Product RoadmapHow to best create and manage roadmaps?

Why this talk?

Not just features & dates

Take a step back!

http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-planning-vision-strategy-tactics/

Outline3pm 3.10pm 3.20pm 3.30pm 3.45pm

Start Intro Examples

Middle Vision & Strategy

Creating &

Managing

End Q&A

What’s wrong?

OutlineDate Jan 10 Jan 10 Jan 10 Jan 10

Name Why roadmaps? Take a step back Create Manage

GoalUnderstand roadmap benefits & pitfalls

Focus first on product vision & strategy

Discuss roadmap creation

Discuss roadmap management

ResultsShared understanding of roadmap role & value

Learned what product vision & strategy entail

Clear on goalsRemove features

Understand pitfallsHappy to be flexibleLearned how to monitor & update

MetricsNo. of participants still on hangout

No. of participants realising need for vision & goals prior to creating a roadmap

No. of times participants will apply a goal or theme oriented roadmap

No. of participants who will rethink stakeholder comms and roadmap monitoring

Why roadmaps - Benefits & pitfalls

Provide direction

Pair objectives & strategy

Continuity of purpose

Facilitate collaboration

Help prioritise

Aid communication

By Martin Eriksson: http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2011/10/what-exactly-is-a-product-manager/

Beware! Roadmap comms

Beware! Roadmap comms

“The challenge for me with roadmaps is always the communication and buy in part from all parts of the business.

I'm in a 23,000 people company, and is a challenge to have everyone agree or be informed properly.”

Christian Miccio, VP of Product

Beware! Hard to predict

Beware! Hard to predict“If at all possible remove dates that are too far in the future. Try instead for a Q1, Q2, MVP3, MVP4, Set up.

This means you can go for themes rather than actual features once dates become too grey to predict with accuracy.

This helps mitigate changes you don't yet know are going to happen.”

Gary Finnigan, Product Owner

Beware! Be flexible

Beware! Be flexible

“Balancing the sales/marketing teams' needs forplanned deliverables to talk about with our need for flexibility to adapt to market changes.”Emily Tate, Product Manager

Why roadmaps?Provide strategic and product

direction Offers rationale for decisions, resource allocation and prioritisation

Effective communication tool

Facilitate stakeholder collaboration

Create continuity of purpose

Take a step back

http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-planning-vision-strategy-tactics/

Vision

Vision

“Based on my experience the biggest challenge is to validate the 'vision' behind the whole roadmap”

Antti Suvanto, Product Management Consultant

Start with a vision - business

Start with a vision - business

Start with a vision - product

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/VisionStatement

Start with a vision - business

Start with a vision - business

Start with a vision - product

Short:“Create a scalable set of tools and services which help our partners to sell as many products as efficientlyas possible.”

Long:“To provide an end-to-end partner experience around those tools required by partners to solve their critical business needs or workflow issues, irrespective of the number and types of platforms they sell on.”

Start with a vision Think big – A good vision is lofty and aspirational

A shared vision – Create a common sense of purpose which is shared widely across the company

Motivating – Outlines product benefits for others

Use for decision-making – Use your vision as guide when making business or product decisions

Distinguish between vision and strategy – A vision should not be a plan that outlines how to reach a goal

Take a step back“Making the complex easy and simple”

“Biggest challenge is getting budget approval without committing to delivering features by dates”Stephen Sherwin, Product Manager

“Getting stakeholders to accept that referencing themes and user problems or even KPIs you want to improve is a better way to construct a roadmap than listing features” James Henson, Head of Product

Ryan Frederick, Product Consultant

Goals / OKRs

Goals / OKRs

“Make sure the problem is identified and understood across the teams before the roadmap is drawn up”

Simon Cohen, Product Manager

Goals / OKRs

Goals / OKRsObjective: Enable Not On The High Street (‘NOTHS’) sellersto make product and business decisions based on their NOTHS performance data

Results:NOTHS partners make data informed decisions before and throughout Christmas ’15

NOTHS partners benchmark their gross turnover stats as we believe this will help them make product decisions

But …Don’t forget about strategy, ‘the bit in the middle’

What problem are we trying to solve and for whom?We believe our partners have a need to understand how their products are performing on our platform. We believe they currently suffer from a lack of transparency, making it hard to make decisions.

What is the outcome we are trying to achieve and why?We believe that having real time access to performance data will enable partners to make quick decisions about e.g. their stock levels, products to remove or extra staff to hire. We also believe it will remove some of the strain on our account managers who currently spend a lot of time generating reports for partners.

