When you begin developing your product roadmap, you start to envision how your product strategy will actually be accomplished. You tangibly define the phases or activities required to reach your aspiration goals. These set of activities will typically cover multiple product development cycles and define high-level deliverables. The form your roadmap takes is largely dependent upon the expectations of your organization. This can range from PowerPoint to more automated tools.

Purpose of the Product Roadmap

So what do you want to accomplish? Are you trying to attain internal and external alignment around a set of envisioned activities? Or are you also attempting to ensure an appropriate allocation of supporting resources so that your team can achieve its goals? Your organization likely has goals of its own. Organizations commonly use roadmap deliverables as a visible measure of how efficient your product team is. Make sure you not only understand what you and your team want to accomplish – but also what the organization’s expectations are. A disconnect between these two sets of expectations can spell trouble.

5 Things Normally Included

Every product roadmap needs to cover these items:

• A timeline aligned with customer purchasing behaviors or business cycles.
• Outline the market drivers that will drive deliverables on the roadmap. For instance, tradeshows, high sales seasons, or expected legislation that could impact the market, etc.
• Define the business objectives or product themes that divide the overarching timeline into phases that align with the overall product strategy and support the long-term product vision.
• Capture the high-level features being targeted for delivery in each phase.
• Optionally, include an aligned technology roadmap that reveals specific technology platforms that will be impacted by each major phase and feature list. This can be a big help in proactively aligning product and technology groups.

Four Characteristics of a Top-Notch Product Roadmap

It should:

• Be crafted in such a way that it can guide each of the planned phases and project priorities.
• Align with your product vision and strategy and provide a plan for delivering on what these documents promise.
• Include a plan around resource requirements that the executive team supports.
• Is not so set in stone that it cannot be updated along the way as market changes occur and progress is made.

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Defining a Product Vision Document

The Product Vision document looks into the future. It presents a 30,000-foot view of what you plan for the product to be in the future and its anticipated value.

The Role of the Product Strategy Document

Your Product Strategy document explains what high-level actions will need to take place in order for your product to live up to the anticipated deliverables in the Product Vision document. Just as important, the Product Strategy document sets boundaries for activities that should not be pursued.

It’s easy to understand why these two vital documents are often presented together.

Three Things Product Vision and Strategy Should Provide

A well conceived Product Vision and Strategy will:

• Present a statement about what you envision the product will be in the future and how it will benefit its market.
• Cover high-level actions that must be taken in order to fulfill the promise presented in your document.
• Outline measurable objectives that include both short and long-term goals as they relate to the product.

Characteristics Specific to a Well Developed Product Vision

• Present a clear view of where you see the product in one year or perhaps many years, depending on the product lifecycle.
• Define your target customers and how the product will help them solve challenges. Clarify the value to be derived from the product.
• Set a high bar that pushes product team innovation.
• Make sure that the level you set is high enough that it won’t change every time there’s a shift in market dynamics.

Characteristics of an Excellent Product Strategy

A well thought out product strategy can set the stage for your product roadmap. Your Product Strategy needs to offer clearly defined phases that lead up to meeting the Product Vision. It should include the key activities your product team will undertake toward meeting the Product Vision. Your Product Vision acts as your north star guiding your decisions. However, your Product Strategy will evolve over time in response to changing market conditions.

Your Product Strategy should also be centered on objective time lines associated to business metrics related to customers, the competition, the market, or financials. You also need to include shorter-term milestones with specific deliverables. Make it clear all along the way what the next steps should be.

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However, before you can get people working together in unison, rethink how these groups – project management, product management, user experience, and engineering – see themselves. Rather than maintaining separate functional “fiefdoms,” they need to come together as one cohesive team. As one team, they will share responsibility for pushing product development activity along with a shared set of goals and incentives.

Incentivizing the Product Development Teams

Aligned incentives are vital to getting people who formerly considered themselves part of a stand-alone team to instead focus on common objectives. Incentives offered should not be linked to when their individual goals are reached. Instead, the focus needs to be on meeting shared goals. That’s when the company will benefit most. It’s also when project management, product management, and engineering groups will too. It should also be noted that not all employees are financially motivated. So it is important that the management team has a strong grip on what drives employee behaviors.

