Field guide

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Chapter 2.4

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Planning the Product Roadmap

Planning the Product Roadmap

Plan a discovery-led product roadmap and set milestones for launch

💡 Did you know that companies that follow a structured product discovery process are 40% more likely to deliver the most impactful products to the right users? —  according to a survey by the Product Development and Management Association.

Let’s take Airbnb for instance. Their rise to prominence underscores the significance of a discovery-led approach in product development.

Facing initial challenges in understanding diverse user needs, Airbnb pivoted towards a more strategic product roadmap driven by customer-centric insights. A pivotal moment came with the introduction of "Experiences," in their app — a result of their intensive product discovery efforts and market trend analysis back in 2016, while they were already in the process of implementing their product roadmap. As a result of this real-time pivot based on extensive user research, it not only expanded Airbnb's user base but also fostered a sense of community and trust globally.

With such compelling evidence, it's clear that a discovery-led product roadmap is crucial for prioritizing features and initiatives that resonate with your users' needs and pain points. Because, building a roadmap is one thing but building an insight-driven product roadmap is what changes the game for a product-led organization.

As Marty Cagan rightly puts it in his book, INSPIRED —

There are two essential high‐level activities in all product teams. We need to first discover the product to be built, and we need to deliver that product to market.”

How discovery-led product roadmap empowers product teams

There’s a common challenge faced by many organizations — a roadmap planning exercise that consumes significant time and resources but fails to deliver tangible value throughout the quarter or in some cases, the entire year. This kind of scenario is often encountered in traditional, rigid planning approaches that lack adaptability and real-time feedback integration.

On the other hand, a product discovery-led product roadmap emphasizes continuous learning, customer-centricity and iteration based on real-time insights.

In fact, it can transform the planning landscape with —

  • Iterative planning cycles that product teams can engage with, in alignment with ongoing product discovery principles such as continuous experimentation and validation.
  • Cross-functional collaboration for breaking down siloes and a shared understanding of business outcomes and strategies.
  • Continuous feedback loops that encourage being in touch with core users throughout the planning and building process.

Exercise for building a Discovery-led Product Roadmap

1. Define clear objectives and key results (OKRs). Every product decision should align with the overall company or business objectives in mind. You should define a strategic product roadmap with well-established objectives and key results, so that the company’s resources are allocated to the most impactful and priority objectives.

Let’s use these examples for reference:

 OBJECTIVES  KEY RESULTS
 Improve user engagement on the platform →  Increase daily active users (DAU) by 20% within the next quarter.
   Achieve a 15% increase in the average session duration by the end of the quarter.
   Reduce user churn rate by 10% over the next six months.
 Enhance the user experience of the mobile app →  Decrease app crash rate to less than 1% by the end of Q2.
   Achieve a 4.5-star rating in app stores within the next six months.
   Increase the Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 15 points by the end of the year.

2. Prioritize impact and effort for your build. Create an impact vs effort chart with four quadrants that helps you visualize it. These could be based on certain scores and weightage that you assign to each feature. Not all features or improvements will have the same impact or require the same effort. Using frameworks like these can help prioritize initiatives effectively.

High Impact, Low Effort: Quick wins that should be prioritized.

High Impact, High Effort: Strategic initiatives that require significant resources but offer substantial benefits.

Low Impact, Low Effort: Minor improvements or maintenance tasks.

Low Impact, High Effort: These should generally be deprioritized or reevaluated.

3. Set actionable timelines in your roadmap with with well-defined milestones. Setting actionable timelines in your product roadmap involves defining specific timeframes for completing key tasks and achieving milestones. These milestones serve as checkpoints to track progress, assess project health, and make necessary adjustments to stay on track.

The first step is to set the milestones the planned developments. A very basic example could be —

  • Milestone 1: Complete user research by Q1.
  • Milestone 2: Launch beta version of the new feature by Q2.
  • Milestone 3: Collect feedback and make necessary adjustments by Q3.
  • Milestone 4: Officially launch the feature by Q4.

As a second step, product managers should leverage specific roadmap templates that help you achieve these-

  • Product portfolio roadmap — ****Choose for managing a diverse product lineup. Perfect for product teams overseeing multiple products, providing a clear view of each product's roadmap with well-defined timelines.
  • Objective oriented roadmap — ****Use when aligning product features with strategic goals is important. Ideal for product teams ensuring every feature contributes directly to the overall business objectives.
  • Status based roadmap — ****Choose when you need a clear view of your product's development journey. Ideal for product teams tracking feature status and progress while ensuring timely releases.
  • Now Next Later roadmap — ****Use this when you want to avoid deadline based delivery. Beneficial for product teams categorizing tasks into immediate, upcoming, and future stages, aiding in strategic planning.

Sometimes, we do set timelines that are impossible to achieve. It’s always advisable to set timelines that have a buffer, in case of deployment delays - but not a huge buffer that’d make you go sidetrack.

Best practices for planning roadmaps and shipping products

✅ Best practice #1: Leverage an objective-based hierarchy to define your product strategy

Imagine two scenarios when it comes to feature-planning —

  • Feature chaos: Random features added as piecemeal, based on gut feelings or fleeting trends. Your team is confused, frustrated, and wondering what you're building
  • Feature harmony: Strategic objectives guide feature development. Each feature addresses a specific user need, seamlessly aligning with your overall product vision.

In the first scenario, the feature frenzy leaves you exhausted, overwhelmed, and frankly, unable to build the amazing products your customers deserve. The second scenario, however, is an ideal situation.

With objective-oriented views in product roadmaps, the goal is to enable product managers to create and track product objectives from your feature backlog and guide your product decisions effectively.

Define each stage of the hierarchy clearly. For instance -

  • Objectives = your high level goals that you want to achieve
  • Ideas = the approaches to achieve the objective
  • Features = the specific things that you wish to ship.

Here, you are defining your major objectives, breaking them into ideas and further down, into actionable features. It’s a great way to track progress efficiently and adapt to changing needs.

✅ Best practice #2: Ensure stakeholder collaboration at each stage of the product roadmap

It’s always advisable to keep stakeholders informed about your product development plans. They could be your cross-functional teams, advisors, customers, etc. But, more importantly, it’s also more crucial to encourage stakeholder participation at each stage of your feature-planning. There are multiple reasons why you should do this —

  • Having a transparent roadmap reduces miscommunication and conflicting priorities among different stakeholders.
  • These roadmaps make sure to foster a sense of ownership among stakeholders.
  • Collecting feedback from stakeholders on the roadmap provides valuable insights into needs & trends, and helps you iterate quickly.

Ultimately, stakeholder collaboration leads to more customer-first product outcomes, as product teams leverage diverse perspectives and insights from stakeholders, at multiple phases of rolling out product roadmaps.

Wrapping up Stage 3 of product discovery

Moving forward in discovery-led product roadmaps, teams should focus on continuous discovery and validation.

This involves ongoing research, testing assumptions, and iterating based on feedback to ensure that the product roadmap remains customer-centric and aligned with evolving market dynamics.

Given that product development in itself is an intricate process, product managers should embrace these best practices,  to effectively navigate the intricate terrain and make well-informed decisions that propel both immediate and long-term success.

Having said that, now it’s time to launch and effectively close the loop with your customers. Head over to stage 4 of product discovery.

See next chapter →