Product Roadmap

• High-level, strategic plan for the products' future development
• describes the likely development of the product over the next period of time
• support the products' purpose and vision and it helps the Product Owners to keep their stakeholders aligned
• fosters transparency in order to manage customer expectations
• Models
  • Goal Oriented (GO)
    • facilitates a lot of focus on the goals, much more than the actual work to be done
    • Although offers the possibility of adding features, start with the end goals in mind
    • focus on goals enables value steering (steering on outcome) instead of steering on work packages (steering on output)
    • supports you in thinking about the most valuable features that enable the achievement of your goals
    • get an overview of the products' development over the next upcoming releases, which comes in very handy to manage stakeholders
    • Fields:
      • Name: the name of the new release
        • If meeting the goal results in a new major release or product version, what will it called?
      • Date: the realease date or timeframe
        • When will the goal be met?
      • Goal: the benefit the product should offer
        • What outcome should be achieved, or which specific benefit should be offered
        • Why is the product being developed?
      • Features: the high-level features necesary to meet the goal
        • What output is required to achieve the desired outcome and meet the goal?
        • What are the 3-5 key features or deliverables?
      • Metrics: the metrics to determineif thee goal has been met
        • How do you know that the goal has been met?
  • Now-Next-Later
    • Easy to understand but lot of focus on features
    • Sticks with Features in 3 groups: Now, Next, Later
  • Story map
    • often use in the beginning of new projects or products. The story map is an excellent way to create a nice overview of all the features you and your stakeholders can think of
    • nice starting point to facilitate creative ideas
    • provides an overview of all the user activities that need to be covered by the system, which in turn enables you to create small and valuable user stories
    • starts with the user activities, and thus taking a users' perspective on the product
    • The main downside is that it creates the illusion that all the features for the product will be developed
    • make it very explicit to stakeholders that you will not necessarily develop all of the stuff in your story map. So manage these expectations well
    • (User Personas), User Activities, User Tasks, Features per UA-UT-Release (can include dependencies)

      • Template

        <aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" width="40px" /> As a (who wants to accomplish something - PERSONA-WHO - User Personas) I want to (what they want to accomplish - OUTCOME - General features - User Activities) So that (why they want to accomplish that thing - GOAL - User Tasks)

        • (Extras) </aside>

      • 5 Key Components

        • User Stories Must Always Have a User! The first point might sound obvious. ...
        • User stories capture what the user wants to achieve in a simple sentence. ...
        • User stories contain a qualifying value statement. ...
        • User stories contain acceptance criteria. ...
        • User stories are small and simple.

      • 3 elements: the 3 C´s

        • Card
          • the ideas are written on the back of the card
        • Conversation
          • a future conversation. It allows you to not stress about the details right away and instead quickly jot something down as a placeholder for a future conversation, at which point you will fill in the details.
        • Confirmation
          • Details of the story or conversation. Rather than endlessly repeating the same conversations, agile teams capture details of a user story just in time. This detail is typically captured as acceptance criteria before a team takes on the story
• 11 Tips:
  • Start with your product vision (tip: use Roman's Product Vision board)
  • Describe and validate your product strategy
  • Focus on goals and benefits, by creating a goal oriented product roadmap (or one of the other types I've explained before)
  • Tell a coherent story about the likely growth of your product and don't oversell it
  • Keep it simple! Resist the temptation to add too much details to your roadmap
  • Actively collaborate with stakeholders to ensure buy-in
  • Have the courage to say no, to prevent an overload of features in your roadmap
  • Think twice about adding timelines, dates or deadlines to your roadmap
  • Make sure your roadmap is measurable, by adding measurable goals and KPI's
  • Create a rough estimate for each feature (#people + required skills) to determine the viability of a feature
  • Review and adapt your product roadmap on a regular basis