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
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, […]
Turn Your Release Notes Into a Content Marketing Machine
If you’re in a product company the chances are that you’ve developed some process of informing your users about new features. This could be in the form of a blog post or as a notification within the UI. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Spending a bit more effort on the process can help […]
How to Survive the Hardest Part of Product Management by Janna Bastow
There is probably one part of the product management job we can all agree is the hardest – people. People are unpredictable, they have strong opinions and unconscious biases. Many people in your organisation have more power than you, yet they are wrong just as often. In this illuminating talk from Mind the Product San […]
Experiments in roadmapping at GOV.UK
Roadmaps can be a powerful tool to communicate the vision for a product’s development, unite teams of makers around common goals and let stakeholders know (roughly) when they can expect the improvements they care about. That’s why everyone loves a good roadmap. But getting them right is hard. Roadmaps are born of all sorts of […]