Book Brief: Product Roadmaps Relaunched

How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty

Brief Summary

Title: Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
Authors: C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors
Published: 2018 by O’Reilly
What It Teaches: Product Roadmaps Relaunched teaches professionals involved in new product development a more strategic way to use product roadmaps — providing clarity and a common understanding while avoiding over committing or getting into details more appropriately managed elsewhere.
When To Use It: Product Roadmaps Relaunched is a guide for those involved in new product development, especially product managers responsible for setting the strategy and guiding the development of products. The first chapter is primarily structured around common problems that are addressed by the book’s new approach to product roadmaps:

• Nobody understands why things are on the roadmap
• You are shipping a lot but not making progress
• Executives and customers demand commitments
• Marketing and sales are not selling what you are making
• Customers aren’t excited about your new features
• Your stakeholders and customers expect a firm commitment on dates for your product releases
• Time spent estimating design and development efforts takes time away from actually implementing them
• Your team looks at the roadmap as if it were a project plan listing when features will be released

If these problems describe your current product development efforts, Relaunching Product Roadmaps may provide good ideas for improving your process.

Brief Review

I’ve been involved in product development in one form or another for the past few decades. Managing the process has become more structured and scientific over those years, but the most significant change has been the adoption of elements of design thinking, lean startup, and agile development. To oversimplify them, these methodologies share in common a hypothesis-driven view that requires experimentation and iteration (the scientific method).

From a product development perspective, while business decision making has become increasingly data-driven and algorithmic, the reality is that what the market wants and needs is still fairly mysterious. Product developers must find a healthy balance between satisfying the desires of decision makers to predict what will happen and when, with maintaining the ability to learn what will actually succeed before rushing a new product to market. Product Roadmaps Relaunched suggests an approach for achieving this balance.

In Chapter 1 the authors describe the exercise at a high level, laying out requirements for a successful roadmap relaunch and then explaining how their new approach will address specific challenges product teams face.

In their approach, a product roadmap should:

• Put the organization’s plans in a strategic context
• Focus on delivering value to customers and the organization
• Embrace learning as part of a successful product development process
• Rally the organization around a single set of priorities
• Get customers excited about the product’s direction

While not:

• Making promises product teams aren’t confident they will deliver on
• Requiring a wasteful process of up-front design and estimation
• Being conflated with a project plan or a release plan

Most product leaders would agree that an approach that accomplishes all of that would be pretty amazing.

In the second chapter, the authors define the key components of a product roadmap. The primary components include a product vision, business objectives, product themes, high level timeframes, and a disclaimer that all of it is liable to change at any time. For certain audiences, some secondary components might be needed, including features and solutions, level of confidence, stage of development, target customers, and product areas. Finally, the authors identify additional information that isn’t really part of the roadmap, but is complementary to it. This information typically resides in other types of documents such as project plans, business cases, or release plans.

The next eight chapters walk through the process of developing this new type of product roadmap:

• Chapter 3: Gathering inputs
• Chapter 4: Establishing the Why with Product Vision and Strategy
• Chapter 5: Uncovering Customer Needs Through Themes
• Chapter 6: Deepening Your Roadmap (e.g. with secondary components)
• Chapter 7: Prioritizing — with Science!
• Chapter 8: Achieving Alignment and Buy-in
• Chapter 9: Presenting and Sharing Your Roadmap
• Chapter 10: Keeping It Fresh

Throughout these chapters the authors use the fictional example of the product roadmap for “The WOMBATTER Hose” from the Wombat Garden Hose Company to show the progression through the various steps in developing a robust and effective product roadmap. They also provide guidance and tools based on their experiences working with a variety of different product teams.

The authors emphasize that they aren’t proposing a specific format for the product roadmap document. Each organization will likely develop a format that works best for them. Rather they are defining what needs to be included and how to develop those components. Often the authors present actual roadmap documents and other artefacts from the product roadmapping processes of real companies, showing a variety of different formats. Many of these examples don’t perfectly meet the requirements laid out in the book, emphasizing the reality that not all organizations will immediately fully implement this new approach. For many it will be a big change that will require time and diligence to mature into.

The final chapter provides readers with guidance in how to help their organizations begin to implement this new approach to product roadmapping. The chapter starts with a 14 question assessment checklist to determine how dramatic the change will be. The authors then recommend two different approaches to choose between depending on that starting point.

Bottom Line: Product Roadmaps Relaunched provides a new model for roadmapping as part of the product development process. The book emphasizes the benefits of getting roadmaps right and the dangers of communicating too much, too little, or the wrong information. The authors know from experience that the actual process and documents will be different for each organization, so they emphasize guiding principles and share approaches that they have seen work. If you are involved in the product development process, you likely will benefit from this book.