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Product Roadmap

Motivation

A product roadmap serves as the prototype of an organization's strategy. A roadmap is not a planning nor a feature list. Roadmap focuses on the strategy while the latter focus on the execution. That being said, a roadmap should be able to:

  1. Put all planning in a strategic context
  2. Focus on value: enable capabilities
  3. Embrace learning: adapt to the real world
  4. Rally the organization around priorities
  5. Get customers excited

For an explorative stage project, roadmap should be planned and reviewed by months. For an growth stage project, roadmap should be planned and reviewd by quarters. For an mature project, a yearly basis planning & review makes more sense

Content in a roadmap

  1. Vision
  2. Mission
  3. Value

Continuous Discovery Habbits -- Opportunity

Build an experience map

  1. Draw (visualize) the exeprience, not via verbs
  2. Co-build with the team, consolidated and review on a routine basis

Continuous interview

  1. People tend to give answeres influenced by the sense of identity rather than actual behavior
  2. Research question: What you are trying to learn, i.e. What needs, pain points and desires matter most to this customer?
  3. Interview question: What you ask in the interview

The best way to learn is ask them to share specific stories about their experience. Inform the participants that would like them to share their full sotry and as many details as possible. Ask for missing details when the sharing is done.

Narrow scoped question helps optimizing existing products while broad scoped one help uncover opportunities.

Interview Snapshot:

  1. Memorable quotes from the customer
  2. Quick facts
  3. Insights
  4. Opportunities
  5. A photo (e.g. profile picture) to recall the story visually

The purpose of having an interview snapshot is to make the reserch referenceable and actionable in the future.

Automate the recruiting proces to interview at least 1 candidate per week

Ditch the dicussion guide, instead generate a list of requestion questions and identify one or two story-based interview questions.

Mapping the opportunity space

Uncover the underlying sturcture of the opportunity space

  1. Use experience map
  2. Use interview drawings to identify key moments in time

Distinguish between opportunity and solution: Is there more than one way to address this opportunity?

Prioritizing opportunities, not solutions

Product strategy happens in the opportunity space, not the solution space.

Addressing only one opportunity at a time, and work on a leaf node opportunity.

Accessing a set of opportunities: opportunity sizing, market factors, company factors, customer factors.

Opporunity sizing: how many affected customers and how often?

Market factor: how might affect our position in the market, competitive landscape

Company factors: how could affect the team and organization

One-Way vs Two-Way Door Decisions:

  1. Level 1 decision: hard to reverse, i.e. one-way
  2. Level 2 decisoin: easy to reverse, i.e. two-way

Prioritizing opportunities are actually level 2 (two-way) decisions.

The value of having a systematic decision process is also for being aware of other options so that we can constrast and compare. So that we could work on the most important one.

Supercharged ideation

  1. Review the target opportunity: make sure it's a appropriately sized leaf-node opportunity
  2. Generate ideas alone: find inspiration from competitor & analogous products
  3. Share ideas across the team
  4. Repeat steps 2 and 3

Generate ideas individually, but review them as a group. Dot-vote the ideas into at most 3 and then use prototyping and assumption testing to whittle from three to one.