Product development is often left to the engineers because they know the product the best, and on the surface, this seems like a great idea. However, engineers are too close to the products, and too distant from customers and the market to see clearly enough to be strategic. Your roadmap should be defined and informed by your customers’ needs and your own market analysis. Remember that successful products solve customer problems. To use the words of businessman and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, “any big problem is a big opportunity.”
When Should You Create Your Software Product Roadmap?
You need to have a clear software product roadmap as part of your quarterly strategic review with your board. You want your roadmap to go out 12-18 months and update it every quarter.
Deliverables Your Roadmap Should Include:
- Features
- Functions
- Milestones
- Capabilities
Your roadmap should show that each deliverable directly supports the business objectives you’ve already defined. If a deliverable can’t be tied directly to a positive business impact, it should not be on the roadmap. It’s imperative to get clarity on your strategic business roadmap first, define your objectives on a quarterly basis, and then sequence your software roadmap deliverables to directly support them.
Use Your Roadmap to Maximize Your Development Velocity.
The forward visibility of your roadmap helps you invest your time and effort more efficiently. If you have a cogent product strategy going out for 12-18 months, you’ll see a noticeable improvement in development velocity and quality, and have confidence that the deliverables your R&D team is working toward are well aligned strategically and will help you hit your business objectives.
Bottom line: If you want to “move the needle,” define a strategic product roadmap that you and your team believe in.
What If Your Development Is Already Off-Track?
Strategic product roadmaps can start your software product development off on the right foot. If you’re already deep in development and you’ve gotten off-track, you’re likely headed back to the board with bad news.
Every technology organization is going to have issues. When you have issues, the way to make your roadmap more strategic is to divide your software engineering efforts into two streams:
- Today’s Problems: maintenance/tactical
- Tomorrow’s Problems: strategic
When you’re starting, you may find that 80% of your effort is tactical, focusing on today and basic break-fix kinds of activities. The goal here is to get that to 20% or less by making the conscious strategic decision to divide the work streams, and possibly the engineering teams, between tactical and strategic. This is going to pay dividends in terms of helping you save money, increase revenue, and deliver more value to customers in the form of more frequent and higher quality feature releases.
It’s Not About The Plan, It’s About Planning.
It’s ok to pause and regroup if you see your software product strategy going in the wrong direction. Plans will change; having regular reviews and making adjustments to your plan is a normal and important part of strategic software product development. You want to make these decisions consciously instead of being forced into them.
Advantage of the Strategic Product Roadmap Approach.
This approach forces you to build a truly strategic roadmap. You’ll be able to forecast changes and plan for 3-6-12 months in advance. If you have your roadmap in place with buy-in from the board and your team, and you are reviewing it quarterly, the changes you make will generally be more than three months out so you can plan developer capacity, and prioritize the most important fixes and features first.
The development assets you build along the way should be reusable, which translates to a better ROI when your developers use those components again and again–they will support your needs well down the line. Your roadmap can drive up productivity across your entire organization!
Who Should Be Involved in Building Product Roadmaps?
Business Development owns the roadmap! Team members to think of:
- Head of Sales
- Head of Marketing
- CEO
- CTO
- Lead Developer
You don’t need to get into the minutiae in terms of details and features. Your business leaders will drive the roadmap at a higher level. The engineering teams will break down the business objectives into tech milestones, and the details will come in at this point.
Essential Components of a Strategic Product Roadmap.
Your roadmap is a living document! It should be updated at least quarterly and have the following attributes:
-
Forward-Looking
12-18 months long (4-6 quarters)
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Driven by Business Objectives
Identify the top 2-5 business objectives the board or CEO is looking for in each quarter.
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Accepted by your Engineering Team
Business objectives should be clearly defined and well understood by your engineering team. Sharing the core business objectives with the tech/engineering teams is a critical motivator.
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Sequenced Tech Milestones tied to Business Objectives
For each of the 2-5 business objectives, there should be 2-5 technology milestones required to achieve the objectives listed on the roadmap. Tech milestones need to be sequenced correctly so they correspond with each quarter and the work that needs to be done to achieve the objective. The tie-in between business objectives and tech milestones must be captured to create an early warning system. If the tech milestone is missed, you will know the business objectives are at risk, too, so you can plan for that.
Recipe for a Successful Product Roadmap Workshop.
Your workshop should start with 2-3 days of in person meetings with the CEO and/or a small group of your business leaders (for example, your COO, CTO or top 1-2 tech leaders).
Day 1
Define, over the next 18 months, which strategic business milestones need to be hit.
On a whiteboard, draw out six quarters. Hand the marker to the CEO and ask them to tell you, quarter by quarter, what their business objectives/milestones are. This will start a conversation with the engineering team and begin an effective back-and-forth conversation between leaders.
Day 2
Understand the current state of the technology assets and the team. What are the current features and functionalities being offered to the market?
Day 3
Perform a gap analysis on current technology assets and the strategic business roadmap to help the tech team come up with a list of technology milestones that correlate with each of the business milestones.
What Your Product Roadmap Workshop Should Provide.
At the end of three days, you should have a solid roadmap. Estimate the effort and investment needed to deliver the milestones, and determine if the current team can execute or if there is a gap that needs to be filled. Determine if your gaps are related to people, processes, or technology, and start securing resources to shore up these deficiencies.
If you discover you’re going to need $100 billion that you don’t have, maybe you need to back off on a few of the roadmap objectives.
Vetting and validating your roadmap will ensure it is achievable so you have a clear plan of attack. You should have a technology roadmap that is completely aligned with business objectives that your business and tech leaders can both get behind.
Three Physical Takeaway Assets from the Roadmap Workshop:
- Roadmap document complete with business and technology milestones and their interrelationships.
- System map; a logical system diagram of all current technology assets as well as an assessment of their suitability for the roadmap itself. (Everything you have.)
- Gap analysis identifies new elements on the system map or new components/modifications to existing components on the system map that need to be implemented as part of the roadmap. A graphical representation of what technology assets are there currently, how strong or weak they are, and what needs to be modified.
You don’t have to go it alone!
We’ve developed a three-day process that will get your entire organization in alignment, with input from 25-year software development veterans. Schedule your three-day workshop with our experts and map your software product vision for the next 24 months! https://www.modularis.com/tech-roadmap-workshop-sales/