(From uie.com’s All You Can Learn library, requires highly-recommended subscription)
In running international seminars, Bruce McCarthy asked attendees to write break-up letters with their current roadmapping process, which highlighted many real-world current issues:
- No defined process
- Not tied to business strategy
- Not enough customer input
- Lack of stakeholder alignment
- Unclear prioritization
- Broken promises
- Overly incremental
- Shiny object syndrome
- No clearly defined target
- Poor use of data
- Groundhog Day phenomena
Roadmapping 6 months out doesn’t sync well with Agile processes and can be a no-win scenario
Yet roadmaps are a way of clearly expressing a product strategy and setting a budget
Jared Spool suggests roadmaps shift focus from planning feature releases/dates to reflecting an understanding of what the customer is looking for and solving those problems. Jared thinks these new roadmaps can be a company’s competitive strategic advantage
Relaunching roadmaps
A roadmap should:
- Put plans in a strategic context
- Focus on delivering value
- Embrace iterative learning and evolution
- Rally the org around a single set of priorities
- Get customers excited
A roadmap shouldn’t:
- Make promises you’re not sure you can keep
- Act as a project plan or a release plan
- Require wasteful up-front design and estimation
What is this new roadmap?
- A strategic communication tool
- A statement of intent and direction, not a promise of deliverables
- Lays out where you’re headed and what the obstacles might be without getting into product specifics
- Could be a Kanban board, spreadsheet, slide deck—whatever works for your team to hold your product’s vision
- It’s NOT a release plan:
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Roadmap components:
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The primary components are compulsory; the secondary provide color and context for stakeholders; the complementary provide other contexts that aren’t part of the roadmap (but may be part of the release plan)
Primary components
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Product vision: How a specific customer will benefit from your product as it becomes more fully-realized and ubiquitous. Sample (note how the PV is about customer benefit while the rest of the roadmap is about business needs):
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Business objectives are what will be measurably different for the org as you progress towards your product vision:Image may be NSFW.
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Timeframes should be kept broad (quarterly for example) rather than having specific delivery dates:
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(Note the even broader timeframe strategy: Now, Next, Later)
Themes are the problems / jobs to be done / needs of customers that you plan to fulfill while you drive towards product vision and business objectives:
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Disclaimers set the expectation that everything is subject to change — it’s even likely to change as you iteratively learn
Back to the sample:
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Note, aside from the hose there are no deliverables on this page
Establishing Product Vision
What is your product vision?
- Google: To organize all of the data in the world and make it accessible for everyone in a useful way. Other Google orgs’ missions:
- Chrome browser: To provide a fast, simple, and secure browser for everyone to experience the modern web
- YouTube: To give everyone a voice and show them the world
- Android: Helps people around the globe enjoy greater access to information and opportunity than ever before
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
A framework for measuring progress
Objectives:
- What? The outcome you want to see
- Why? To provide context about the purpose of the work
Key results:
- What? Numerically-based expressions of progress towards an objective
- Why? To provide a reference for evaluating how well you are executing on those objective
- Generally set up quarterly
Roadmap Themes
To achieve our product vision, what themes would have to be solved? Example for SpaceX to get people to Mars:
- Full reusability of rocketship
- Refueling in orbit
- Propellant production on Mars / Correct propellant
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An opportunity solution tree is another way to visualize this:
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The lo-tech version of this tree:
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Prioritize with Math
Three techniques you can research further esp in Bruce’s new book (see below):
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Another technique:
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Bruce suggests using T-shirt sizing here
Add in confidence:
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Example:
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Obtain Buy-in
- Alignment (different from consensus)
- Willingness to commit to a decision / directions that you may not agree with to achieve a common goal
- Consensus (only if absolutely required)
- Collaboration
- Folks cooperate to accomplish a common goal
- Testing validates goals
Shuttle diplomacy
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Sample of a tool you can use for diplomacy:
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Present & Share
Why share roadmaps internally:
- Alignment
- Feedback
- Inspiration
- Co-creation
Why share roadmaps with customers:
- Feedback
- Avoid overpromise and under deliver
- Competitive advantage — lead vs play catchup
Secondary components
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Be cautious when sharing these, since they are expected to change over time
- Confidence measures how confident you are in a feature’s durable importance over time
- Target CMRs are different buckets of customers
- Dev stage denotes where in the process (discovery, design etc through final testing) something is
- These details can be added to your existing product screen:
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Great example of a fully realized roadmap from chef.io:
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About Bruce McCarthy (from uie.com): It’s not every day that you run across a friendly subject-matter expert like Bruce McCarthy. He’s so invested in helping product managers and UX designers work smarter that his company—UpUp Labs—is launching a tool to help them validate requirements before jumping to design: www.reqqs.com
Bruce’s new book is Product Roadmaps Relaunched