The Product Roadmap Instruction Manual

This is the second in a series on product roadmaps. The first post, “The Roadmap Battle Royale,” covered the purpose, importance and impact of roadmaps.

This post goes into how to start building a roadmap. The privilege to build a product roadmap comes with great responsibility. Drawing the future is a lot of fun. A future that produces no product or outcomes, however, will be seen as a waste of time, opportunity and resources. That outcome also will not be good for your PM career longevity.

If you need to produce a roadmap from scratch, you may not fully understand what it needs to encompass.

We’ll cover the multiple inputs to the creation process, and the various ways you can validate or invalidate your ideas with customers and stakeholders. The multiple pressures that need to either be accommodated or selectively ignored, or that may later force-adjust your roadmap are also covered.

No place to hide

If you build a roadmap or set any direction for your organization, you are responsible. PMs live and die by their outcomes. Sometimes, you will not have perfect information or market research, but you still need to drive a vision and roadmap. That will, in turn, start your team of five, 10, or maybe, 50 or more engineers working. Make a mistake, and you may have squandered five engineers’ time for 3 months, i.e., three engineers making $150,000 a year who were just directed to work for 3 months for no return. I’m being conservative and not including the employee burden rate. You earn the privilege of making roadmap choices with outcomes.

How to build the roadmap

Many roadmap-related articles I’ve read in the past operate on an assumption that it is a self-evident document. If you’re a person who works to fulfill a roadmap set by someone else, this may be true. If you need to produce a roadmap from scratch, you may be at a loss to fully understand what it needs to encompass. This post describes some of the many considerations and inputs to the roadmap development process. Even if you are not currently responsible for creating this document today, it may help you understand what your organization was evaluating when the roadmap was produced or updated.

The inputs

Putting a roadmap together is an iterative process that requires the synthesis of several inputs. The output is a plan on which many teams will begin planning and working. In a company with great vision, you can view the start of this process as coming from the top, initially, asking why do we exist, and what great goal do we have? Let’s get started.

1. Identify product maturity

Where in the product lifecycle is your product? This is important, because how you form your roadmap and how much you invest is determined, in part, by the maturity of the product. A cash-cow product is optimized to make money. A brand-new product is likely optimized for growth and user acquisition. There is a wide range in between. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has a famous matrix for this, which every business student learns. Plotted over time, you can also view this in startup terms, from MVP (minimum viable product) to EOL (end of life).

It should be pretty obvious what life stage your product is in. Did you just create your first prototype and raise series A (question mark/MVP stage)? Or did your product make $30M in revenue from 60,000 users last year (star/growth or cash-cow/maturity stage)? The mix of investment, maintenance, technical debt, etc., dollars you apply to your product will be different for each.

Here is a visual representation of investment, expected revenue sources and marketing motions per product maturity phase.

The startup or MVP product roadmap

Stage: Startup or MVP
Effort: Aggressive build
Investment Dollars Sources:
– Bootstrap or venture $$$$
– New customers $$
– Sell to install base
– Support $
Marketing:
– Growth hacking, organic, friends and family

Note: Build like your life depends on it. Ignore technical debt until later.

The mature product roadmap

Stage: Mid-life
Effort: Growth, maintenance
Investment Dollars Sources:
– Venture $ or $$$$
– New customers $$$
– Sell to install base $$
– Support $$$
Marketing:
– Traditional, demand generation

Note: You’ve achieved an MVP; you’ve scaled marketing; you’re investing in building, quality, support and more to deliver a growing and stable product.

The cash-cow product roadmap

Stage: Cash cow
Effort: Sustaining, maintenance
Investment Dollars Sources:
– Venture
– New customers $$
– Sell to install base $$$
– Support $$$
Marketing:
– Demand generation, brand

Note: This product is very mature, but not EOL. You’re maintaining it and harvesting revenue from a healthy install base and some new customers. You may now be investing core development budget in new MVP or growth products vs. this one.

2. Identify customer and company needs

“The customer comes first” is a good guide. However, you will be pulled in multiple directions by different key stakeholders. To understand what your customers need, PMs must consistently have direct interactions with them. This is because, absent direct interaction, you will start to invent customer motivations that might not be true and eventually miss the market. The other reason for direct interaction is primary research. PMs must actively cultivate direct customer relationships for firsthand access to customer voice, opinions, pains and needs. Secondary research via news, trade publications, competitive research groups, blogs and other teams is useful and should be leveraged. These augment your primary research knowledge base. You must know your customer directly, however. Don’t outsource your authority by relying on others to know the customer better than you do.

Next, you need to understand what your company needs. The process starts at your company’s reason for being alive. What is your core vision of who you are as a company? This may sound trite, but take this example: Freight trucking and Formula 1 racing are both forms of transportation. The extraordinary high-speed requirements of Formula 1 have no application to trucking. The disproportionate gross weight requirements for trucking have no application in Formula 1. The direction you head in should align with your reason for being.

After that, what goals do your executives and business unit require? This is a level down from company purpose and more likely to be a business metric. Are you pursuing a new business segment? A revenue target? Volume target? What is your current motivation?

Hopefully, your company and organizational goals are already known. Below are abbreviated lists of motivations per key stakeholder. Some will be complementary across groups; others will be relevant to only the group they are listed under.

