🚗 Week 15 - How to Build an Effective Product Roadmap
🚗 Week 15 - How to Build an Effective Product Roadmap
Quote
“Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features”. – Steve Johnson
💯 Framework // Concept // Mental Model
Roadmaps
After you are done creating the #mission #vision and #strategy then it’s time to think about execution and when will your team execute the vision. The roadmap will be a living document of incremental value you will create for your product this could be a mix of features or experiments you would undertake to achieve your goals over a certain period of time.
Types of roadmaps
Customer Facing - Communicates the broad level value/feature your product will give your customers over time
Internal Facing - Communicates when certain features or experiments will be conducted and brings alignment between cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
Why you need a roadmap
☎️ Communicates value: Roadmaps are communication tools that act as the single source of truth that shows what incremental value you are providing to the customer and backs up product vision.
🧙♀️ Stakeholder alignment: They should be detailed enough to give visibility to the necessary steps needed to hit your goals, without getting lost in the details, in order to get stakeholder buy-in and team alignment.
🗣 Tool to initiate discussion: A roadmap is a discussion, not a decree, that allows for questions, feedback, and input from everyone before resources and time are used up.
🔋 Motivate teams: They build excitement and motivation for teams that are aligned around a core purpose and understanding of their company’s mission.
5 Step process for creating a roadmap
😉 Step1: Find the right problems to solve
What are the user problems you can solve to impact your metrics and business need
#Different types of discovery methods
Interview: setting up interviews with current or potential customers where you ask them questions about their customer journey and use cases from which you generate insight on the pain points, frustrations, and problems the customer has.
Observe: Sometimes users might not know or are not able to articulate what their needs and pain points are, it always helps you to see how your users are engaging and using your products.
Focus groups: Interviews might give you high-level problems but focus groups are a great resource for understanding the depth and fine details of the problems
Pick top problems
After the discovery of pain points, you can pick the top problems by the intensity of the pain for problems and the frequency of their occurrence.
Example
Let’s take an example of a food delivery service and try to improve it through design thinking. for this exercise, let’s concentrate on the delivery partner experience. Here are some pain points that the delivery drivers might have.
Needs/Painpoints
Finding parking
Paying for parking
locating the entrance to restaurants
Deliver on time
Keep food cold or hot etc….
Here finding parking causes drivers the highest level of pain and is a problem for more than 80% of the drivers so let’s pick that.
💡 Step 2: Ideation session
In the ideation phase, you generate different solutions to solve the problem you identified and defined in the previous stage. Create multiple solutions to the problem as the first solution may not be the best solution for your problem.
Most of the ideations session are phrased as how can we solve x, Suppose we take the previous example we pick one problem “Finding Parking” and now we come up with multiple solutions to solve that problem.
Steps for ideation
Pick any tool like Miro, Docs, etc - My favorite is Miro.
Bring everyone into an ideation session.
Clearly state the problem statement.
Give everyone 10 to 20 min come-up with ideas -Time-box Ideation 10 to 20 min
Quantity > Quality - Instruct the team on adding as many ideas as possible to solve the particular problem.
Example
Now you try to come up with multiple solutions for the problem statement as you know the first solution may not always be the best 🙂..!
Driver app with step-by-step directions from restaurants to delivery location and parking info to facilitate smoother pickups - Selected solution
Voice alerts on parking info and entrance info to drivers when they approach restaurants or delivery locations
Text alerts on parking info and entrance info to drivers when they approach restaurants or delivery locations
📜 Step 3: Longlist to Shortlist
After you are done with the long list of ideas, Now it’s time to cut down the list to the best solution that can create maximum impact on the problem you are trying to solve.
Steps for ideation
Once everyone comes up with ideas for a given them
Go through the list, Give give 2 minutes to each submitter to explain why you should work on it and add perceived effort for it(T-shirt sizes S, M, L, XL, XXL)
Once all the ideas have been shared, Go through the problem statement with the team again to ensure they are grounded in the problem you are trying to solve and ask people to vote. Give each person 10 votes to vote for their best ideas.
Pick the winning ideas and nominate a person to validate the ideas for feasibility, challenges, opportunity size, etc, Sometimes the PM could as this to himself.
After this process, you can cut down the long list of ideas to a shortlist and move on to the next stage for prioritization.
🔢 Step 4: Prioritization
Prioritization is an art in its own right. However, there are a few common exercises you can use to get started:
Feasibility, desirability, and viability: Judge features based on how technically possible they are (feasibility); if your customers want them (desirability); and if they support your overall product strategy (viability). Effort/cost and impact scale: This prioritization method is a simple 2x2 grid where you score features by how much impact they’ll have based on their effort. The goal is to look for high-impact, low-effort/cost features. The RICE method: This method goes a bit deeper by judging a feature on a few categories. First, how many people will it impact in a given period? How much will it affect your strategy and goals (on a scale of 1–3)? How confident are you that it will be a success (out of 100)? And how much time will it require from the product, design, and engineering teams? Multiply each number together, and you’ll end up with a ‘total impact per time worked’ metric.
🕵️♂️ Step 5 Review
Creating a product roadmap necessitates in-depth analysis, consideration, and deliberation. Unless you operate independently, you will also need to consider the needs of the rest of your organization. Furthermore, try to collaborate with other teams and stakeholders early in the process to gather their feedback.
Some questions you could ask are:
What problems do you feel are most pressing? Why do you feel that way?
What industry trends are you observing that we should be aware of?
What do you think will happen if we don't act on this feedback or build this feature?
How does the roadmap align with the organization's bigger vision
What are some risks and dependencies
Do you have the right strategy to achieve your goals
Although keep conversations short and concise, try to have them on a regular basis. Remember, roadmap alignment is an ongoing process.
Some Roadmap template
Conclusion
An actionable guide to product roadmaps provides a clear and concise set of steps that can be taken in order to achieve the best results. By following this guide, you will be able to create a roadmap that prioritizes the highest impact projects, aligns with leadership, partner teams and relevant stakeholders, and has well-defined goals that can help measure success.
📚 Book
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
🎧 Podcast:
100 PM: The Product Roadmap on Apple Podcasts
😎 Meme
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