How can you improve your product road map with iteration?

The tricky part about assumptions are they come wearing a cloak of facts. One technique that has specifically helped me dissect assumptions with what I knew for sure was to list both of them down and then present it to all stakeholders in the room. This would help me gauge accurate feedback on how some of those were misplaced.

Roadmap needs to be dynamic but at the same time it should not be one dimensional. As a product manager, you need to define a boundary of the things that needs to be implemented but also open for new addition. To keep the roadmap evolving, 3 things you need to keep in mind: 1. Talk to customers & understand their need. It can be user interviews, surveys etc. 2. Talk to your client facing teams viz. Sales, Ops& Support, Customer Success etc. They exactly know the reason why customers insists for any feature/request. 3. Watch the competition. Make a habit to doing a competitive analysis. This helps you as a PM to be informed whats happening around you. Based on the inputs, being a PM you need to evaluate the requests & prioritise it.

Whatever thoughts and ideas you have regarding the product are all assumptions until you have enough relevant data points to validate it. Often founders are guilty of having too many bright ideas on their plate, so definitely listing it all out, ranking the ideas, validating them is a good starting point.

Engage with a user advisory group early in the product development process. Create low-fidelity prototypes or mock-ups of your product and gather a diverse group of potential users to interact with them.

To iteratively improve our product roadmap, we start by clearly defining our assumptions about the product, customers, and market. Building on this, we actively integrate continuous customer feedback, ensuring our roadmap evolves in response to real-world data and performance metrics. Looking ahead, we are considering the integration of AI and machine learning technologies to anticipate and adapt to emerging customer trends, further refining our development strategy and market positioning

This is the fun part. I see way to many team leaders taking way too long time thinking and not executing. Meanwhile you are thinking and planning and debating and not taking a decision, the market is changing, sentiment is changing, your competitors are acting. Act fast, don't be afraid to make mistakes, and involve your customers. They will appreciate the fact you are taking them along your journey of innovation.

Develop low-cost, manually operated prototypes that simulate the functionality of your product. This approach allows you to test user reactions and validate assumptions about user interaction without investing heavily in development.

-Define goals: Clearly outline what you want to achieve with the product innovation experiments. -Identify Metrics: Choose measurable metrics aligned with your goals for analytical evaluation. -Create Control Groups: Establish control groups for comparison to isolate the impact of the innovation. -Iterative Testing: Conduct iterative tests, adjusting variables based on analytical insights for continuous improvement. -Define the extrapolation boundaries and do not trespass them.

Don't just hope for success; design it. Crafting effective experiments isn't a luxury; it's a necessity in the journey to enhance your product roadmap through iteration. It's not just about testing assumptions; it's a strategic deployment of methods tailored to each uncertainty level. Whether it's a nuanced survey or a full-scale MVP, the choice matters. Success metrics aren't an afterthought; they're the compass guiding your experiment's purpose. Neglecting this step isn't just an oversight; it's dismissing the very essence of informed and deliberate product evolution.

Designer & Strategist Beware, Most experiments are not scientific or statistically significant enough to prove validity... most will generate some kinds of metrics, though much of that will be noise. Remember that your ultimate goal should be to pivot to the better option "if, & when" it is needed. By listing and articulating assumptions you have effectively put attention on what should trigger a pivot - which is all an experiment should do - get a minimum threshold of feedback to trigger a pivot, full stop, not seek a 'truth' like a scientist. Ranking uncertainty and impact helps "prioritize" experiments, but in a pinch are something to skip in favor of investing time to design a better strategic option for pivoting.

Organize in-person user testing sessions where participants interact with your prototypes or experimental features. Ensure a diverse group of users to capture varied perspectives. Facilitators can observe user behavior, ask open-ended questions, and record real-time feedback.

Im a big fan of validating the idea through the preorder campaigns. Your MVP is only valid when you actually have a paying customer for it. Designing a landing page, spending some advertising dollars on bringing traffic to the page, asking for a deposit and a feedback survey, is a great first step understanding whether you are moving in the right direction.

Executing experiments is the crucial third step in enhancing your product road map. Rigorous, unbiased data collection and analysis are paramount. Speed and agility prevent wasting resources on misguided ideas. Utilize tools like lean canvas, customer development, design thinking, or agile to guide your experimentation process effectively.