Customer motivations

• Save me money.
• Make my job easier to do.
• Remove my pain.
• Reduce employee training costs (OPEX).
• Reduce number of employees needed for the same work (OPEX).
• Reduce tools and infrastructure needed (CAPEX).
• Create magic (hard to define, harder to deliver).
• I want it. This might not be rational or feasible.
• Your competitor has it, so I want it. This might also be irrational.

Company motivations

• Make money.
• Fulfill customer motivations, if they lead to the above.
• Fulfill customer motivations, if they lead to satisfaction and continued usage of product.
• Encourage users to advocate for your product to others (organic growth).
• Drive customer to buy a multiyear deal (ELA or subscription) to increase dollars up-front at a (sometimes) reduced price in exchange for time value of up-front money, i.e., lowered cost, but bulk of money up-front. Note that money upfront does not equal money on the books (revenue recognition, ratability).
• Deliver shareholder value in the form of stable and growing stock value.

Sales motivations

• Sell enough to make my quota and earn commissions.
• Meet my sales goals as a rep.
• Solve customer problems.
• Push feature prioritization and delivery to PM in order to satisfy the previous three.
• Push any team in order to get the first two.

Note: Sales is hard. If you doubt this, try convincing anyone who isn’t your parent to part with their hard-earned money, and see how far you get.

Product manager motivations

• Satisfy my customers.
• Sell product.
• Deliver stable, high-quality product.
• Satisfy a reasonable number of selected additional stakeholders.
• Ship product of which I can be proud.
• Discover and deliver value.
• Deliver the right amount of value at any given time.
• Beat the competition to customers’ budget dollars.
• Accelerate into problem spaces customers need before others.

3. Collect your data

It’s quite challenging to deliver to all these motivations. If you don’t know where to begin, talk to your management. Your team or personal goals should point you in a direction. In addition, unless you are starting with a blank canvas (not common), there will, undoubtedly, be a long backlog of requests and potential features. Review all of them, and ask questions. Talk to your predecessor, if possible; your engineering team; your SEs, your salespeople; etc. You will get quickly flooded with feedback and asks. Talk to your customers. Start forming an opinion. The more senior you are, especially if you came from the industry previously, the more likely you have some foundational beliefs and insights to the industry. That will get you started. This background probably helped you get hired. If you’re stuck, use your toolbox of frameworks and product analysis methods, e.g., start with a SWOT analysis.

4. Form your opinions, and start writing

As you speak to all your contributors, you will begin to form your own opinion on what needs to be done. Take out a piece of paper, and start by drawing out four quarters. Then pencil in what’s important and serves your strategy, and what you believe is right. Ask yourself why any item deserves to be on the roadmap, what problem does it solve, and what the expected outcome is. Outcomes can include revenue, adoption, competitiveness and more. Customer satisfaction might be a viable outcome. Just don’t BS yourself by overusing squishy goals, such as satisfaction. When squishy goals are used too often, you probably don’t know why you’re building in a particular direction. Remember that customer asks are cost-free and easy to make. You have to determine what must be done at the expense of everything else. Ensure everything matters and everything is defensible, then write it down. That’s your first draft.

The roadmap as a clean, printed document belies the pressures you’ve been managing and the river of blood you’re standing in from backroom cuts, executive overrides, horse trading, resource losses and negotiations you’ve battled to get the right product out to your customers at the earliest possible time.

That’s it? Perhaps that initial draft exercise sounded too easy. The mental crunching, research, prioritization, fighting, defending, negotiating, and moving teams and the company forward is the hard part that never ends.

5. Feedback loop

Once you’ve built a roadmap, you will continually hone it via customer feedback. This is how you ensure you have the right signal and you’ve prioritized the right things. You’ll know you have it mostly right when customers and internal stakeholders 80%–90% agree with the roadmap. It’s OK not to get 100% agreement. Individual stakeholders don’t usually see the whole picture you see. Individuals also don’t always feel the same pain points. Furthermore, reviews are ideal opportunities for new research and discovery that may end up on a future iteration of your roadmap. It’s also how you can build long-term relationships with key customer influencers who can help you validate new ideas. These close customers are your personal advisory board.

The finished document

Your roadmap is never really finished. As each quarter and each year go by, you will be forever updating and re-evaluating what deserves to be on the roadmap. The roadmap as a clean, printed document belies the pressures you’ve been managing and the river of blood you’re standing in from backroom cuts, executive overrides, horse trading, resource losses and negotiations you’ve battled to get the right product out to your customers at the earliest possible time. It’s not easy. Even with the best planning, there are forces always in motion that can hit you hard. Your job as the PM is to anticipate all these while delivering the best roadmap for customer and company needs AND results that move the revenue, adoption or your metric of importance.

For a short time, a new startup can operate on vision alone. As companies get larger and invest in dedicated product management, you need the skills and the tools to coalesce numerous internal and external pressures, requirements, demands, and strategy together in order to move your organization and product forward. The roadmap is one such tool, but by itself, it’s just a document. As a PM, ensure you’re investing in the right places at the right time to achieve the outcomes your company needs. The roadmap is much more the outcome of a well-trained PM organization than a commanding document. That said, a roadmap is a very useful document for the entire company. A great PM will know how to define, build, defend and execute a roadmap to make the right stakeholders happy. Get comfortable with the fact that not everyone will be happy, and you will have to manage that, too.

About the author: Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market, including startup MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.

Originally published at http://lukecongdon.com.