Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a strategic communication tool. Its purpose is to show your team and other stakeholders what your product vision is and how it breaks down into product strategy and the product development initiatives needed to achieve that strategy. A product roadmap is not a gantt chart, and it’s not a device for showing off every last detailed feature in your development plan – instead a product roadmap should focus on high level themes aligned around customer outcomes.
LATEST POSTS
Escape From the Feature Roadmap to Outcome-driven Development
I’ve made a lot of roadmaps in my time. In fact, in the first three years I was at WorldRemit, I counted that I represented our company roadmap in 10 different ways. This reformatting was always an attempt to make the roadmap work harder: to bring more focus, communicate more effectively with stakeholders, keep a […]
Product Roadmaps in Five Easy Pieces
. . . so my investor said that I need a product manager to do our product roadmap?” When I worked as a product management consultant clients would often talk about “needing a product roadmap ASAP”. So I’d dig a little deeper to find out what they really needed, and it was often a return […]
Roadmaps are Dead! Long Live Roadmaps! by C. Todd Lombardo
Do you ever feel like breaking up with your roadmap? In his talk from #mtpcon San Francisco, C. Todd Lombardo takes on a topic that is emotional to most of us as product managers – the product roadmap. Why do we Ship the Wrong Thing? In modern product management, we have multiple frameworks and tools […]
Growing up Lean: Lean Strategies for Maturing Products
Building an MVP and launching a product is actually the easy part. It’s much more difficult to manage a product in its maturity or decline stages, so I wanted to tackle the challenges of a product that’s past its initial growth stage, and share some tips on: – How to avoid becoming a feature factory, […]
Creating Good Roadmaps: 6 Practical Steps for Product Leaders
Much has been written about the process of creating product roadmaps, not least the six great articles written by my own team. But there has been surprisingly little written about a product leader’s role in the process. I believe the actions of a product leader all too often are the root cause of a “bad” roadmap. Without […]
Top 10 Product Insights You Should Have Read in 2017
Every week I curate the best product and design content from across the internet into our weekly product management newsletter Prioritised. Here are the top 10 most clicked articles from the 408 links featured in this year’s 51 newsletters – 10 articles your peers digged so much you should definitely check them out as well. […]
A Roadmap Doesn’t Have to Lead to Broken Promises
Gain Valuable Feedback Without Overpromising We’d spent weeks perfecting the roadmap presentation for our annual customer conference. We thought it was pretty compelling. Every detail was worked out, every timeline de-risked, every benefit clearly articulated. Our SVP, who was usually uneasy in front of large crowds, even got through all the slides smoothly, even crisply. […]
How to Gain Alignment From Your Team on the Product Roadmap
When No-one Agrees With Your Roadmap When I arrived at Workbar, a growing co-working space headquartered in Boston, I had to wrap my arms around what the product was, how they did releases, and who decided what was going to be in the next sprint. Turns out that it was a bit of a mess, […]
The Roadmap Dilemma: When to Grow, When to Learn
All products start with one thing in common: teams face a certain degree of uncertainty about the market they’re targeting. In Lean methodologies, you build an MVP to collect user feedback and confirm your hypotheses, or you learn from your mistakes and pivot. Reducing uncertainty, therefore, comes as a result of learning cycles, and will […]
The Parable of Frank de Boer - Evolution, not Revolution in Building Product Teams
The Parable On June 26, 2017, English football team Crystal Palace enthusiastically announced the appointment of the great Dutch defender Frank de Boer as its new manager. Admittedly he was joining after a disappointing spell in Italy, but his success with the Dutch champions, Ajax, with whom he won the Champions League four consecutive times, […]