Product Management: Building a Product Roadmap

As a Project Manager one should be aware of the process involved in building a Product Roadmap. Below is my notes from a recent course I took on Building a Product Roadmap. If you have access to this training by Teg Grenager and Eldad Persky, I recommend you should give this a shot.

My Top 3 Learnings:

1. Having a Product Roadmap will help you as a Product/ Program Manager and everyone involved with the project.
2. Identifying the right stakeholders and checking the alignment of your product roadmap with Product strategy is the key and will avoid any failures in the future.
3. A good estimation strategy will include the development and support team’s existing capacity before planning for the release milestones.

What is a Product Roadmap?

Definition: A product roadmap is a long-term development plan that gives product stakeholders the information they need.

• Product Roadmap brings predictability to the product development process which everyone loves.
• Product Stakeholders :
  • Customers – help with purchasing and implementation decisions.
  • Customer-facing groups – Sales, marketing, and customer support (who needs to develop documentation and training that needs some lead time.)
  • Investor, Board, or Executive sponsor – They need to know the product roadmap to support the product with the right resources including financial investments.
  • Architects, engineers, and designers & DevOps – Visibility from the roadmap will help them create higher-quality designs for the product.
• Product roadmap helps ensure that the Business leaders clearly articulate their business goals and strategy in achieving them.
• Product Roadmap helps align the product development efforts closer to the business strategy.

Product Roadmap Template:

• Simple template of a Product Roadmap for 2 or more products.

• The X-Axis is the time and Y-axis is the product types.
• Milestone Grid – should be a meaningful bundle in such a way that it should depict impact to the business.

  Backlog: Next most important thing for product development. Mostly small features, bugs.

Roadmap for early-stage products:

• It does not make sense to have a roadmap for a product that is just starting and also its intended customers, benefits are not known.
• Learn about the market and customers and Validate hypotheses.
• The product should start having Roadmap when the product is at the Product-Market Fit stage. ie: When the product has Active and engaged customers.

The Groundwork!

• A product roadmap has no value if key stakeholders aren’t aligned in advance.
• Alignment is created when all stakeholders are included, asked for feedback, and sent updates regularly on the progress.
• A Successful Product Roadmap is :
  • The one which has a sound strategy.
  • Realistic
  • Fully supported.

• Sometimes ” Leaders often use their intuition and persuasion to build a product roadmap” –
  • Intuition can be faulty.
  • When there is no alignment, there can be a lack of support.
  • Solution:
    • Spend time with leaders at the beginning of the process.
    • Ask for underlying thoughts.
    • Explain the importance of including other stakeholders and the risk we may face if they are left out.
    • Estimate development time.

• Selecting the stakeholders:
  • Business Leader – who leads the business development. help allocate resources. Involve early and often.
  • Sales Leader – To help with revenue and market knowledge.
  • Product Development Leader – Responsible to rally key development staff.
  • Other stakeholders – Dev, Operations etc.

• Customer Research:
  • Customer knowledge is the primary currency of a product manager.
    • What problem are they trying to solve?
    • What other options are available to them?
  • Initiate Research group ( identify key user group and hold a brainstorming session to chalk out the process flow )
  • Ask your customers using a survey.
  • Participate in sales or customer service meetings.
  • Talk to existing customers and ask them to use the application and watch how they use it. That should give you an insight into how your product is being used.

• Product Strategy:
  • We can’t evaluate the quality of a roadmap without understanding the strategy of the business.
  • Product Strategy: – Describes how your company will achieve its business goals.
    • What are your business goals and how do you measure success ?
    • Who are your target customers?
    • What are the needs for the target customer that you can meet ?
    • what benefit do you provide to customers?
    • Who are your competitors?
    • What differentiates you vs competitors?

Decision Making and Alignment

• Identify Key Milestones: 
  • Internally research the business strategy and how it will apply to product development.

• Estimate levels of effort:
  • Estimate the development capacity of your team.
  • Identify the current capacity of the Development team
    • 25% – Bug fixing
    • 20% – Product maintenance
    • 20% – engineering
    • 35% – Capacity for Development
  • Estimate the development time for each milestone.

Build the strawman:

1. Sequence your milestones.
2. Schedule the milestones in the roadmap. ( based on capacity, effort, etc)

• Identify high-priority milestones that can be completed together.
• Identify lower priority milestones for the second time period.

Reflect/review on the roadmap and Ask below:

• Does it implement your product strategy?
• Is it feasible from a development resource and capacity perspective?

The Product Roadmap Meeting:

• Most important meeting in the Roadmap building process
  • Explain the Goal
  • Quickly review your product strategy (check alignment)
  • Review the development capacity of the team (all efforts included bug fixes, Operations, and maintenance)
  • Walkthrough your product roadmap strawman, with milestones and strategic objectives for each milestone.
  • Ask the team what they wish was different.
  • Modify the roadmap directly in the meeting (so people can agree ! and compensate the milestones)
  • Show the team the tradeoffs.
  • Think about the future success of the business.
  • Align the team with decisions.

Common Challenges

• Evangelize the roadmap:
  • Create a short presentation
    • Top-level objectives
    • Target customers
    • Competitive advantage
  • Slide with product roadmap diagram (milestones vs capacity etc)
  • Show what features got pushed or delayed.
  • Schedule 1 X 1 meetings with leaders who didn’t participate in the meeting and build consensus. – Check Alignment again !!
  • Finally, Roll out the roadmap to the business unit.

• Maintain the roadmap:
  • Update your roadmap when you’ve learned something new and can impact the existing roadmap!
    • New Information
      • Customer needs or desires
      • Competitor information
      • Development time or cost
    • The team will reach out to understand and explain the reason for the change.
  • The frequency of the roadmap change depends on the maturity of the Product.

Let me know if you do something differently and I will include that during my next roadmap process.

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