The Four Essential Shared Goals

There are four key goals that every combined development team should strive to meet before the company hands out incentives to employees:

1 – Enable achievement of the organization’s projected sales and margin rates

2 – Publish product roadmaps that are 100% resourced

3 – Attain customer-facing roadmap deliverables (Example: on time, on scope, and on budget execution)

4 – Attain compliance with your organizations product lifecycle management process

In my next post, I will break down each of the four essential shared goals listed above. You’ll soon see how sharing goals can positively impact the overall success of your entire product development process. In addition, it will help your team stand out to management for the exceptional work it’s done.

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Reach Out to the Rank-and-File with Your Product Vision

Step back a moment and enjoy your recent weeks’ accomplishments. You’ve developed a solid product vision and shared it successfully with executives and thought leaders. Now it’s time to broaden your reach and get those who will be actively involved in executing your plans on board. One of the best ways for you to do this is by creating forums for sharing your product vision. Also be prepared to share any high-level support detail that you developed after meeting with customers.

Begin With the Team Leaders

In the influence map exercises we’ve discussed in an earlier post, you identified key people who were critical to your success. Now it’s time to circle back and meet with any team leaders who may not be aware of your plans. A good place to start is with any of your own team members who may not be aware of the plan. Bring these people up to speed then reach out to others in your organization. Some meetings will be one-on-one. At other times it will be appropriate to talk to an entire team or even a larger group at one time.

Engage Your Known Supporters

Think back to when you were sharing your vision with your company’s thought leaders. Who among them were your strongest supporters? Once you’ve identified those firmly behind your plans, enlist them to bring those in their operational area on board too.

It’s important to remember that not everyone will be solidly behind you. Some people are happy with the status quo. Others resist change. Be prepared to face a certain amount of resistance. Keep focused on your goal: to align as many people as possible behind your vision. Invite them to participate in making the vision a reality. The better your team understands where you’re leading them, the more support you will gain.

How Product Managers Should Handle Questions

Don’t dodge questions from employees or try to bluff your way through. As a product manager you’ve done a tremendous amount of research and consulted with customers, executives, and thought leaders. You’ve tried to think of every possible argument against your plan. If someone asks a question you haven’t considered, take the time to find the answer and then get back to this person after the meeting.

Accurately communicating your vision and getting the employees behind your plan is critical to success. With the help of those who share your vision, you’ll be able to win the support of many people across your organization. Ultimately, you are accountable for getting results. But you need others to ensure success.

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Given this reality, I want to answer my friends question and differentiate product strategy from product roadmaps. Let’s start by defining product strategy.

Product Strategy

Organizations typically have an aspirational goal or vision for what their product could ultimately become in support of an overarching business objective. This vision is often conceptual, not committed to paper or even fully shaped. Regardless, product strategy is the path that organizations choose to take in order to achieve this idealized future product. In other words, product strategy is intended to describe how the organization, or product team, intends to achieve a desired future state. It provides high-level context for a set of activities or milestones that are to be pursued and strives to be directionally correct.

A product strategy is visually illustrated as a phased timeline or series of future steps starting with the current state to some defined point in the future (E.g. 3 or 5 years or even longer in some instances). This is often necessary as a product team may not have the necessary resources at their disposal to deliver all that they desire in the aspirational future state so parsing the product strategy into clearly defined components helps to structure the work ahead and manage stakeholder expectations.

From a communication standpoint, breaking the product strategy into easy-to-understand components makes the path forward more digestible, particularly for those who are not part of the core product team with inside knowledge of the effort. It is important to note that solid product strategy not only defines the boundaries of the actions you intend to take to achieve the desired future state, perhaps most importantly, it also articulates those activities that lie outside of the scope of the strategy that will not be pursued.

Providing a solid product strategy will help focus activities, establish a direct link between the product and the company strategy, and clearly identify to everyone involved the high-level steps currently being taken to achieve the vision.

Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is common for products that can be delivered incrementally or in an evolutionary fashion, and high-level requirements or epics are their building blocks. Product roadmaps act as the bridge between the product strategy and the actual tactical product development projects that are undertaken in pursuit of attaining the product goals.

