Hacking the Roadmapping Process

The product roadmap is an ultimate tool for planning in the way that facilitates success. Done properly, a product roadmap helps you, your team, and the whole business focus on what’s important. It is visual, accessible, and clear enough. Today, Goals by KeepSolid team explores the ins and outs of roadmapping!

Roadmapping as an agile tool

As you will see below, roadmap as an agile tool brings 3 core benefits:

1. Enhances productivity
2. Improves communication
3. Sets clear expectations

Product roadmap empowers your business to become truly agile. And to maximize the effect, it’s best to use a roadmap in conjunction with other agile tools. Or, better yet, to use an agile management software such as Goals by KeepSolid. It combines roadmapping with other elements of the agile approach, such as mind mapping, OKRs, task management, kanban boards, sprints, and automated status reports.

Goals by KeepSolid will help your team and executives wrap their heads around the product. It will provide easy-to-digest summaries and regular updates. Everyone will have clear expectations about the product’s timeline, and what is expected of them.

Three key results of roadmapping

Normally, the main focus of a company should be its customers, their problems, and how its product can help solve them. This causes product managers to constantly balance relationships with their clients, team, executives, and other stakeholders. They have to make decisions, communicate those to employees, and lead them. 

In this context, a product roadmap delivers the following key results for companies and managers:

1. Clarity
2. Simplicity
3. Relevance of information

This is especially important if you consider the complex nature of digital products. Developing a product involves many teams, requires high costs, and has an intimidating degree of uncertainty. A product roadmap is the way to make it a bit more manageable and less costly.

Three main questions of roadmapping

To build an effective, simple, and clear roadmap, a manager has to answer three pretty basic questions.

Question 1: Why? 

Why are you building the product? The answer can be in your organization’s mission, your big vision, or your purpose. Whatever you choose should be both realistic (tactical) and aspiring enough. Try to simplify the answer into a single, client-oriented sentence.

Do NOT skip this step. You don’t want to include all the details in the world and then forget WHY you’re doing this. Besides, don’t underestimate the importance of a clear business mission for your company’s image. This one sentence is what people will understand, what they’ll talk about, and what they’ll buy into.

Question 2: What?

What outcome do you want to get? What do you want to achieve with your product? In other words, these are the business objectives of your product. Ideally, they should be based on qualitative and quantitative data about your customers.

However, it’s important to understand that to answer this question, you should not focus completely on features and outputs. First of all, think about what real business value your product will drive.

Question 3: How?

This is the question of priorities and backlog. Determine the timeline that you will follow, and what short-, mid-, and long-term activities you will include to pursue your business objectives. Also, break down your activities by specific aspects of your product. This way, your teams will know what features and parts of your product are coming when. 

Three mistakes of roadmapping

1. No clear priorities
   This manifests in poor communication, poorly-defined timelines, and unrealistic expectations. When asked which of their priorities are the most important, such managers reply “ALL OF THEM”. This is wrong. When everything’s important, nothing’s important.
   
   
2. Solutions over problems
   Some may argue that focusing on solutions is an optimistic approach to planning. However, focusing on solutions too early is not going to do your company any good - always start with the problems. So you will care only to fix it, not on the particular solution that your team has fallen in love with.
   
   
3. Too much detail
   Your product roadmap should never get overly complex. Even if YOU can make sense of it, there’s no guarantee that your team will be able to. Don’t forget, one of the three core benefits of the roadmap is simplicity, so keep it simple and digestible, don’t turn it into a release plan. 

Create your own product roadmap

You know all the theory about the roadmap as an agile tool, it’s time to put it to practice: 

1. Talk to your users to learn about their pains
2. Gather the data about internal capabilities and external opportunities
3. Align key stakeholders by presenting to them your vision
4. Create a new roadmap in Goals by KeepSolid and tie it to your business objectives and key results
5. Communicate, establish a feedback loop, and keep your roadmap updated and relevant