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Product Roadmapping: A Practical Guide to Prioritizing Opportunities, Aligning Teams, and Delivering Value to Customers and Stakeholders PDF

216 Pages·2017·1.69 MB·English
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Praise for Product Roadmaps Relaunched It’s about time someone brought product roadmapping out of the dark ages of waterfall development and made it into the strategic communications tool it should be. McCarthy and team have cracked the code. —Steve Blank, author of Te Startup Owner’s Manual Te theme-driven roadmap is the only way to operate today. By focusing on value rather than features or dates, this book makes product roadmaps useful again. —David Cancel, CEO, Drift Product roadmaps matter. You can’t build a great company unless you have a great strat‐ egy and a product roadmap is a way of clearly articulating that strategy. Tis book makes it clear how to develop the core components of a roadmap, the problem set, the value prop‐ ositions, and areas of focus for the customer. —Jeffrey Bussgang, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Product roadmaps bridge the gap between Agile tactics and company strategy. Tis book is required reading for anyone on my team and I’d recommend it for all sofware product leaders. —Samuel Clemens, VP of Product Management, InsightSquared When you follow this book’s brilliant advice, a smartly designed roadmap will put your customers directly in the focus of your product strategy. You’ll shif from the standard approach of “Look at us and what we can do” to “We understand what you’re dealing with and we can help you.” Roadmaps will be your company’s competitive strategic advantage. —Jared Spool, CEO/Founding Principal of UIE Roadmaps are one of the most critical tools we use as product leaders to drive our strat‐ egy, but also one of the more challenging to get right. Tis book brings together a breadth of experience to provide practical advice and war stories to take you to the next level. —Vanessa Ferranto, Director of Product, The Grommet Tis is a fantastic book with so much useful information on every page. Plus, Chapter 7 on prioritization: if it was shorter I would have it tattooed on my arm. i —Tim Frick, CEO, Mightybytes, author of Designing for Sustainability Tis book clearly articulates what a roadmap should, and more importantly should not, be in order to make the connection between product vision and what problems need to be solved to in order to achieve it. It’s a must read for product people, but it shouldn’t stop there. Anyone who is in a product driven org should be reading this as well so that the entire team can align around this important tool. —Ryan Frere, VP Product at Flywire Tis is the frst book I can wholeheartedly recommend to my students on the subject of product roadmapping. So long to committing to unvalidated features upfront, and hello to communicating progress on solving problems. —Melissa Perri, CEO, ProdUX Labs and founder of Product Institute Product roadmaps have been long misunderstood as tools of project forecasting rather than product vision. Tis book clarifes their purpose—required reading for product lead‐ ers with a vision to share! Finally, product roadmaps are given their due as a critical part of the Agile process—making sure you’re solving a problem worth solving! —Lisa Long, Vice President of Innovation and Product Management, Telenor ii | Praise for Product Roadmaps Relaunched Product Roadmaps Relaunched How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncer‐ tainty C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo Product Roadmaps Relaunched by C. Todd Lombardo , Bruce McCarthy , Evan Ryan , and Michael Connors Copyright © 2017 C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, Michael Connors. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc. , 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles ( http://oreilly.com/safari ). For more information, contact our corporate/ institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or Table of Contents Praise for Product Roadmaps Relaunched. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii 1. Relaunching Roadmaps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 What Is a Product Roadmap? 