Communicate Your Vision with an Internal Roadmap
There is a misconception that building a roadmap will define a product’s future. But a roadmap doesn’t create a clear view of the future. Your vision of the future should bring clarity to your roadmap.
People usually build roadmaps by throwing a bunch of unrelated projects onto a schedule. That approach works fine until your sales team gets on the phone to tell a customer about the Next Big Thing. They open the roadmap and say with confidence, “9 months from now, on October 15th, we’re going to give you a game changing new feature. It will revolutionize the way you do business!”
The conversation happens with the best of intentions. IT is trying to help sales understand what they’re doing. Sales is trying to help the customer see the value in your company. The customer gets excited because they’ve been promised a New Thing! The problem is the enormous gap between today and 9 months down the road. That time is full of uncertainty and changing projects. When you define a roadmap as a group of project commitments, you’ve set your team up for failure.
So why build a roadmap at all?
A good roadmap illustrates how your product contributes to the company. It aligns business decisions with strategic vision. Effective roadmaps translate leadership’s vision into a guided conversation with stakeholders. The steps outlined in this article will help your product team to frame the conversation.
Guidelines & Tips
Before we create a roadmap, use these tips to guide you through the process.
- Select a reasonable time range for the roadmap. Balance the need for flexibility in your market strategy against the average size of projects. Lots of large projects should extend your roadmap further into the future.
- Avoid using dates. Roadmaps are overviews that communicate potential, not commitment! In any conversation about the roadmap, emphasize that it is flexible by nature.
- Use the concept of the cone of uncertainty as a guiding principle. In the cone of uncertainty, the further you go from today, the less accurate your predictions are. For more information, check out the Gartner article: Avoiding Audience Disappointment in Product Roadmap Delivery by Chris Meering and Clifton Gilley.
- Do not share the internal roadmap with customers. I’ll say that again to drive home the importance. Do not share the internal roadmap with customers! Team members will want to share your roadmap with the best of intentions. They’ll want to create transparency and build excitement. Don’t fall into the trap! It sets expectations that become unintentional commitments.
Target Audience
If the roadmap isn’t for customers, who is the intended audience? Start by asking who in your business needs to understand the product’s vision. An internal roadmap is a tool in the Product Owner’s toolbox to enable conversation. Use it to communicate how expected work fits into the goals of the company. Use flexible timelines to guide the expectations of internal stakeholders. Most of all, use it to stop sales driven development from derailing delivery. A roadmap tells business stakeholders that you have a plan.
Framework
Step 1 — Vision
Outcome: Define a long-term vision statement for the platform.
Participants: Senior Leadership (required), Product Manager (required), Product Owner (optional)
Guiding Question: What is the purpose of this platform and how does it support company goals?
Let’s use an existing product launch to illustrate how to apply this framework. When Amazon started planning to release the Kindle in 2007, it didn’t start with a fully formed plan. Instead, a smart person asked a hard question. “When you’re the biggest bookseller on the planet, how do you grow?”
Jeff Bezos answered that question when he walked into the head of book sales’ office and set the mission. “Kill your own business… I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.¹”
With that counterintuitive idea, another group of smart people had to figure out how to improve their profit center by killing it. They talked through a lot of bad ideas to get to the good ones. Through collaboration and healthy conflict, the good ideas grew into a single vision. “Make it so easy to buy e-books from Amazon that no one wants to buy physical books anymore.”
Just like Amazon, your decisions should focus on answering one question. “What is the purpose of my product?” Your answer will drive the strategies you choose and the projects you pick. It will create alignment between teams and a shared sense of purpose. You can’t choose which road to take unless you know where you’re going.
In defining your vision, keep the following points in mind:
- To be successful, you must align your product with leadership’s vision for the company.
- The vision should extend out beyond your roadmap. If it’s easily achieved, then it’s not a vision, it’s a strategy.
- Your answer can be aspirational but must be practical enough to build strategies on.
- The vision statement should never be “Make more money.” We all want to make money, but it doesn’t inspire people. Treat money as a measurement of success, not the goal. Your goal should be a clear illustration of what you’re trying to achieve.
Once you’ve defined your vision, you can get started. You don’t need a fancy tool to build a roadmap. You can use a simple spreadsheet program like this:
Step 2 — Strategy
Outcome: A few strategic goals that will support the outcome of your vision.
Participants: Senior Leadership (required), Product Manager (required), Product Owner (optional)
Guiding Question: What would the ideal platform look like in one year’s time?
Amazon knew that entering the e-book market meant traveling an unfamiliar road. To complete their mission, they had to select tactical supporting strategies. By launching their own e-reader, it put Amazon in direct control of the environment. They could make purchasing books easy by incorporating the existing sales process. By focusing on reader comfort, they could improve the experience of reading a book. These choices encouraged users to embed themselves in Amazon’s product purchasing cycle. Why drive to Borders when you can shop for books from the comfort of your couch?
None of these concepts were concrete deliverables. They are ideas that took multiple passes to build. By agreeing on ideal goals, you create the path to get there. Then you break those paths down into iterative projects. Those projects focus on achievable outcomes that contribute to the original idea.
Build your strategies on these principles:
- Vision statements are aspirational, whereas strategies are achievable. If the end of the roadmap is one year away, then what’s the best possible outcome at the end of that year?
- Use the ideal outcome to guide your decisions and ground the roadmap in reality. When you understand where you’re going, you can focus on projects that move you closer to your destination.
Step 3 — Project Themes
Outcome: Turn your strategies into project themes and set the amount of effort you will put into them.
Participants: Product Manager (required), Product Owner (required), Leadership (optional), Development Manager (optional)
Guiding Question: What project themes contribute to your ideal outcome?
At first, defining project themes will feel like repeating the previous step. You start by just copying your strategies onto the roadmap. Then look deeper and distill them into buckets of work. Finally, rank them by priority.
Amazon’s biggest challenge to domination of the e-reader market was inexperience. Amazon had never built a product like this. So the first theme was obvious: “Launch an e-reader.” They already had a proven sales process, so the second theme built on an existing strength: “Integrate e-book purchasing with Amazon.com”. The comfort of the user was key to adoption, but it’s affected by both the hardware and software. That’s too big a goal to tackle with a single solution. It made sense to split it in two: “Design of the Physical Hardware” and “Intuitive Software Interface”.
Now comes the hard part. Unless you work for a digital giant like Amazon, your organization probably doesn’t have hundreds of teams ready to handle every need. For everyone else, a good roadmap must consider the resource pool. Then it should assign the resources against the relative importance of each strategy.
Start by putting your themes into the roadmap as swim lanes. Then assign a percentage of time to spend on each bucket. For example, 40% of the company’s time will be spent on Theme 1, 30% on Theme 2, 15% on Themes 3 and 4. You don’t need to go down to hours and you don’t need to to be exact.
Keep the following highlights in mind as you change strategies into a roadmap.
- Limit yourself to 3–5 conceptual themes that support your strategies.
- Your strategies should fall into two major categories. First look for opportunities to achieve goals. Then look for gaps in the plan that will slow progress.
- Your themes are one level above a project itself. In the next step, you’ll link related projects to contribute to a cohesive theme.
- Your initial allocations are just educated guesses. They don’t have to be perfect on the first pass.
By now your roadmap should communicate an understandable outline of your goals. Discussion with leadership and business stakeholders has guided your decisions. You’ve taken a high level view to get things in motion. In part two of this article, you’ll work with your development team to add potential projects to the roadmap. Together you’ll translate strategic vision to real tactical work.
Sources
¹Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