While the product strategy outlines a desired future state the product roadmap articulates the necessary tactical steps to take to achieve the vision. As business conditions and priorities change, so should the product roadmap—think of it as a “living document.” The roadmap can be visualized in two distinct time frames.

In the short term, it’s a record of planned releases and may extend two to four release cycles into the future. These activities are often represented by calendar year or on a rolling 12-month basis. Some projects on the product roadmap may be already in active development, or some amount of planning has already occurred, and there is a high degree of confidence that most of the specified deliverables will happen.

The longer-term portion of the roadmap outlines product capabilities that reside outside the organization’s current planning activities and are effectively queued while the current priorities are being developed. This section provides a directional view of where the product might head given current business conditions in the next 12 months or longer. Any major changes in the current projects, the external marketplace, or internally in the business can change these envisioned future releases. For products or platforms with relatively long lives or industries that are relatively slow-moving, the long-term view can project out multiple years or span a predetermined lifecycle. For faster moving industries, such as software or consumer electronics, a multi-year look into the future may be much more difficult to assess with any degree of certainty, given the native rates of change, but it should remain directionally correct.

The primary internal objective of product roadmap activities is to gain organizational alignment so that resource and budget allocations can be planned in advance to enable effective execution. The main components of the product roadmap consist of 1) a defined time frame, 2) a solid understanding of market events or deadlines that will drive deliverables, such as the underlying sales cycle or product seasonality, 3) specific products, product capabilities, or themes phased over a period of time, and 4) associated development activities or resources impacted or required. The internal product roadmap may also be the result of, or heavily influenced by, the product definition and project plan activities for the current release. Very often, the desired scope of envisioned capabilities to be delivered, in the current targeted time frame, far exceeds the team’s human resources or budget, and so a prioritization exercise will be needed for what is delivered now—versus what can be deferred. Requirements prioritization may go so far as to further define a set of phases for future work, which becomes additional short-term and possibly longer term aspects of the roadmap.

For some industries or products, especially those sold business-to-business, an external version of the roadmap may be required for customers. This is often the case where the product impacts a major operational or strategic capability of the purchasing company, or is deployed on a large scale across the organization. As the buyers are making long-term and/or major decisions for the company, they expect to see long-term product plans from the suppliers. Customers typically want to be sure that the organization will continue to invest in the products, and product roadmaps are often used as a means to measure the pace of investment. External versions typically contain much less detail than the internal roadmap and can also be much less committal on specific dates. The most common representation depicts a high-level set of planned release milestones, in presentation slide format, and is often used to support internal or external communication—generally face-to-face.

Conclusion

Product strategy ensures effective alignment between company business goals and defines the path the product is taking to reach an idealized future state. The product roadmap differs from the product strategy as roadmap activities highlight current and near-term tactical development activities that ideally support the product strategy and the overarching business goals. Unfortunately, many organizations lean too heavily upon product roadmaps without setting the product strategy boundary to ensure tactical activities stay between the lines now and well into the envisioned future.

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Source: The Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge, Greg Geracie and Steven Eppinger

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I recently read an article by Chris Fussell discussing lessons learned from his time working for the military’s Joint Special Operations Task Force. In the article Chris discusses the challenges today’s military faces in driving effective communication and high productivity levels.

There are many parallels between productivity and communication challenges military teams face and those of product teams. Before we get into the similarities I want to share Chris’s tips.

Five Productivity Tips

• Efficiency is not the same thing as effectiveness. Focus on effectiveness.
• There is a difference between doing things right and doing right things. Acting upon right things increases your effectiveness.
• The rhythm of communication and the quality of each interaction matter, the more frequent and face-to-face the better.
• Organizations and teams should value purpose over habit. It is all too easy to fall into habits that have little or no value.
• It is critical that teams align their day-to-day activities with company strategy. Without alignment your team’s effectiveness is diluted.

Interestingly, some of Chris’s tips also show up in our market research on product teams. For instance, this year we discovered in our regression analysis that the frequency of stand up meetings, face-to-face team meetings, matters. Teams that conduct stand ups daily are more likely to perform at a high level.

We have also substantiated through our statistical analysis that only 37% of product teams believe that their daily activities are aligned with company strategy. In other words, two-thirds of teams suffer from not knowing how their daily activities align to the strategies and objective that senior leadership is striving to achieve!