24 Key Terms and How We’re Using Them 24 Product 24 Stakeholder 25 Customer 25 Where Did Product Roadmaps Come From? 25 Requirements for a Roadmap Relaunch 26 A Roadmap Should Put the Organization’s Plans in a Strategic Context 27 A Roadmap Should Focus on Delivering Value to Customers and the Organization 28 A Roadmap Should Embrace Learning 30 A Roadmap Should Rally the Organization Around a Single Set of Priorities 31 A Roadmap Should Get Customers Excited About the Product Direction 33 A Roadmap Should Not Make Promises a Team Cannot Deliver On 34 A Roadmap Should Not Require Wasteful Up-Front Design and Estimation 35 A Roadmap Should Not Be Conflated with a Release Plan or a Project Plan 35 Summary 36 2. Components of a Roadmap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Primary Components 40 v Product Vision 41 Business Objectives 41 Timeframes 42 Themes 42 Disclaimer 42 Meet the Wombat Garden Hose Co. 43 Developing the Wombat Roadmap 44 Secondary Components 47 Features and Solutions Show How You Intend to Deliver on Your Themes 48 Stage of Development 48 Confidence 49 Target Customers 49 Product Areas 49 Secondary Components Added to the Roadmap 49 Complementary Information 51 Project Information 52 Components in Context 53 Components in Context 53 Components in Context 54 Components in Context 54 Summary 55 3. Gathering Inputs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Understand Where Your Product Is in Its Life Cycle 57 New Product Phase 58 Growth Phase 58 Product Expansion Phase 58 Harvesting Phase 59 End-of-Life Phase 59 Gathering Input from Your Market 59 Understand Your Ecosystem 59 Define the Problem and the Expected Outcome of the Solution 60 vi | Table of Contents Gathering Input from Your Customers 61 Customer Roles 62 User Types 62 Users Versus Buyers 62 Roles Versus Personas 63 Gathering Input from Your Stakeholders 64 Summary 67 4. Establishing the Why with Product Vision and Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Mission Defines Your Intent 70 Vision Is the Outcome You Seek 71 Values Are Beliefs and Ideals 71 Product Vision: Why Your Product Exists 72 Value Proposition Template 73 Example for Our Wombat Hose 74 Duality of Company and Customer Benefit 75 Product Strategy: How You Achieve Your Vision 75 Objectives and Key Results 76 The 10 universal business objectives 77 Key results (and metrics) 79 Outcome Versus Output 80 Timing 81 Case Study: SpaceX 81 Business Objectives 82 Themes 82 Key Results 83 Summary 83 5. Uncovering Customer Needs Through Themes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Expressing Customer Needs 86 Themes and Subthemes 87 Ways to Uncover Themes and Subthemes 89 User Journeys and Experience Maps 89 Existing Product Needs 91 System Needs 91 Opportunity-Solution Trees 92 Using Job Stories and User Stories to Support Themes 94 Themes Are About Outcomes, Not Outputs 96 Relating Themes Back to Your Objectives 96 Real-World Themes 99 The High Cost of Space Travel 99 Slack’s Theme-based Roadmap 99 Table of Contents | vii GOV.uk’s Gantt Chart with Benefits 100 Summary 101 6. Deepening Your Roadmap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Features and Solutions: How They Can Work with Themes 104 When and Why Do Features Appear on the Roadmap? 104 Where Do Features Appear on the Roadmap? 106 Buffer’s feature-level roadmap 106 Feature questions 107 Using Stage of Development 107 Stage of Development Questions 108 Communicating Confidence 108 Confidence Questions 110 Identifying Target Customers 110 Target Customers Questions 111 Tagging Product Areas 111 Product Areas Questions 111 Secondary Components Summary 112 Strive for Balance 112 Summary 112 7. Prioritizing–with Science!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Why Prioritization Is Crucial 116 Opportunity Cost 116 Shiny Object Syndrome 117 Exponential Test Matrix Growth 118 Features Versus Tests 119 Bad (but Common) Ways to Prioritize 119 Your, or someone else’s, gut 119 Analyst opinions 120 Popularity 120 Sales requests 120 Support requests 121 Competitive me-too features 121 Prioritization Frameworks 122 Critical Path 122 Kano 124 Desirability, Feasibility, Viability 126 ROI Scorecard 128 A Formula for Prioritization 133 A simple scorecard 133 A more complex scorecard 134 viii | Table of Contents

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.