What do you do if your product roadmap lacks logical reasoning?

Review the current roadmap: Understand the goals, priorities, and rationale behind the decisions made so far. Gather feedback: Talk to stakeholders, customers, and team members to identify any concerns or gaps in reasoning. Reevaluate priorities: Ensure that the roadmap aligns with the overall business strategy and addresses the most critical needs of the users. Incorporate data-driven insights: make informed decisions about feature prioritization. Iterate and refine: Continuously update the roadmap based on feedback, changing market conditions, and new insights to ensure it remains logical and effective. Clearly communicate the rationale behind roadmap decisions to stakeholders, ensuring buy-in and alignment across the organization.

If my product roadmap lacks logical reasoning, I take a step back to reassess. I gather feedback from stakeholders and team members to identify gaps or inconsistencies. Then, I prioritize objectives based on data and strategic goals. I break down the roadmap into clear, actionable steps, ensuring each decision aligns with our overall vision. Sometimes, it means revisiting assumptions or seeking outside perspectives for fresh insights. Transparency is key – I communicate the rationale behind each decision to build trust and buy-in. It's about finding the right balance between creativity and pragmatism, ensuring our roadmap is grounded in logic and purpose.

To ensure your product roadmap is both logical and powerful, closely align it with your company's strategic objectives, making it deeply informed by direct customer feedback. Work closely with customers to understand their needs and make them the primary stakeholders in your roadmap development. Prioritize features and initiatives that deliver the highest impact, and maintain regular, quarterly reviews with stakeholders to ensure alignment and adaptability. This focused, collaborative approach ensures your roadmap remains relevant, strategically aligned, and capable of driving significant business outcomes.

Start by pinpointing the 'why' behind your product. Crafting a clear problem statement can illuminate the purpose and direction of your roadmap. This step ensures that every feature, milestone, and initiative on the roadmap directly contributes to solving a core user problem or achieving a specific business objective. ??

If the product roadmap lacks logical reasoning, I would: 1) Review alignment with strategic goals, customer needs, and market trends to ensure coherence. 2) Gather input from cross-functional stakeholders for diverse perspectives. 3) Revisit prioritization criteria and ensure features are properly weighted. 4) Validate assumptions and hypotheses underpinning the roadmap. 5) Rethink the sequencing and dependencies to maximize value delivery. 6) Analyze gaps or missing components contributing to the lack of logic. 7) Iterate and refine the roadmap collaboratively until it reflects a clear, well-reasoned plan aligning with organizations vision and principles.

Structuring a product roadmap requires a strategic framework to ensure its logical progression. Utilizing frameworks for prioritization and identifying KPIs will give you a boost, such as using OKRs, which will link your product vision to measurable goals, creating a clear path. For example, if you are developing an OTT video platform, the objective could be "increase user engagement," with key results like "increase average viewing time by 20%" or "increase monthly active users by 30%." Using a structured approach makes the roadmap clearly understood and ensures that every feature or improvement contributes directly to the project's primary goals.

Prioritize flexibility over rigid adherence to any single framework. While frameworks provide structure, being too rigid can stifle innovation and responsiveness to market changes. Use a hybrid approach, adapting elements from multiple frameworks that best fit your product's needs and team's workflow. This allows for a more dynamic planning process that can adjust as new insights and priorities emerge, ensuring your roadmap remains relevant and effective.

To keep product roadmap grounded in reality rather than speculation, you need data to validate your assumptions. This means gathering and analyzing relevant information that would either support or disprove your hypotheses about consumer behavior, market developments and whether or not suggested features are practical(understandable!). The use of A/B testing in evaluating responses to new features is an example of how it can be done. Similarly, market analysis and user feedback can shed light on areas where improvements could be made and options that have not yet been explored. This essentially makes sure that whatever decisions are made about products are based on logic and data rather than emotions and personal biases.

Ask the tough questions. Why are these features prioritized? Do they align with our overall product vision and business goals? Are we solving real customer problems, or chasing trends?