What is a Product Roadmap?
Allearn
 2022-01-12 09:04:14  

What is Product Roadmap?

Product Roadmap is a long-term product development plan that gives all product stakeholders the infomation they need to coordinate plans.

Why we need a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap provides a prediction to the product development process.

Who are your product stakeholders?

  • Customers
  • Customers-facing groups like sales, marketing, and customer support
  • Investors, and sponsors
  • Architects, designers, and engineers.
  • Human resources
  • Legal team
  • ……

We need both Product backlog and Product roadmap.

  • You estimate the dates of the product milestones on the roadmap using a completely independent set of top-down estimates from your product development leader. In the end, these estimates are inaccurate, of course. But as long as they’re close, they’ll serve the purposes of the product roadmap, to allow coordination among the different product stakeholders. Increasingly, your backlog will be directed by the product roadmap,which is one of the main ways you ensure that the activities of the product development team are aligned with the needs and goals of the whole company.

    Laying the grooundwork

    Why the process is important?

  • A roadmap has no value if the stakeholders are not aligned in advance.
  • The fail usually comes from engineers, designers, and the whole team not being exposed to the project early.

    What are the product development purposes?

  • Serve the business.
  • Support overall business strategy.
  • Win customer adoption, loyalty.
  • Generate revenue.

    How to create alignment?

  • Include stakeholders early.
  • Ask for, address, feedback.
  • Send updates.

    What a successful Roadmap need?

  • Sound strategy.
  • Realistic.
  • Fully supported.

    How to avoid failures?

  • Spend time with stakeholders at the beginning of the process.
  • Ask for underlying thoughts.
  • Explain the importance of including others.
  • Estimate the development time.

    Select your stakeholders

  • Business leader: allocate the resources and prioritize the tasks are necessary to the product sucess.
  • Sales leader: They have the target to hit. And they have the ability to rally resources to make the roadmap sucessful.
  • Product development leader: They are response for organizing and motivting their team to hit the roadmap milestones.
  • When working across groups, use the sales leader as the your business leader.

Customers research

There are some question have to figure out:

  • What decisions do your customer need to make in choosing your product?
  • What problem are they trying to solve?
  • What other options are available to them?

And luckily, there are some ways you can get to your customers:

  • Initiate a research group.
  • Ask your customer yourself like make an appointment, a phone call, a zoom meeting, etc. Reach out to your customers directly may be the best way to get insights.
  • Participate in sales or customer service meetings.

Start with product strategy

A product strategy describes how your company will achieve its business goals. And a product strategy should answer the following questions:

  • What are your goals?
  • How will you measure your sucess?
  • Who are your target customers? Who are you really want to win?
  • What are the key needs of your target customers you want to meet?
  • What benifit do you provide to customers?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • What options do your customers have? the alternatives?
  • What is the key different between you and your competitors?

Decision-making and building alignment

Identify key milestones

Product Milestone

Some milestones may address the pain points of existing customers, increasing their usage and reduce the churn. And other milestones may allow your customers use your product in new ways. Some may even do not benifit your customers directly, like open new distribution channel, reducing costs.

  • Record the strategy objectives it supports.
  • When you finished brainstorms your milestones, give it a priority and meet with your business leader. An one-to-one meeting may increase the chance they share true feedbacks.

Estimate leves of effort

  • First, estimate the development capacity of your team. It usually in the form of developer days, weeks, and months.
  • The next is estimate the development time for each milestones. One thing we have to know is not all time is spent on developping. It may cost plenty of time to fix bugs, maintain products, and engineering.

Building the strawman —— the first version

  • The first step is to roughly sequence your milestones in terms of their value in supporting your product strategy.
  • The next step is to schedule these milestones into your roadmap. You can start with the most basic approach to scheduling. Look at your first, highest priority milestone. Use the effort estimate provided by your product development leader,as well as the development capacity of the team, to figure out when on the calendar you could expect it to be delivered.
  • Next, you pick up the second highest priority milestone and assuming that the first one is completed on time, schedule that one in the same manner.
  • Once done, it may look like this.
    Product Milestones

​ Milestones

  • If these milestones are for different products, you may separate them like this.
    Milestone_3.png

Here comes the product roadmap meeting

  • Explain the goal
  • Quickly review your product strategy
  • Review the development capacity of your team
  • Walk through your product roadmap strawman
  • Ask the team waht they wish was different
  • Modify the roadmap directly, so everyone can see the consequences.

This process reminds me of the RACI chart, and get all the group members in a warm meeting.