Product Management
Roadmapping Through Change
Product Management in the Time of COVID Part II
What are we going to do next? one of our developers asked. I sat staring blankly at the screen waiting for someone else on the video call to speak up. But nobody could answer. That was the moment I realized everything about our company, our products, and the way we do business had already changed.
Moments of harsh realizations are etched into many of our memories. This one came from a VP of Product in the US. It was a video call in March, and her company was announcing a work-from-home policy for the foreseeable future. Each of us has experienced a startling realization like hers. COVID-19 impacts how we live, work, and relate to each other and the world. What are we going to do next?
In March I set out to help product leaders answer this question. Through interviews, case studies, and community dialogue I continue to identify emerging product management best practices, product strategy pivots, and delivery practice trends that will impact our profession for years to come. The “Product Management in the Time of COVID” series presents these insights in hopes of deepening the product community’s dialogue to help all of us adapt and thrive as a new normal emerges.
This article highlights emerging roadmapping best practices.
Triage
COVID-19 created enormous volatility for products as customer behaviors and preferences changed overnight. In the US, retail products lead this painful change curve. As early as February retail product managers were scrambling to triage product strategy and roadmaps. By April, many retail product managers abandoned irrelevant quarterly roadmaps with consumers sheltering in place. One product manager shared that: “at face value we were triaging. We put less impactful things on hold and jumped into work that was suddenly necessary for our users. It was more than just reprioritization. We identified whole new features that needed to be developed for our users to shop us from home.”
Knowingly or unknowingly many retail product managers implemented a major practice shift by abandoning time-based roadmaps. Suddenly lean roadmaps emerged organizing work in “ongoing,” “near term start,” “future start,” and “on hold” buckets. The most successful product managers focused on tightening scope of ongoing work and updating acceptance criteria based on emerging customer needs. A Product Director explained that: “Suddenly everyone was sitting in the parking lot waiting for curbside order pickup. That required new acceptance criteria to enhance order pickup notifications and make for a better experience. The features took longer to develop because we added new scope, but pickup improvements kept customers happy.” Their new lean roadmap was the perfect tool for this product team to quickly scope and prioritize deliverables that helped customers navigating a new retail experience. This empowered the company to retain satisfied customers.
Fixed scope delivery > fixed date delivery
Teams reach a crossroads after successfully navigating short term pivots with lean roadmapping. Do we go back to timeline based roadmapping, or stick with a lean approach? The question centers on a tradeoff between fixed time, and fixed scope, delivery. Timeline roadmaps fix the date of feature deliveries. Lean roadmaps fix the scope of feature deliveries. From the section title you can guess which approach this article advocates.
Fixed scope delivery requires a crystal-clear understanding of each feature’s attributes. As features progress from “future start” through “near term start” product managers organizing attributes into objective and deliverable acceptance criteria. This tells us what we are developing and its value to the customer.
Well scoped features project their impacts on product metrics and business goals. This tells us why we are developing the feature from a business standpoint and gives us a means of measuring success. Together projected metrics and acceptance criteria provide a means of identifying whether pivots are needed. If expected trends do not emerge with the first few deliverables, we can reassess and pivot development priorities.
Product managers and development teams share responsibility for defining how each feature will be developed as it moves from “near term start” to “ongoing.” In a planning meeting they identify technical functionality of each deliverable, when work will start, and when the feature will be completed. This results in a delivery plan outlining the delivery timeline of each “ongoing” feature.
In fixed scope delivery roadmaps and delivery plans are separate documents built through separate processes. Delivery plans visualize the progress of granular feature development and forecast availability. They tell us when and how development proceeds. The delivery plan can be adjusted as development speeds up or slows down. Roadmaps scope each feature by defining their attributes and outlining importance to the customer and our business. The “what and why” embodied in that scope never changes unless customer or business needs evolve.
At face value timeline roadmapping condenses feature scoping and delivery planning into one document. Often that document emerges as a one-to-two-year roadmap displayed in quarters with start and end date for feature development. Best practices for managing timeline roadmaps include ensuring the product manager and development team agree on the scope of all features delivered or started within the next quarter, and how each feature on the roadmap will be produced. Features slated between six months and two years out represent the product manager’s best guess as we continue to scope attributes.
Timeline Roadmap — Fixed Scope, Fixed Date, or Neither?
Accuracy of feature dates in timeline roadmaps requires clairvoyance. When was the last time you knew exactly what you would be doing two years down the road? How about six months, or even one month? Even when we plan as much as possible, most product managers and development teams constantly reshuffle work to navigate dependencies and address changing customer or business realities. Timeline road mapping sets us up to fail in these efforts.
Changes in staffing, shifting user needs, and unforeseen impediments are just a few things impacting our ability to accurately forecast development timelines. Disruptions to ongoing work compound through the roadmap by impeding our ability to start new work on time. As the timeline roadmap snowballs out of control product managers must adjust feature scope and/or move delivery dates. But minimizing feature scope to deliver some attributes on time frustrates customers who needed more functionality.
Pushing out the feature development aligns the roadmap with reality. But, shifting dates creates an illusion that work is not getting done which in turn torpedoes morale and leads to work actually not getting done. Imagine navigating all of that during a global pandemic. No wonder so many retail teams abandoned timeline roadmaps.
Emerging Tend
For most of us timeline roadmaps present the illusion of fixed date delivery. Nobody can forecast start and end dates for feature development with pinpoint accuracy. We end up shifting feature scope, undermining the value we deliver to customers, and most likely shifting delivery dates for descoped features. Lean roadmaps are true fixed scope roadmaps that fully scope valuable features. Pairing a lean roadmap with a development plan gives us the whole picture of what features we are delivering, why we are developing them, how they will be developed, and when they will be delivered.
Many product organizations are electing to keep lean roadmapping in place going forward. As a Product Director explained: “COVID-19 is big. We will not have a good handle on new customer needs and behavior for a while so our strategy will evolve over time. We need product roadmaps that can be flexible as strategy evolves. Lean roadmapping ensures we focus on customer impacts and the alignment between our evolving strategy and those impacts.”
The emergence of widespread fixed scope roadmapping feels long overdue. Lean roadmapping allows product managers to focus on objectively aligning deliverables with product strategy. Forecasting individual feature availability has always required development team input, so formalizing that in delivery planning makes sense. The fixed scope approach minimizes risks and enables roadmaps to evolve with product strategy. In a volatile market this can mean the difference between a product’s survival and death. But shouldn’t we always want flexibility to deliver on changing customer needs? For that reason, fixed scope roadmapping and separate delivery planning is a best practice.
You may want to read the first article of this series which covers retention strategies for products adapting to changes in customer behavior.
What does success for your product look like? What product best practices are we missing? Share this article with comments that answer those questions so the entire community can benefit from your experience. Reach out to me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertbrodell/) for product practice optimization and coaching if you need help answering these questions or addressing anything else product.
