What should your Product Roadmap look like?

How do you communicate your product strategy without building a feature roadmap?

The CEO and customers are always very keen on seeing a feature laden roadmap - what features are going to be delivered over the next year or two. Many a times, the product manager is pressurized to deliver a feature roadmap.

Feature roadmaps are a bad idea.

First of all, it makes you extremely competition focused, and naturally, draws immediate parallels and comparison. Your are necessarily equating your competitors customers immediate needs as your customers needs, which is extremely wrong.

Secondly, it creates unnecessary restrictions and implied, time-bound commitments, that complicate an already difficult process. In an ever-changing technology landscape, the value a feature brings may change overnight along with the underlying assumptions. Locking this down makes you less agile in pursuing your quest of maximizing value for your customers and solving their problems in the best possible way.

Unless the product is in the very early stages of its lifecycle, the product team should not produce an external facing feature roadmap for customers and stakeholders.

On the other hand, it should always be possible to provide a feature-less roadmap, to both internal and external stakeholders.

Feature less road-maps state how the product is going to solve the customers problems and create value for the customer. It is a very powerful tool in the hand of the product manager – to align the product to the company vision, to focus on outcomes rather than outputs, and finally, it brings alignment within the team on specific choices that are made for the product backlog.

However, it is not easy for the product team to move away from the output laden mindset to the outcomes mindset. That’s because, outputs are easy and less abstract, they tell the “how” but not the “why”. As a result, the product team tends to create outputs at a faster pace than they can understand the customers real problems. It’s really the top-down approach to product building where requirements are handed down to the engineering team to deliver, without the scope of questioning. It leads to a very poor understanding for the product team of the customers real problem.

So how do you get into the outcomes mindset, and build a feature-less roadmap? Make it thematic.

First get your organizational OKR’s in place. The organizational objectives and goals are a great place to start getting the ideas and opportunities that are inputs to your product goals. Once you have concretized your product objectives, it is a good idea to design Themes around your key results. Themes are a great way to plan out roadmaps, get alignment and communicate the value proposition effectively to all stakeholders. For example, a theme could be – Help customers respond to critical incidents quicker to cut downtime losses - Reduce the end-users notification time for incidents by 40%. Such a theme setting for the road

map makes it value oriented, and, also, automatically justifies why that futuristic idea of Sales VP was not included.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that product roadmaps have to be featureless. Create your product road-maps by laying out key results of your product OKR’s arranged as themes to be adopted in each quarter. That way, you can get faster alignment within your team, as well as, have a great strategy to say no to any unnecessary distractions that are thrown your way. Additionally, by not listing down outputs, you are keeping your technology and features choices flexible, while at the same time keeping a razor focus on your customer problems and how to deliver greater value from the product.