Conclusion

These five tips from Chris are equally useful whether you are in the military or on a product team. Effective communication starts from the top but teams also have the responsibility to fill in the gaps and lead by example. The more tightly strategy and tactical execution are aligned – the better your chances of success.

How productive is your team?

Source: Fortune, June 21st, 2015 Chris Fussell, The Biggest Career Lesson This Navy SEAL Learned in Iraq

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Product Roadmap Defined

Product roadmaps are a visual representation of a series of planned product development activities which depict future product releases on either a calendar or rolling-year basis. Given the long duration product roadmaps often span across several future development cycles. The planned work efforts, commonly called releases or epics, typically reflect high-level deliverables.

How Are Product Roadmaps Used?

Roadmaps can be used many ways but most organizations utilize product roadmaps in order to ensure internal alignment between the product manager and/or product owner, internal stakeholders and team members. Product roadmaps are also used to ensure appropriate resource planning and performance measurement. Externally product roadmaps can be used to manage customer and key external stakeholder expectations.

Is There Only One Type of Product Roadmap?

As a result of these many possible uses organizations often create two product roadmap variants; internal and external. Internal roadmaps address the needs of key constituents inside the organization while external roadmaps tend to be less aggressive and are intended to effectively manage the communication process with the sales organization, partners, suppliers and the customer-base.

Additionally, company’s frequently create technology roadmaps which illustrate specific technology platforms that might be impacted by planned market-facing or internal activities. These types of roadmaps help all parties involved gain insight into resource allocation requirements and are often used to align the market-facing product teams with technology teams to ensure appropriate synchronization in both team’s activities.

What Does A Good Product Roadmap Do?

A robust product roadmap does several things well:

• Outlines a clear plan – with well-understood resource requirements – which have been agreed to with the executive team
• Serves as a visual guide to the planned releases in order to improve communication and coordination with internal stakeholders and the market
• Ensures appropriate alignment with an existing product strategy
• Sets an expectation that changes to the plan “might” occur as a product roadmap is inherently future-facing and therefore subject to this risk

Why Do Customers Value Product Roadmaps?

Customers value roadmaps because they want to make sure that a company is continually investing in their products. Roadmaps serve as a tangible way for customers to understand the level of investment in your product’s development. As such, they view roadmaps as concrete and immutable commitments.

Failure to effectively execute undermines the trust that customers (individually and collectively) have in you and your company. This is a common mistake that may organizations make – not effectively managing customer expectations and being too overly aggressive in telling customers what they want to hear and not backing these perceived commitments up with successful execution.

Back To Where We Started

So this brings us back to where we started. Do we really need product roadmaps? Arguments can be made on both sides. However, ultimately it all boils down to customers. While organizations may want to eliminate roadmaps – customers will continue to insist upon them as they remain the best way clients have to understand what your company is investing in, the level of your financial commitment to your product’s evolution, and how effective your organization is at addressing customer needs.

Roadmaps are not a perfect solution and product development organizations are often their own worst enemies by putting in place product roadmaps that are poorly resourced and not effectively calibrated to what the organization can truly accomplish. This sets the stage for customer disappointment.

As long as customers continue to clamor for them market-facing product roadmaps will continue to be produced. Can you blame them?

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In our recent study of high performance product teams we asked a question regarding how product teams view their relationship with the sales organization. As it turns out, just over 9% of product teams report being “completely aligned with the sales organization with little or no friction.” Here’s a closer look at the findings.

Product Teams Perceptions of the Relationship with Sales

When asked how they would describe the relationship between the sales organization and the product team, nearly three quarters of responders, 73.41%, indicated that they are either mostly aligned with the sales force with occasional friction or completely aligned with little or no friction.

Still, over a fourth of respondents were both lacking alignment and feeling a significant amount of friction (23.70%) or were in a constant state of friction with the sales force (2.89%).

For these companies, there is definitely significant opportunity for improvement in relations that have the potential to greatly benefit the bottom line.

Are All Forms Of Friction Actually A Problem?

While this year’s study did not differentiate between different types of friction it is our belief that some friction can be healthy – if managed appropriately. Healthy friction can result from the product team and the sales organization appropriately channeling their different points of view in the best interests of the organization.

