How do you define and scope your product roadmap themes and initiatives?

Product Strategy is definitely your starting point. Think of it as the high-level roadmap to realizing your vision ???. Product strategy is the plan for how your product will steer your company toward that grand vision. It's a delicate balance of deciding what you'll intentionally pursue and what you'll deliberately avoid. Usually it includes this areas: ?? Market trends ?? Customer behavior and needs ??? Competitive landscape and positioning ?? Big bets (usually 3-4) ??? Key use cases ?? The growth flywheel

One of the best exercises to generate data for your product roadmap is competitive analysis. This is especially true for complex software applications for financial services, manufacturing controls, or telecom, to name a few. Understanding the details behind your competitor's products and why clients buy them can reveal important data to drive decision-making in your roadmap. Bringing in an objective third party to conduct the competitive analysis is important to avoid biases towards your own software. We always joke that our clients hire us because we're willing to tell them when "their baby is ugly". Better to hear the unvarnished truth and be made aware of tough decisions rather than keep your head in the sand until it's too late.

Mastering Product Management: The CERAE Approach to Customer Understanding In the dynamic landscape of product management, success hinges upon understanding your customers intimately. As a seasoned product expert, I've learned that the key to building exceptional products lies in knowing your users inside out. In this article, I advocate for the adoption of the CERAE framework – Context, Experience, Reflection, Action, and Evaluation – as a powerful methodology to achieve deep customer understanding.

I strongly disagree that the Product Strategy should contain the Objectives and Key Results. OKRs are operational and are always limited to a period of time (typically 1, 2 or 4 quarters). A strategy should be more far-reaching, spanning multiple years. OKRs are time-bound (generate an outcome by a deadline, measure a change in metric up until a deadline). A strategy is concerned with how to win and is typically condition-bound (we will win if we do X while Y holds true). OKRs are certainly used to break a strategy down into executable phases, but they are not part of the strategy itself. A proof of this is that if an annual objective fails to deliver meaningful results, it doesn't automatically invalidate the product strategy.

A product roadmap is a strategic tool that outlines your product's vision, goals, and priorities, showing how you plan to deliver value over time. The first step in defining and scoping your roadmap themes and initiatives is understanding your product strategy. This strategy, encompassing the problems you're solving, the value proposition, your target market, and your competitive advantage, along with your product vision, mission, objectives, and key results (OKRs), guides your decision-making. It ensures your roadmap aligns with broader business goals, laying the groundwork for a robust product roadmap.

Structuring your product roadmap around themes can prove effective. These are broad categories that cluster initiatives based on the customer needs they meet, such as user acquisition, retention, engagement, monetization, security, performance, and usability. Focusing on themes emphasizes desired outcomes and benefits over specific features, helping to communicate the value and impact of your roadmap to stakeholders. By aligning initiatives with overarching themes, you can ensure your product development stays focused on delivering customer value.

We find that themes are more useful for the marketing team than the product team. Once you have the product strategy defined (see above) this is used to create the themes which are incorporated into blogs, social media posts, videos, etc. Themes in our industry, wealth management, focus a lot on client engagement and strengthening relationships. More software is being launched that provide enhanced communication tools and AI-powered recommendation engines to give advisors an action plan for dealing with clients effectively.

Airbnb utilizes product themes to enhance guest and host experiences, focusing on themes like trust and safety, booking ease, and community engagement. By categorizing initiatives under these themes, Airbnb can align its roadmap with strategic outcomes, ensuring every feature or improvement directly contributes to overarching goals

These overarching categories group initiatives based on specific customer needs or challenges, like user acquisition, retention, or usability. By organizing your roadmap around these themes, you can ensure alignment with your overall objectives and communicate the roadmap's value more effectively to stakeholders. This approach fosters a clearer understanding of priorities and promotes cohesive decision-making throughout the product development lifecycle.

I'd recommend ranking themes based on their criticality to customer or business value. Ranking at a theme level fast tracks many conversations while ensuring the focus remains on the high impact initiatives.

- Collect insights from market analysis and user feedback to inform the development of initiatives. - Translate each product theme into actionable initiatives. - Define SMART goals for each initiative to track progress and success. - Evaluate the feasibility of each initiative in terms of resources required and potential impact on the product's success. - Involve various teams in defining initiatives. - Document the scope, objectives, required resources, and timelines for each initiative for transparency and effective implementation.

As an example, Slack's approach to enhancing user engagement, a key product theme, involves initiatives like simplifying the onboarding process, integrating AI for smarter notifications, and enhancing chat functionality with richer interactive elements

When mapping out your product roadmap, it's essential to identify clear objectives and then break them down into practical steps called initiatives. These initiatives are like building blocks that help you tackle your larger goals systematically, ensuring that each step contributes directly to your overall product vision without getting lost in unnecessary details.

