Question: What should our product team work on?

Product roadmaps

Roadmaps are often a root causes of failed product efforts (See The wrong way of building products). They are a prioritised list of features and projects a team has been asked to work on.

Typical roadmaps are all about output; good teams are asked to deliver business results.

The problems with product roadmaps

Product roadmaps lead to very poor results due to 2 inconvenient truths:

1. At least half of product ideas are not going to work
   • Customers aren’t as excited (value risk)
   • They can’t use it (usability risk)
   • Business can’t afford to build it (feasibility risk)
   • Internal constraints from others block the solution, e.g. legal, financial, business (business viability risk)
2. It takes several iterations to get things done
   • Time to money is critical

Good product teams embrace these inconvenient truths and embrace them with the right alternative (see The best way of building products)

<aside> 💡 No matter how many disclaimers you put, a list of ideas in a document called ‘roadmap’ will be interpreted as a commitment.

</aside>

The alternative to roadmaps

Management has reasons to ask for ‘stakeholder-driven roadmaps’:

1. To ensure the team is working on the highest-value things first
2. To plan the resources accordingly.

Any alternative to roadmaps must address these desires.

1. Product team is fully aware of the business context
   1. The product vision and strategy
   2. Business objectives (OKR framework)
2. Product team produces high-integrity commitments
   1. Asks for discovery to be completed, then is ready to commit to any dates
   2. In good companies commitments are minimised

Product vision and strategy

For a product team to be empowered and to work with autonomy, it should start with a clear and compelling product vision, and the path to achieving that vision is the product strategy.

Product vision should be inspiring; product strategy should be focused.