Why Reflecting Product Strategy In Product Roadmaps is Essential
Let’s understand why just building the features is not the ultimate goal when building successful products.
Have you ever stared at a roadmap and wondered why? Why is the roadmap organized the way it is? What’s the end game? What are we trying to achieve for who? Why is this important to our company? Roadmaps should not focus on features, no disrespect. Features are important, but they need to come together in the roadmap to show a clear product strategy.
What does ‘product strategy’ mean?
So you say product strategy. What does that mean? Vision, story, metrics, objectives, and capabilities, but product strategy is not corporate strategy. Product strategy should link directly to the corporate strategy and a strategic goal. Product strategy, at its essence, translates the corporate strategy to a product that generates revenue and user love.
Let’s make this real. Let’s say I own a multi-national donut franchise since I am craving one as I write this. My corporate strategy might include an objective to grow revenue with a critical segment, Gen Z. More specifically, 100 million dollars of new revenue next year from Gen Z customers. How will that be achieved? Product strategy to the rescue.
What product or capability could we create to achieve this objective? A new type of donut? A new design for the store? A mobile app targeted to Gen Z extolling the virtues of eating donuts? Or perhaps all three linked with a solid marketing strategy — hint hint. Marketing plays a crucial role in getting the word out there on your new product. Let’s say the how turns out to be one-of-a-kind digital donuts as NFTs.
The product strategy articles why a digital donut, how it supports the corporate strategy, and what we need to do to make it real. Making it real might include the story (e.g., NFTs are taking over the world, we need to get with the program), metrics (e.g., sales), objectives (e.g., first sale by 1/1/2022), capabilities required (e.g., digital ledger), etc.
Roadmaps need to reflect the product strategy
The team delivering must understand the vision of a world of digital donuts, why their capability is essential (e.g. digital ledger), and how each feature ties back to the strategy.
The roadmap needs to reflect the product strategy at every level. The roadmap should not simply reflect features for a release but how those features deliver a release that brings us closer to the vision of a world of digital donuts.
Roadmaps are the rallying cry for the team that gets them behind the strategy. Most product and engineering teams, in my experience, are not interested in the high-level, imprecise, broad statements in corporate strategy. Instead, they want details in the form of features and stories. But they also deserve to know why what they will deliver contributes to the company success.
And like magic, the new digital donut delivers on the strategic objective. One hundred million in revenue from Gen Z.
Does your roadmap reflect your company strategy?
Now I’ll ask you to take a step back and review your company strategy? Does it reflect the story, metrics, objectives, and capabilities to deliver the strategy? Or is it a collection of features from a backlog someone told you to do with no context? In my experience, most teams are fantastic at defining a time-bound release of specific features. Perhaps after further examination, you’d notice feature definitions and the related stories are often not great at the why that backs the release.
Each increment of the roadmap in the form of a release should contribute directly to the end game. The roadmap is a living, ever-evolving plan to execute the corporate strategy.
So as a product manager, the next time you are building your roadmap, formulating a release, or working your backlog take time to reflect. Does your roadmap reflect corporate and product strategy or is it a list of features of unknown origin?
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Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