Strategy – ‘Bit in the middle’

https://blog.intercom.io/talk-product-strategy-saying/

But …Don’t forget about strategy, ‘the bit in the middle’ (cntd)

What are the competition doing?Our competitors are providing sellers access to sales stats, reason why partners expect more transparency from the platforms they sell on. We therefore believe that providing data is therefore a basic hygiene factor.

What does success look like and why?

At least 50% of our 5,000 partners viewing their performance data within 3 months from release to make decision and using the data to make decisions on e.g. stock levels and staff hiring.

So what …We believe our partners have a need to have access to their real time sales data, so that theycan make critical business and product decisions on an ongoing basis

We believe our partners need to benchmark their real time sales data, so that they have more context before making decisions

AssumptionsWe believe these needs can be solved through a real time data dashboard which makes it easy for partners to view and extract all the data they need for their day-to-day operations

We believe the no. 1 value our partners will get out of this dashboard is the ability to see at a glance how their business and products are performing

HypothesesWe believe that providing our partners with a real time data dashboard will help them make criticalbusiness and critical decisions

We know this is true when we see an average of 5 visits of the data dashboard per partner, within 1month following the first dashboard release

We know this is true when we get qualitative feedback from 100 partners within 1 month following the firstdata dashboard indicating that they have used the data to make stock level decisions

Initial validation

Strategy - ‘Bit in the middle’

Business goals

Revenue & profit

User Experience

Business model

Value chain

Customer segmentation Design principles

Competitors User needs

Technology Compliance

Domain Geography

Strategy

Constraints

Take a step backIdentify business vision-> create product vision

Ensure product goals are SMART or OKRs

Think about business and user goals to achieve

Focus on problems first

Don’t forget about strategy, the bit in the middle!

Create a roadmap

Create a roadmap

“Navigating that ‘if I asked them what they wanted they would have said faster horses’ space in a way that you keep users, bring innovation and strengthen your own identity”

Sherwyn Singh, Talent & Leadership Coach

Roadmap Wish list

Roadmap Customer only

Problems not features

"If I had one hour to save the world I would spend 45 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes finding the solution”

Albert Einstein

Unknown unknowns

Pitfalls when creating

What’s wrong?What is the context?

Why are we doing certain things? Why not?

What value are we looking to deliver and why?

What business or user problems are we looking to solve, for whom and why?

Don’t forget that your roadmap is a communication and collaboration tool!

Pitfalls when creatingCommon pitfalls when creating a roadmap:

Why? - Just a collection of features and timings

Dependencies - Not thinking about cross-product or team dependencies

“Solution sickness” - Fixating on a feature or solution upfront

Facilitate learning“Working towards goals without getting fixated on specific features leaves room for learning as well. Over time one may learn more about the problems to be solved, and also possible solutions to problems.

Going further one may even learn that the problem to be solved is somewhere else than originally thought, i.e. there is an even more important problem that needs to be solved, but the customer (or the solution provider) was not able to identify that in the beginning.”

Stefan Baggström, Solution Architect

Goal oriented roadmap

Create a roadmap

Roadmap themes

Owning the roadmapWho typically creates and owns a product roadmap?

Product Manager

Roadmap stakeholdersWho typically influences a product roadmap?

Stakeholders

Roadmap stakeholders

By Janna Bastow: http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2014/07/product-roadmapping-prioritisation-portfolio/

Create a roadmapDon’t fixate on features; focus on problems, goals, assumptions or themes instead

Important to not lose sight of measurable results

Consider adding extra layers to allow for risks, dependencies and product discovery (‘unknowns’)

Manage a roadmap

Manage a roadmap“One of the challenges is around stakeholder management in the agile world.

If it goes in a roadmap (and in some ways you have to question the term 'roadmap') with a month/quarter against it then that is often taken as gospel by stakeholder and reported on from them accordingly :-)

At best the roadmap is really only accurate the day you drew it!”

Alistair Harvey, Head of Product

Roadmap a one off

Roadmap Set in stone

Manage a roadmap

Roadmap updates

Manage a roadmap

Manage a roadmap

Product Roadmap - 3 things

3 things to take away:

Take a step back before creating a roadmap

A roadmap needs strategic context

Stakeholder communication is critical

Thank you!

@MAA1

https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahammarc

https://marcabraham.wordpress.com/

https://medium.com/@maa1

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Image Credits

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http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2014/07/product-roadmapping-prioritisation-portfolio/