One thing I have found helpful is to get the direct feedback from the following groups; 1) CXOs - from the Management By Objective MBOs perspective. Operational as well as financial. 2) Mid level managers - How well they have been handling and what could be gap-fillers they may require. 3) Actual users of the product - UX, UI, Time savers, fine tune points. How well they can serve the customers. Our product should be focused on customer-centric. If it is user friendly but not taking care of the customers because of who the organization actually exists then the scope of the product is lost.

As the saying goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." For each primary goal in your product journey, pinpoint specific actions, such as initiating a referral program to boost user numbers. This approach divides larger objectives into achievable tasks, guiding where to direct your efforts and resources for maximum impact.

After identifying product initiatives, prioritization and scoping are key. Prioritization entails ranking initiatives based on value, effort, risk, and strategic alignment. Scoping involves defining the scope and requirements for each initiative, guided by customer feedback, market research, data analysis, and technical feasibility. These processes help balance your roadmap between short-term and long-term goals, ensuring alignment between customer and business needs. Hence, careful prioritization and scoping ensure your roadmap is both strategic and realistic.

When I advise companies on prioritizing their product initiatives or product features, we most often use the scales of expected impact and effort/feasibility. Both require time investment from the product manager, diverse feedback from cross-functional team members, and a health set of assumptions (since things always change). Scoping is a particularly onerous task that every product manager needs to get comfortable with. In our practice, we get as detailed as we can with our scoping and estimation process to ensure we have an exhaustive list of tasks and assumptions in place when the scoping is complete. That way our estimates are directionally accurate and enable conversations, even if they're attached to "best guess" assumptions.

It's about discerning which paths (initiatives) will most effectively lead you to your destination (goals), taking into account the terrain (market research), weather conditions (customer feedback), and the capacity of your vehicle (technical feasibility). The key is not just to choose the right paths but to sequence them in a way that balances speed with sustainability, ensuring you're not sacrificing long-term value for short-term gains

Prioritize your initiatives based on factors such as strategic importance, customer impact, business value, and feasibility. Use prioritization frameworks such as MoSCoW (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Won't-Have) or Value vs. Effort analysis to guide decision-making. Scope each initiative appropriately to ensure that it is manageable within the available resources and timeframe.

Communicating the roadmap effectively involves engaging with your team and stakeholders, offering insights into strategic directions and upcoming efforts

This is an important step which really should be fluid through the entirety of roadmap planning. Earlier in the process, collaboration and communication is vital to stay on task developing the product and not get lost in the weeds on marketing OKR's. The marketing team will be creating their roadmaps as well, look more for analysis and market fit in those earlier phases with the marketing teams alignment feedback. Overall in the end, you want to present your best Bob Ross for stakeholder buy-in, show them the pretty little trees!

Create a visual representation of your roadmap that communicates the prioritized themes and initiatives over time. Use tools such as Gantt charts, swimlane diagrams, or timeline visuals to depict the sequencing and dependencies of initiatives. Clearly communicate the rationale behind your roadmap decisions, including how each theme and initiative contributes to achieving strategic objectives. Share the roadmap with internal stakeholders, including product teams, executives, and cross-functional partners, to align everyone around the product direction and foster collaboration.

I wouldn't wait until this stage to begin communicating. In fact, I'd start at Step 1 - sharing the Product Strategy with a small group and then progressively to larger audiences. By doing this I'd be able to refine the roadmap and automatically ensure alignment across stakeholders.

As a product manager, visualizing the product roadmap involves laying out the sequence of product deliveries, breaking down steps, identifying dependencies, and pinpointing key actions. Use the visual roadmap as a communication tool; it is more engaging than traditional product plans or strategy documents. A well-designed roadmap helps achieve buy-in and alignment from product team members, stakeholders, and cross-functional partners. Once finalized, you can share the roadmap with customers.

Product roadmap is your short-term plan to move towards your product strategic goals. Every initiative in it - is your “investment” project. For every initiative you need to have strong expectation on impact it drives short or long term. The roadmap you build - is a “portfolio” of initiatives and depending on stage of the company you can have there more risky initiates dominating vs less risky.

As Roger L. Martin says, a strategy goes beyond planning—it's a coherent set of choices that positions you uniquely in the market. Your strategy defines the problem you're solving, the value you provide, and your market edge. While roadmaps chart the immediate journey, a well-defined strategy is the long-term vision that guides your path to sustained success.

Apart from the obvious, a unique trend I am picking up is Open/Public Raodmaps - Exposing your product roadmaps to public. Check Github, Atlassian etc. Imagine not sitting in countless meetings second guesing what user want or waiting endlessly for those elaborate user feedback results. If possible go public with the roadmap or even set of features. Let users paticipate and give feedback. Co create. Look up Lego Ideas, Lays - Do us a Flavour, Dell - