Product Roadmap

Introduction:

So you’ve now understood and built your Product Strategy and through a data driven and disciplined manner discovered the Product you want to develop or if you’re working in a large corporation, have received an instruction to align the vision with the existing flagship product you work on. What next? How are you gonna build the product? Do you have a plan on how you’re going to reach your product vision and achieve the product goals?

Product Roadmap. A product roadmap will be a tool you will use to assemble your ideas in a structured plan to make your way towards achieving product vision. 

In this chapter, we will discuss and study everything around the product roadmap in detail and also build one for Ironman.

What is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap is a structured plan to achieve the product vision by encompassing product strategy and product goals along the path. It provides a representation of what steps will be taken over a period of time to achieve product vision.

It is very important to know very early that a Product Roadmap is never and should never simply be a list of features which will be delivered over a time. It’s more than that and we’ll see ahead.

Leadup to Building A Product Roadmap:

Since a product roadmap is not just a sequence & list of features that need to be delivered over a period of time, then what should it be ?

Here’s where we need to understand the importance of Product Vision, Product Strategy & Product Goals. 

As we’ve established before, that roadmap is a plan to achieve product vision, building a roadmap requires a clear Product Vision put in place by either the leadership or if you happen to be a product leader, then by yourself.

To give a recap, Product Vision is a clear & ambitious state your Product is envisioned to achieve. Product Strategy provides us answers on “how to achieve the Product Vision”. Product Goals on the other hand are measurable expected outcomes of strategy which eventually leads us towards achieving product vision.

Putting Customers’ needs and problems at the forefront:

Since we build products to either cater the needs of people or solve any problems they are facing in activities they perform frequently, it is very important to center the product’s development towards customers and customers alone.

This is because, many a times, Product Managers find themselves in a conundrum and at junction where either they’re forced to build products based on leadership instructions and hidden intention to slide in their pet projects in the product ignoring the fact that it’s of no use to the company, the product and above all the customers. At the same time, Product Managers through the muscle memory and hold over a domain try to solutionize and embed their own romanticised features and solutions.

Thus, it is important to balance decisions rationally & objectively by focusing purely on customer needs alone.

Importance of Prioritization:

Prioritization plays a big part in building roadmaps. This is because Product Roadmaps carve out detailed plans on achieving Product Vision only by considering those initiatives that are crucial in solving customer’s needs & solving their problems. In the sections ahead, we will understand more on how to prioritize.

Prioritization is required for:

1. Launching the right product at the right time and hence not losing an opportunity in the market.
2. Prioritization helps create a clear plan that gives you the visibility on what are the bigger bets for the future.

Attributes of a Good Product Roadmap:

1. A Product Roadmap describes the product vision and strategy and depicts how it will be achieved.
2. It serves as a guiding document for executing the strategy.
3. A good product roadmap gets the internal stakeholders in alignment and helps facilitate discussion of options and scenario planning.
4. Product Roadmap also reflects progress and status of product development.

Types of Product Roadmaps:

While there are numerous product roadmaps which product managers can employ for their use, there are three commonly used and equally important Product Roadmaps used. These are: 

1. Feature Roadmap
2. Outcome Based Roadmap
3. Sprint Based Roadmap

We will discuss and understand each in detail and further as an exercise to build an Outcome Based Roadmap.

1. Feature Roadmap:-

A feature based roadmap is one which aims to depict a plan to build and deliver features for a product for a given product. Such a roadmap is used and created when solutions and ideas are identified for a problem based on the opportunities identified. A feature based roadmap helps harvest advantage from the identified opportunities by packing them in features and depicting them over a timeline for set milestones and intervals.

The key objective to keep in mind while designing a feature based roadmap is that all the features prioritized and selected are those that solve pressing needs of customers.

2. Sprint Based Roadmap:

A sprint based roadmap is a more detailed and technical roadmap, aimed for execution. It can be thought of as a roadmap achieving deadlines rather than delivering value. It depicts which epics of a theme are considered along with their correlating user stories for each sprint.

3. Outcome Based Roadmap:

An outcome based roadmap is a roadmap which focuses on delivering great value to the company, the product and customers. This is because it focuses on “what outcome will a product decision yield?” thus ensuring features and solutions built are tightly coupled with the outcomes.

But how do we define outcome(s) in regards to a Product?

Outcome can be defined as a measurable change driven by customers’ behaviour. Example, if the onboarding flow is seamless, then there will be steady rise and ease in the number of users. Similarly in a negative sense, if your product or service is bad and gives users an unpleasant experience, then the users will churn out leading to losses across all fronts. 

Hence it is important to define outcomes by the customers’ behaviour you need to address in order to achieve a market fit.

Let’s do an exercise and also understand steps in building an outcome based roadmap.

Building a Product Roadmap:

We’ll understand building the roadmap in two parts. First, let’s get with the theory and then actually build a product roadmap.

Building Outcome Based Product Roadmap happens in 2 phases.

1. Phase-I: Strategy to Discover
2. Phase-II: Discovery to Delivery

Phase – I: Strategy to Discovery

Step 1: Start with defining the Product Vision or take it from the leadership for an existing flagship product you’re working on. While coming up with Product Vision, ask and answer the following questions ( answering them wrt Ironman, we get:) 

1. What are your business values and needs?

Answer – To build solutions that not only solve real customer problems but also helps sustain and grow business.  – This is because I envision Ironman to clock profits from Day 1 leading to sustaining the business.

2. What would the world look like if we solved our customers’ problems?

Answer – People would enjoy the convenience of outsourcing their laundry to nearest laundromats. At the same time, laundromats will enjoy growth in business.

3. What will this product be in future?

Answer- The product will be a one stop solution and laundry marketplace where consumers and laundromats can benefit from each other through service against cash.

Answering these questions will help us come with a product vision. Giving an example of Ironman, 

Ironman is intended to be a one stop location to fulfil the laundry needs of every household by integrating local laundromats to serve based on location at the most reasonable price in the online service market.

Understand here that,

• Starting with Product Vision will help you ruthlessly prioritise the roadmap and help make decisions on what to build and what not to build.

Step 2: Define your Product Strategy.

Brainstorm on how you would be achieving your product vision. Define a plan based on thorough research of domain, market, population, their personas & needs.

To provide a concise strategy of Ironman, here are a few points:

1. Ironman will focus on profitability per order per laundromat 
2. Ironman will keep quality at paramount, ensuring that every order is treated and delivered with a high degree in quality.
3. The product’s user experience will be similar to that of any e-commerce website or app and will not focus on convoluding it.

Step 3: Define Long Term Goals & Objectives.

Here we need to identify 2-3 goals for your company for the coming 6 months to a year or 18 months. This is to get confidence and trust in order to come closer and closer to achieving product vision.

Initial goals for Ironman will be:-

1. To ship out a Product which lets consumers seamlessly order and avail for laundry services.
2. To onboard those laundromats which have consistently built trust and are delivering high standards in quality.

Step 4: Define Outcomes and Key Results

Now with goals identified, define what outcome each goal should have. Write down what concrete actions you can take in the set period of time to move towards that goal.

In reference to Ironman,

Outcome 1.a Steady rise in number of visitors and users (both consumers & laundromats)

Outcome 1.b Steady rise in average order value and thus increase in revenue

Outcome 2.a Major laundromats have signed up on the Ironman platform and are ready to serve within their periphery.

Outcome 2.b Customers are receiving their laundry needs at a reasonable price at high quality treatment.

Step 5: Identify & Map Opportunities

Based on research, market trends but most importantly centered around customers, their behaviours and needs identify opportunities.

This marks the end of phase-I.

Phase-II: Discovery to Delivery

With opportunities identified and strategy put in place, it’s now where you as a Product Manager along with your team comprising leadership to engineering to sales & customer service to marketing brainstorm, experiment and come up with solutions and features.

Step 1 – IDEATE:

By employing the best possible ideation technique, gather the right stakeholders to come up with as many ideas as possible. The whole exercise should be about gathering as many ideas as possible which are directed and inclined towards achieving product vision.

Step 2- SOLUTIONIZE:

Carefully consider & ruthlessly dump ideas and get a collection of them. Then, associate each idea to an outcome & goal to eventually come up with a solution for each idea.

Step 3 – FEATURE IT:

When designing features based on the identified solutions and ideas, ensure that these features are those that take the advantage of opportunities and move your product towards achieving the outcomes and key results. This way, you will know all the features you work on will help solve the customers’ problems and achieve business objectives.

Step 4 – PRIORITIZE:

Rather than simply listing features individually in the roadmap based on simply the “need” by common sense, think larger and bigger to group them into Themes. 

In order to do so, start grouping the initiative and solutions into Themes so you can organize your roadmap in a way that describes value to customers & other stakeholders. This leads to having a story stitched for the roadmap.

Techniques of prioritization we have discussed in our previous chapters and so can be referred to.

An Outcome Based Roadmap: 

If you google images or examples of outcome based roadmaps, you’d end up with something like this,

Source – Link

The flavour of the roadmap is called “Now-Next-Later” roadmap. The problem with such representation of the roadmap is that it lacks depth for execution. Although it is great to present it to the leadership who most often than not are interested in superficial representation. 

But what about execution and product strategy? How do we get it?

Here’s where using a scientific approach helps design a better one. What you should do here is couple such a philosophical roadmap to a detailed roadmap.

This can be done by coupling Feature Based Roadmap with Outcomes. 

Here’s how: –

Takeaways:

In this chapter we learnt and discussed everything around the product roadmap. We understood the importance of Product Vision, Product Strategy and Goals in creating a compelling Product Roadmap. We further discussed how important Prioritization is. Then, using Ironman as an example we built a roadmap.

In the next chapter, we will discuss everything around Product Validation.