Today, experimentation is at your fingertips! Create stunning landing pages, pricing models, and pre-launch sign-ups with tools like Webflow, Canva, and chatGPT. Testing has never been more accessible. Yes, Ads costs can be a hurdle for startups, but you can't build a customer base without attention. Invest wisely, target effectively. As your organization grow, you can create a test focus group so that you can lower your Ad costs with your most engaged customers.

Hold your horses... It would be nice in theory to do all this... but in practice most will only need three or four kinds of experiment designs to resolve ~90% of their uncertainty. Can you complete 1,000 reps of the same experiment type for that same assumption type (eg: what is consumer/customer 'value'?). Note that a 'value' assumption usually comes boils down to uncertainty around categorical, hierarchical, and scalar weighting of a concept (eg: is 'ease of use' a valuable benefit?... which depends on where is links, fits, and ranks with regards to the user needs). Speed and agility are irrelevant because all investment (cost) in an experiment is just the price of information - which should be cheaper than the cost of failure.

Running surveys and experiments without acting on the results and findings is a great waste. Not listening to feedback is a big red light. Unfortunately more often than not we see teams going way too deep into the product development, that they turn a blind eye when they hear the feedback that forces them to pivot or delay the timelines. Dont. It'll be more expensive in the end. Take time, research, study, iterate.

Getting feedback from your consumers is key. The more data you can have the better! It can be quantitative or qualitative. The important is to get visibility as soon as you can! There are some nice researches to validate from insights, concepts and even the possible sales outcomes (volumetrics)! Do not hesitate to reach out research agencies!

Getting feedback before product development from your early adopters or 'key users' is invaluable. Testing your hypotheses against their expectations and desires helps align your efforts effectively. After conducting user testing, organize a retrospective workshop with your team. Evaluate what worked well, pinpoint areas for improvement, identify gaps, and turn challenges into new opportunities. Learning from this feedback loop enhances your product roadmap with meaningful insights and paves the way for continuous improvement. Remember, the key to a successful product roadmap lies in this continuous cycle of feedback, iteration, and learning.

Learning from your results may not yield value without a consistent mechanism in place. Product organizations have established mechanisms to gather feedback through surveys, user interviews, social media monitoring, and analytics tools. This mechanism should involve cross functional stakeholders including Sales, Marketing, Support beyond Product Management and Engineering teams. Gathered feedback is then compared against the hypothesis to be validated, and inferences are drawn to update the product roadmap.

You didn't 'learn,' you 'eliminated' a less optimal choice... "Learning" is over use of the word because it implies understanding or connecting the dots to abstract greater meaning. That was in 'discovery'. You are now in experimentation, which is to low-cost, fail fast rather than full launch to take all failure at once. Theoretically you could brute force a product launch and get all the failure up-front... but that might be hard to post-mortem. So a little scouting mission in to the market allows for disambiguating the impact of each product decision apart from the whole. Again, experimentation is a process of elimination.

Don't be afraid of delays, especially if its for a good reason like product improvement for a better user experience. Your customers wont tap you on your shoulder if you make them pay and then deliver a crapy product. If there is a way to bring out smaller bits and pieces for new feature release, meanwhile waiting for a bigger update, do it. Customers will see it as a pleasant surprise, it'll create a positive experience where they'll see you as a brand that is continuously innovating and not standing still.

Be humble. You might have some features that you like but just don't belong anymore. There might be some things that aren't valuable QUITE yet. Listen, use hard facts and don't let your opinions or ego get in your way.

El refinamiento final en la evolución de un producto es la actualización de su hoja de ruta. Este paso es crucial, ya que incorpora los conocimientos adquiridos a través de experimentos y pruebas en la estrategia y prioridades del producto. Es fundamental ajustar la hoja de ruta basándose en feedback y datos recopilados, asegurándose de que esta refleje tanto el estado actual como la visión a futuro del producto. La comunicación efectiva de estos cambios a las partes interesadas es vital, explicando claramente el porqué y el valor agregado de cada actualización. Además, es importante celebrar tanto los éxitos como los fracasos, reconociendo y valorando los aprendizajes así como disfrutar el camino.

Embrace the notion of a protocept. Which is a frugal cousin of a prototype. And a sister term for a concept. Starting with something as simple as showing your customers / partners / investors a (preferably printed) brochure adds a few cycles of iterations right off the bat ??. Apologies for a seriously late Halloween joke.