Why Not Having One Is The Can Be Biggest Product risk?

What does the term Product Roadmap bring to your mind? a ‘to do’/backlog list for engineering is a common interpretation. Yes it may be seen as (mundane sounding) list, but not every list/ backlog is a roadmap. How you have arrived at it makes all the difference. This article suggests a process of arriving at the product roadmap. once you have hit the MVP stage, creating great products takes time and iterations. It is highly likely that without a roadmap your efforts will not add up and a few quarters down the line, you end up with a miles wide but inches deep product. Just look around and you will find many examples. Does product roadmap work against flexibility and nimbleness? this one is trickier than it sounds. Engineering would love to have a roadmap frozen for the quarter (instead of unpredictability). But as a PM you know that it’s not practical to do so — one is constantly learning new stuff and to be honest, there are very few ideas that are cast in stone, it’s enough of a challenge to know what is a priority right now, than determine for the future. Result — most product managers shy away from sharing a roadmap at all. Demand for a quarters clarity, is met with no clarity at all. As a product manager, you need to invest in creating a roadmap. My suggestion is to start with a private version of the product roadmap that initially not one sees but you! Creating a product roadmap and communicating the same are two different things. You can avoid all biases by in a roadmap that you know is not going to invite immediate scrutiny (I mean you can avoid the trap of thinking ‘what’s the point of putting this in, management will not agree’, thereby making it a self fulfilling prophecy by never bringing it up). It allows you to think with customer centricity and ignore immediate pressures. Once you have created that, figure out a communication strategy — how much needs to be communicated to whom and when? this should be done with your real world organisational realities in mind. You have to get the sh*t done… in real world… and that takes making an execution strategy steeped in reality. Product Roadmap Part 1: Improving an Existing Product In the first part of this 2 part series, I would like to cover the situation where the PM. “Intercom on product management” is one of the most useful guides on Product management I have seen. It is especially useful for product managers with some real world experience in adding structure to the thoughts. Part 1 is based on my interpretation of important messages in the book. The eBook is available below for FREE. Highly recommended download. https://www.intercom.io/books/product-management Take a dispassionate look at your existing product features Take some time away from the daily routine and dispassionately evaluate the usage of features of your product. I am assuming that you have the tracking in place that allows you to do this. If not, start with putting the tracking in place. If you are in a large organisation and have a dedicated analytics team, this is a great brief for them. You should end up with a chart like the one shown below (courtesy Intercom’s product guide) Here are things you can do based on the above 4 categories. 1. You can make a most often used feature better (deliberate improvement) — this is a high risk, high reward activity since whether you get it right or wrong, it will impact most of your users. So, how you know that a feature needs to be improved? Pick feature that data shows as being most popular on your site. Then, see if any of the following criteria is met You have yourself faced problem as a user of the feature. A a! we are ignoring the issues we face far too often… instead it is more satisfying to do “User Research”… why? Buys you more time! It is for nothing that the most often given advice is buy from your own website/app, more often (dog fooding) You have spoken to a large number of users of the feature deliberately and repeatedly an area of improvement finds mention (without you specifically asking). Reaching out and speaking to people deliberately is different from listening in to people who are calling your customer service, for they represent the vocal subset of your audience Know that this feature lags behind Industry metrics — you may not have exact data on competition, but it’s worth a try if you know reasonably well. Be careful here as different in metrics can be attributed to both product and market difference. Tip! Making a feature faster is usually the safest deliberate improvement. Changing design is more risky and should be done only with (A|B testing) x N iterations. A is your current design and B is the proposed new design. What usually happens is people stop at the B iteration by doing it once — you will typically need to have many B’s and keep trying that over and over. Make a pitch for this fact in your organisation 2. Getting users to use a feature more often (increased frequency per user): Let me take an example. If your data shows that users reading reviews are more likely to convert, then you want user to read reviews of every hotel, not just a few. How? Here is a good example — by overlaying reviews on pictures, Booking.com has ensured that anyone looking at pictures of a hotel, sees at least 1 review! Tip! The challenge you will face here will be remembering that there will be negative side effects of increased feature usage and making sure that trade off balances in the long term. For example, maps may lead to higher conversions on a hotels site, but if you start bringing people on the maps page directly, it will have negative effect on your ability to share shift business to top hotels. Intercom guide has a beautiful example of linkedin endorsement feature — they have made it so accessible that often you end up endorsing people accidentally — what this will do for the linkedin image in the long term isn’t necessarily positive 3) Getting more users to use a feature (adoption improvement): Consider the example of laptops on a e-commerce site. There are > 1000 results and you would like user to narrow down to a few choices by using filters… but not enough people use filters. You would like to increase the adoption of this feature. How? begin by figuring out why it is not used in the first place Ask 5 Why’s till you get to the root cause… I illustrate below using Site A (filters were not helpful) and site B (helpful filters) Figure 1: Site A filters didn’t help Figure 2: Site B filters got the job done! I did not use filters on Site A but did on Site B. 5 Why’s for Site A Why the filters on Site A turned me Off? They did not get me the results I wanted Why? I started using the filters (Hard Disk Capacity filter in this case) and they started narrowing the results to much… had to select multiple filters because I was OK with a wider range of HD capacity.. but then I gave up Why? painfully slow experience. I had to click too many filters and the page reloaded each time… Why? The filters were not range based so I had to check innumerable check boxes to get all laptops with hard disk capacity more than 500 GB… Why? Perhaps the technically all filters are rendered similarly — whether they are relating to price or RAM or Hard Disk. Not enough thought was given to the fact that different filters may need different treatment. A case of standardisation in the wrong place. So the solution to the adoption problem could be to redo some filters as (500GB + ). This may not have been as obvious without multiple Why’s So far we have seen methods of picking winning features and making them stronger. There are more important questions to consider while making the roadmap Which features are you better off without & you should kill them right now? New Feature? how do you know you really need them? How does the road map remain flexible, yet directionally stable? Wrong roadmap communication can set incorrect expectations all over… how do you communicate correctly Bombardment of ideas from all directions … product doomed if you listen to all, also doomed if you don’t — what’s the way to win? To be continued in part 2.. I will specifically address the above. Would love to hear your views & also if you are specifically looking for part 2 of this article, please add a comment