How I Created a Roadmap for My Food Cravings #PMLife
Last December, I visited India! I love India for many reasons, but I was most excited about all the food I’d get to eat — sorry mom, but you know that’s true. Some people eat to live, and some people live to eat — I fall into the second category.
My food wish-list was huge, and I only had two weeks. Yes, I had a list! So, like any good product manager, I decided to create a roadmap for my food list using the following framework:
- Define customer needs
- Create a feature/capability backlog
- Prioritize the features
- Review Backlog
Define Customer needs
This is a very important step no matter what product/solution one is building. In this case, I’m the customer:
Customer Persona: Nishanth is an adult male who loves Indian food. He is going to India after two years and he wants to make the most out of this trip. No restrictions on calories or expenses. He loves spicy food, desserts and Biriyanis. He wants to optimize his food-come experience in this 2-weeks trip
Create a feature/capability backlog
I spent months dwelling over past experiences, expert opinions and social-media recommendations to create a laundry list for my cravings. This is what it felt like in my head
The list above is too chaotic for any person and that’s why Product Managers need to organize their backlog into meaningful capabilities/categories. In my case, the categories were:
Reading Tip: These names may be unfamiliar to many of you except people from Hyderabad, but the exact names are not important for this exercise unless of course you are planning a trip to Hyderabad.
Cost-benefit analysis to prioritize the features
Product Managers must always find a way to quantify the benefits and costs associated with their features. While we need actual numbers to decide whether to build a feature, relative numbers are good enough to prioritize features. So, let me take the example of Biriyanis and show how to use a RICE(Return-Impact-Confidence-Effort)-like framework for prioritization
Value: First, I quantified the relative value I perceived of the various items. Relative is the key word here, exact values won’t matter in the end.
Reading Tip: Between ‘Pista house’ and ‘Meridian’, I value Pista House more; but I get the same amount of satisfaction from ‘Mayabazaar’ and ‘Meridian’.
Effort: Next, I plotted the relative costs for each item — a number for how far from home
Reading Tip: Pista house and Meridian are relatively closer to my house than Mayabazaar. And hence they get a lower score than Mayabazaar.
Value/Effort: When we divide value/effort and sort the features, you get your top features with the highest ROI
Here is my final prioritized food roadmap:
Reading Tip: An important thing to remember is to keep the scales consistent across the categories. Otherwise there will be clear biases against other categories (unless that’s what you want).
Anyhow, this view has clearly helped me understand my priorities for India trip (and for life I guess) — Desserts trump everything.
Review Backlog: So, How much did I eat?
Accounting for resource constraint (max. meals per day), technical debt (mom insisted that I eat at home) and downtimes (travel, work, etc.), I must say I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.
Yes, I’ve committed the sin of gluttony. But no, I’ve no regrets. This guilt(less) trip for food has been satisfying…
