Product Roadmap is a high level plan of action, often a visual summary, that maps out the evolution of a solution over time. Simply put, if product vision is the what of your product, roadmap focuses on how and when to reach that ultimate north start.
I have come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as a universal product roadmap.
Designing one is critically dependent on various aspects like company and product strategy, type of product, product org and the type of team/person you are offering it as a reference to. For example, stakeholders might be more interested in seeing a high-level roadmap that focuses on key milestones and outcomes. Meanwhile, for engineers and designers, a roadmap with more detailed goals and features is necessary (Let’s refer to Product Roadmaps as PR for ease).
Among the different version of PRs, the Goal Oriented Product Roadmap, became widely popular when Roman Pichler quoted a template for it.
What is a Goal Oriented Product Roadmap
A Goal Oriented (GO) Product Roadmap, unlike traditional roadmaps, shifts the emphasis from the features to be developed to the outcomes of a product, like increasing revenue customer engagement, retention, acquisition etc.
Therefore you are no longer focusing solely on ‘shippable’ features but aligning strategic goals as high level success metrics to be achieved once they go live. The GO PR is designed best fit for creating products with Lean or Scrum Agile methodology and will be a perfect reference for customers and other stakeholders.
The major five elements to be formulated to design a GO PR include:
- Goal
A goal is a desire, outcome or benefit a product should achieve in its foreseeable future. It is often ambitious but unlike ‘moonshots’, it should be quantifiable and achievable within a timeframe. A goal should also be inline with product strategy leading the product towards its vision.
Sample: Exhilarating coversion, reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), expansion to new market etc. - Features
An enumeration of features that are necessary to achieve the stated goals. In other words, they can be considered as the capabilities or deliverables required to create the outcome of goals. For maximum effectiveness, it is advised to limit the number of features of each goal between 3-5.
Sample: Simplified payment gateway, re-engage cart abandoners etc. for improving conversion. - Metrics
Tangible results that measure achievement of each goal and help you track progress of the delivered features.
Sample: Reduce CAC by half, 5% improvement in conversion etc. - Timeframe
A timeline that can be utilized as reference for:
- customers and stakeholders to expect agreed goals
- cross functional teams to develop the features for those goals
Sample: Even a loose time-bound such as H1 or Q3 2021, is sufficient. - Name
A naming convention for the version of the product that will offer defined goals.
Sample: Windows 10, Android Jelly Bean etc.
One of the most minimalist design grouping these aspects can be seen in the template designed by Roman Pichler:
A few other GO templates follow a format in which Metrics is clubbed with Goals resulting in only 4 elements.
Benefits of GO PRs
GO PR suppresses the following downsides of a Feature Oriented (FO) PR:
- There is a risk of FO PR overlapping with the product backlog since both of them list the functional modules of a solution, especially when detailed features are focused.
- Features are regarded as a commitment rather than a part of a high level plan that is likely to change. This idea restricts the ability to experiment and learn and also limits the flexibility to adapt, in a FO PR.
- Lastly, a feature-based roadmap makes it hard to secure agreement and create alignment, as stakeholders often compete to get their feature on the roadmap.
A few added upper hands has made GO roadmap prominent in product management:
- GO PRs are compatible with Objective and Key Results (OKR) model, which has become highly prevalent in both team and organizational levels lately.
- The objective of GO PR hinders the product from being a Feature Factory; a business focused on building features rather than solving problems for customers.
- GO PRs also helps in keeping the vision of a solution aligned so as to avoid the derogatory Frankenstein Effect; features stitched together from odds and ends with incoherent results.
These benefits make goal-oriented, outcome-based product roadmaps preferable to traditional, feature-focused plans, especially for digital products that exhibit uncertainty and has the potential to change across their entire lifecycle.
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