Intro

A product roadmap is long-term product development plan that gives all product stakeholders the information they need to coordinate their planning. It provides the vision and execution strategy for your team in the days and months to come.  

Ultimately your road map needs to communicate what needs to be built, what the vision of the product is, what the features are, and when critical releases will occur.

Steakholders

• Customers

• Customer-Facing groups in your company: sales, marketing, support.

• Finance, HR.

• Investors, boards, executive sponsors

• Architects and engineers

• Major Stakeholders

  • Business Leaders (CEO, GM)

  • Sales Leader (VP of Sales)

  • Development Leader (CTO or VP of Engineering)

Notes And Tips

From:

• Product Management: Building a Product Roadmap by Ted Grenager and Eldad Persky

• Chief Technology Officer Career Guide by Drew Falkman

A Roadmap

• A product roadmap is designed to give your product stakeholders the information they need to coordinate their own plans.

• Even the most beautiful product roadmap is worthless if your stakeholders don't really believe in it. The key to building this alignment is the process you go through.

• The purpose of this document is to allow each of your product stakeholders, including key customers, to coordinate their planning around this product development plan.

• Each milestone should be a meaningful bundle of new functionality that will have significant impact on your business.

  • Contains only new functionality (e.g. don’t include engineering bugs or maintenance tasks).

• You should strive to make it simple and easy for everyone in the organization to understand.

•  First step in roadmap development is to clearly articulate your product strategy. 

Product Objectives

• Understand your CEO's vision,  the business case, product market fit, and your customers and users.

Product Strategy

• A product strategy is a description of the way your company or business unit intends to achieve its business goals with its product.

• Strategy should be owned/driven by business leader.

• It should answer:

  • Your business goals

  • How will you measure success?

  • Who are your target customers? 

  • Key needs of your target customers?

  • Key benefit your product provides?

  • Competitors to your product? 

  • Key Differentiators?

• A strategy is a single paragraph, that represents your near and longer term product vision.

When Not To Create A Roadmap

• When you're developing a very early-stage product, when you're exploring a new market, a new customer and product, it would be foolish to try to plan out what you're going to develop far into the future. (Good analogy of asking Christopher Columbus for a roadmap for his trip)

• They don't know enough about the market to form a coherent, well-founded strategy. Instead, they probably have ideas about some unmet customer needs and a possible way to meet those needs to create business value.

• Learn about the market and the customers and validate the hypotheses that will later form the basis of the product strategy.

• Create roadmap once your product has achieved product market fit, and you're able to articulate a product strategy that is based on solid market and customer knowledge.

The Process

• The purpose of product development is to serve the business, to support the company's overall strategy, usually by winning customer adoption, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue.  These requires all stakeholders to be in agreement.

• Alignment is easier to achieve when you include your stakeholders early in the process, when you take the time to ask for their feedback and address it, and when you keep all of your stakeholders updated as the plan takes shape and evolves into its final form. 

• A successful roadmap needs three things: based on a sound product strategy, be realistic and be fully supported by the key product stakeholders.

•  A persuasive leader can take over a roadmap, shutting others out. To overcome:

  • Spend time with this leader at the very beginning of the process.

  • Ask them for their ideas about the roadmap and the development projects that are most important to them. 

  • Ask them for the thinking that underlies the selection of these projects. This person most likely has valuable knowledge about the market and the customers so make sure you capture that as well.

  •  Explain importance of including other product stakeholders in the process

Customer Research

• Customer knowledge is the primary currency of a product manager.

• To get customer knowledge:

  • Design a survey and send it out to a small sample of your target customers

  • Participate in sales or customer service meetings

  • Direct qualitative customer research: call customer directly, learn about the experience using product (what they like/hate, the competition, etc)

Milestones

• Identify sequence of milestones. Record strategic object that it supports as well as the rationale. 

• Put the milestones in a rough priority order.

• Meet 1:1 with each of your product stakeholders to review milestones and ask for their ideas.

• Find the development team capacity (remove bug fixing, maintenance. Leave only capacity for new development).

• Divide goals into 3 areas: now, 6 months and more than a year out (can be vague)

• Features and scope: ensure current features are more specific

Roadmap Review Meeting

• Explain the goals

• Review product strategy

• Review development capacity

• Walk through product roadmap

• Ask team what changes they would make. Modify plan directly in the meeting so people can see trade-offs

• Align the team with the final decisions.

Presentation

Presentation of the final roadmap should include:

• Top-level objectives, Target Customers, Competitive Advantage

• Show one slide with timelines.

• Have slides explaining rationale for key decisions, specially if features are delayed or removed.

Constant Review

• The product roadmap should be reviewed periodically. In a startup, maybe once or twice a week.