The secrets behind creating useful product roadmaps
As 2020 begins, and everyone is thinking of resolutions and plans for this year, I think road-mapping is a useful tool that you can use…
As 2020 begins, and everyone is thinking of resolutions and plans for this year, I think road-mapping is a useful tool that you can use for your professional and personal life. Working your way backwards is one of the best practices visualizing your future, and developing a plan to achieve that future is important. A good product roadmap is the best laid plan based on the current information that you have. No one can predict for unforeseen circumstances, but you can make short quick plans to achieve your bigger goal. And thats what a good roadmap should do for you.
What is a product roadmap? A product roadmap is a tool with timelines — sometimes quarterly goals and spreading up to 3–5 quarters. There can be different versions of the product roadmap that cater to different audiences. There can be an internal product roadmap, that you share within your teams and org, and there can be an external product roadmap, that only shows committed product milestones. There can also be an NDA Product Roadmap that you can share with your top customers behind closed doors, so they have more information to plan their own roadmaps and purchase cycles.
A good product roadmap should increase trust and accountability keeping in mind to be careful not to over-promise and over commit, especially with external customers.
How should you go about building one? The owner of a product roadmap is usually the product lead of the product. There can be a platform product manager, who potentially owns the whole platform encompassing other products too. In this case, the platform product manager will get commitments from various product managers and have individual feature lists that each PM has committed to listed in the roadmap. The roadmap itself can be a succinct one pager with myriad of colored boxes and lines indicating different types of products and even dependencies.
What are some best practices? Here are a few tips to build really good product roadmaps.
Arrive at a consensus: Be clear in your communication. Communicate to your superiors, communicate to the executors (engineering, product, design, QA) with your deadlines, win commitments knowing the things that you will not be able to execute to in this cycle will be on the backlog.
Maintain a backlog.
Make sure there is a version of the product roadmap that is clean and committable that you share with external facing stakeholders — sales teams, marketing etc. You will not always be present to the roadmap, you want to be able to help your sales team win the deal by equipping them with the right tools, but not letting them over commit and over promise.
Maintain a central place — a wiki, an intranet site of some kind to store your product roadmap that multiple folks have access to.
Product Roadmaps are live documents — Revisit your roadmap document with every release cycle and make sure that its accurate and well-represented. Its important to maintain a single source of truth thats agreed up on by various quarters.
Have a regular cadence on updating your product roadmap and publishing it to the relevant stakeholders. Make it predictable.
What should you watch out for? As with all things, do not optimize for perfection. A dangerous pitfall is to over-optimize for perfection and play the waiting game and lose out on effective communication and mitigation of confusion. Watch out for scope creep and dependency delays. Customers/Partners appreciate some level of predictability. And a roadmap increases accountability both internally and externally within a company. Granted this changes for early stage startups, but forcing you through the product management exercise forces the bigger questions and points out the glaring holes in your development plans.