Building a Roadmap
Google’s first enterprise PM can teach us about product roadmaps by Ken Norton (Google). He recommends a great way to start: Boulders and pebbles.
On the way to the summit, you will step over countless boulders and pebbles. The pebbles do not matter yet, but try to identify the boulders and make sure they match the customer’s expectations.
The Inputs to a Great Product Roadmap by Sachin Rekhi (Founder & CEO @ Notejoy). Sachin suggests some ideas for building your roadmap:
- Analysis of existing usage metrics
- User interviews to understand audience pain points
- Aggregation of customer feedback & support requests
- In-depth look at competition
- Commercialization of internal innovation
- Audience surveys to understand feature prioritization
How to Prioritize a Product Roadmap by Sachin Rekhi (Founder & CEO @ Notejoy). Sachin recommends 3 lenses for a roadmap:
- Customer obsession
- Business obsession
- Vision obsession
Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets by Adam Nash (VP Product @ Dropbox). Adam suggests 3 buckets for features:
- Metrics Movers
- Customer Requests
- Customer Delight
Rightsizing your product plan, but not your vision by Steven Sinofsky (Microsoft). He discusses deciding the scope of a project for different product situations: Entirely new product, Evolving an existing product, Disrupting an existing product, Side-by-side product. He also discusses a few common pitfalls to project rightsizing as a project goes from planning through execution:
- Backing into a different scope
- Too many features
- Too little features
- Wrong stuff
- Local or global optimization
Why Most Product Roadmaps are a Train-wreck (and how to fix this) by Cody Simms (Partner @ Techstars). Cody discusses that in today’s world, we do not necessarily know which features to build months in advance – we build products iteratively, and we adjust features and functionality quickly based on what data and users are telling us.
The key is to get away from a roadmap that assigns feature delivery dates and to move to one that establishes validation dates. Rather than having a 12 Month Product Roadmap, have a 12 Month Learning Roadmap.
Rethinking the Product Roadmap by Melissa Perri. Melissa also advocates teams to start treating Product Roadmaps as Problem Roadmaps. Instead of focusing on features to be developed, we focus on problems to be solved.
Effective Product Roadmaps by Melissa Perri . She provides a few examples of how to build effective roadmaps.
Dates in a Roadmap?
Deadlines by Brandon Chu (Shopify). Brandon argues that having deadlines moves things faster and helps us counter Parkinson’s law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Should Product Roadmaps Have Dates? by Roman Pichler
Publishing a Roadmap for Clients?
You don’t need a product road map by DHH (Creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-founder Basecamp)
Don’t publish a product roadmap by Colin Rand