PRODUCT MANAGEMENT FUNDAMENTALS: BUILDING THE RIGHT THING
Effective product roadmaps: empowering with outcome over output
Strong product teams acknowledge that most launches fail and strive to minimize risks and maximize experimentation to build on validated commitments
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Great product roadmaps are those that are focused on delivering business results and not output (i.e., feature rollout). In the operating sense of things, product roadmaps are prioritized lists of features/projects for a product team to work on and are generally developed on a rolling three-month basis, but depending on the situation, there can be annual ones also (e.g., the product lags feature parity with the competition).
The objective of product roadmaps
The goal of having roadmaps is bi-folded:
- To prioritize work and focus on the highest-value projects first
- To smoothly operate a business by making forward-looking plans so that various units and teams including marketing, engineering, sales, finance, etc. can coordinate
While product roadmaps are generally maintained and controlled by product managers, other stakeholders including senior business executives, marketing, engineering, and sales can have input on the scope and timelines.
Most product ideas and launches fail
Most features on a product roadmap fail after launch for several reasons:
- Lack of value: users and customers (i.e., demand) are just not excited about the offering compared to what they currently have
- Usability issues: while customers might see the value, the feature is cognitively difficult to grasp and use
- Lack of economic feasibility: while the demand might be there and we can deliver great experiences, the cost associated with delivering those features is uneconomic
- Business constraints: while the users love it and we can design and deliver economically usable products, business constraints such as legal matters could prohibit solution launch
Furthermore, even if a feature or product passes all the check boxes above, it will eventually need several iterations to fully scale and deliver on the business goals that it was set out for, often referred to as time to money.
How to build effective roadmaps
To have successful product teams, we want to empower them with autonomy and accountability. This means that if product roadmaps are handed to product teams to be executed, generally from senior leadership teams, as features fail, and they will fail most often, we will have blame games that target the stakeholder that requested them which will drive teams further apart and reduce overall productivity levels across the board. While more budget could be injected to get the new features right, most will eventually run out of patience and team morale will dwindle resulting in low employee retention rates.
Strong product teams acknowledge that most launches fail and therefore aim to minimize risks through fast iterations, no matter who the stakeholder of the feature/product is. This is called product discovery and should be at the core of building product roadmaps. Roadmaps that aim to prototype and test hypotheses in hours and days rather than in weeks and months are deemed successful ones.
For any longer scope of commitments on the roadmap, we need to make what is called “high-integrity” ones which means we have taken the time to validate that hypothetical solution with customers to ensure demand, usability, feasibility, and its economics for the business.
Roadmaps that empower: outcome over output
Empowered product teams are equipped to figure out solutions to business problems and this needs the product teams to have the necessary business context including:
- A deep understanding of the corporate vision and where the company is heading
- Their specific product vision and strategy, and
- How they are supposed to contribute to the larger organizational purpose through OKRs
Therefore, each product team must know how their work contributes to the larger corporate vision and what they need to be focused on. It is therefore the management’s main responsibility (i.e. senior corporate and product leadership) to elaborate on vision and strategy and provide product teams with specific OKRs to tackle.
From here on, the product team should prioritize initiatives to meet business goals over product ideas or feature generation and build agile and focused roadmaps that minimize risks, maximize experimentation, and encapsulate high-integrity and validated commitments. Such roadmaps will be outcome-based rather than output-based ones.
