Is Roadmapping Needed To Build Successful Products?
As a product manager, you own the roadmap for your product. For those who have roadmapped know that it’s as much an art as it is a science. You don’t have to be a superhuman to master roadmapping skills. Just be a good listener. Good ideas can come from anyone who knows, has used or explored your product - customers, colleagues, sales, marketing, executives, engineering, customer support or even an employee in your company.
Your job as a product manager is to have your own vision for your product, yet be receptive to all these ideas. It warrants that you have the ability to identify, filter and prioritize the highest value ideas from this pool of ideas, those which align with your customer needs and also add value to the overall business goals for your product.
Key Objectives
Product roadmapping is a powerful tool to help you achieve two objectives:
- Create a short repository of all the key ideas that you want to develop both short term and long term.
- Be prepared to effectively communicate your product vision to all the stakeholders across the company.
Key Stakeholders For Roadmaps
So who are the audience for roadmaps? Broadly speaking, roadmaps have both external and internal stakeholders.
- Customers - It helps them understand what you are building and why. Especially in B2B businesses, it helps them plan their roadmaps as well. However, the benefits are not limited to B2B businesses.
- Communicating your roadmaps to your customers has proven to be quite useful in B2C businesses too. “The Amazon Method” (also known as the Working Backwards method), where it does the press release of the upcoming product roadmaps in advance. This has helped both Amazon’s customers and the company in achieving ambitious goals and is frankly one of the key reasons for its huge success.
- Internal Stakeholders - It helps your teams in communicating to your stakeholders about what you are working on and helps them plan their work around the potential product releases.
Time Horizon For Roadmapping
Different companies have different time horizons for their roadmapping. The most effective roadmaps span a year long timespan. A common approach is to spread the big ticket features over the entire timeline while fit the high value achievable features near term.
You can plan your short term roadmap items about a quarter in advance. This will offer you some leeway to define and nurture your ideas, supported by research and validation of your initial assumptions, so that you can increase your chances of addressing the time-sensitive challenges accurately.
Spreadsheet is one of the most traditional tools that has been used by the product community for roadmapping. However, in today’s landscape, there are a myriad of tools available that can help you create powerful roadmaps. If you want to find and compare the most relevant tools that can suit your product and company needs, check out this blog ProductManager - Roadmap tools.
Our blog called A Rearview Mirror for Your Product Roadmap is another interesting read for someone interested in this topic.
Key Takeaway
The product roadmap should just be used as a reference point to building successful products. Owing to the fast changing trends in technology, stringent regulatory requirements and dynamic customer needs, the most successful roadmaps are the ones that are most agile.
As rightly said by DJ Patil (Ex- US Chief Data Scientist), “Dream in years; Plan in months; Evaluate in weeks; Ship daily.”
About the Author:
Dhara Babaria is an experienced product manager and passionate about the fintech and healthtech industry. She wants to utilize her technological expertise to modernize the healthcare technology space and build powerful products to help people.
