.
If your roadmap is expressed in a slide presentation (as many are), this might mean the first four slides apply to all audiences, but there is one additional slide dedicated to each group.
These teams want something that begins with your high-level story but then embellishes it with details including likely features, stage of development, scalability expectations, dependencies and risks, and even information about the technical underpinnings of the work they will be executing on
Technology roadmaps and decisions are always informed by the product roadmap.”
When you first show this roadmap to your team, you are looking for their feedback about what is feasible, not dictating what must be complete by certain deadlines.
Scalability Engineering, operations, and manufacturing teams need a good understanding of the volumes you expect and when you expect them.
The roadmap you share (and codevelop) with your marketing and sales teams should describe when the problems you’re solving will allow you to effectively serve new customers.
you don’t want them to get ahead of your certainty. Use words like likely, probable, and tentative, and make liberal use of your confidence percentages.
Business plan pro formas are not part of a roadmap, but adding rough revenues and a projected break-even timeframe can be useful to help this audience understand what you feel is required to reach a certain level of financial results.
They might ask for details about features and dates, but in most cases that’s not what they really need.
they arranged the themes on cards, relating each theme to a business objective, in a Current–Near Term–Future layout
9-7).
Should be 9.8
A presentation flow that starts with why, covers recent progress, and then gets into the how, frames up the roadmap details effectively.
When conditions in the environment change, your roadmap—like any living thing—must change as well in order to survive.
things change, and the closer your product is to the cutting edge, the faster they change.
In Scrum, the development team is left alone to execute for a few weeks with no changes in priority. Priorities for the next increment are determined when the output of the first increment is available for analysis.
many startups favor a simple roadmap format, which uses broader timeframe bucketing like Now, Next, and Later.
Recommended roadmap timeframes based on a product’s stage of life
As long as customers see that your essential vision is one they share, considered changes in the path you take to get there are generally OK. When they see clearly that their interests are being served, stakeholders in general are supportive of roadmap changes.
the refresh rate of your roadmap should match the time scale of your roadmap.
regularly reexamine your visions, strategy, goals, and themes to ensure you are still headed along the right path.
The four levers of the iron triangle are available for you to push or pull when things don’t go as planned.
when the schedule shrinks, you may need to consider decreasing scope or increasing resources to assure an expected level of quality.
The Mythical Man-Month
“adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
small teams of three to seven people are most effective at delivering on software projects. This effect is thought to result from the increase in communication overhead necessary to coordinate larger groups.
(Amazon.com’s famous two-pizza rule is an attempt to apply this team-size principle across an entire large organization.)
Death March
“While the corporate goal of such projects is to overcome impossible odds and achieve miracles, the personal goal of the project manager and team members often shrinks down to mere survival: keeping one’s job, maintaining some semblance of a relationship with one’s spouse and children, and avoiding a heart attack or ulcer.”
“that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
“Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources.”
Working hard to make that first version of your product the best, most scalable, most reusable, most elegantly bui...
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What problem is this request trying to solve?
specific feature requests are one person’s guess as to the best solution to an unstated problem.
Does solving that need align with our objectives?
Is it more important than what’s on the roadmap now?
the iron triangle dictates that adding something in means cutting something out (or delaying it or adding resources).