Product teams typically take a longer view of what they are trying to accomplish normally represented in a product strategy or a 12 month roadmap. Conversely, sales teams are under pressure to deliver on a quarterly basis. Therefore, it is not improbable that friction results from these two variances in perspective and expectations. The key is to effectively balance the long-term goals of the product team against the shorter-term needs of the sales organization and this often entails compromise or in more extreme cases adjudication by executive stakeholders.

Conclusion

If properly managed, friction can be healthy and potentially lead to better outcomes. If poorly managed, or left to fester, friction can lead to toxicity. The good news is that the majority of product teams perceive that they are effectively handling the sales relationship. The bad news? Over a quarter of product teams currently report a high degree of dysfunction in this important relationship.

So that leaves us with a final question. How do sales organizations perceive THEIR relationship with the product team? The other half of this equation will be very telling.

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This individual was responding to the following question “What factors contribute to the positive aspects of the product team’s relationship with product marketing or marketing?” While I won’t reveal the answers to this question just yet, one individual wrote a verbatim that said “The more fully we embed product marketing in our product team – the better the relationship is.”

As a product management trainer and consultant to organizations world-wide I can tell you that only a minority of companies that I encounter fully embed the product marketing team members in the product development process. In fact, given that the line between product management and marketing is often hazy, I often see lack of alignment and in the worst cases open conflict between the two groups.

I agree with the individual that noted how powerful the product management and product marketing relationship can be when they are in alignment. The best situations tend to arise from a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities, recognition that both teams are co-dependent, strong executive leadership that expects the teams to work together effectively, and most importantly trust.

So as you think about your organization, take a second to reflect upon how deeply embedded your product marketing team members are. If they are not fully embedded it is likely that your organization has not optimized the full power of this relationship.

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Consistent with last year’s findings in the 2012 Study of Product Team Performance, the importance of having a corporate strategy that the product team can link to and align with remains a statistically significant indicator of a product team’s ability to achieve high performance. If the executive team has not constructed, communicated, or deployed the broader company strategy, the product team will have nothing to tether their product development activities to and no way to determine which activities to pursue and – perhaps more importantly – not pursue. In fact, the 2012 study illustrated that approximately 91% of respondents indicated that their daily activities were aligned with the company business strategy. However, a closer look at how this alignment was occurring indicated a heavy reliance on product roadmaps in the absence of product strategy.

This year’s study clearly showed that 37% of organizations have a coherent business strategy they stick to and effectively communicate. The majority of organizations (54%) that have a corporate strategy minimize its effectiveness by not effectively communicating it or changing it so frequently that it is perceived by the product teams of being of little use.

Without a clearly communicated corporate strategy, the product team is often forced to focus on tactical roadmap activities and deliverables. Over time, this can undermine the effectiveness of not only product managers and product owners but the entire product team. With no guiding corporate strategy, the team is unsure how the day-to-day tactical activities link back to the company’s strategic direction. The resulting disconnect negatively impacts performance. Motivation plummets as team members struggle to perceive their contribution to the company and the company’s contribution to the surrounding competitive market place.

As demonstrated by last year’s study, low-performing teams typically lack ability to align day-to-day tactical activities with the company strategy. This linkage is usually created by developing a multi-year product strategy and a parallel multi-year technology roadmap that bridge corporate strategy and tactical day-to-day activities.

High-performing teams benefit from understanding the corporate strategy, tethering tactical activities to the corporate strategy via well-defined multi-year product and technology strategies, and leveraging the connection between day-to-day objectives and product, and between product and company goals and mission, to motivate higher performance. Product and development managers who lack knowledge of the corporate strategy have no grounding from which to effectively develop useful multi-year product and technology strategies, nor tools to motivate their teams. This leads to an inherent market disadvantage, as better aligned organizations capitalize upon clarity of purpose and action.

The difference between reactive product development and effective product management may well lie in product management’s ability to proactively develop a forward-looking product strategy that helps enable the attainment of your company’s business strategy – assuming that your company has one!

Greg Geracie is a recognized thought leader in the field of product management and the President of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management consulting, training, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. Greg is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management. He is also an adjunct professor at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on high-tech and digital product management.

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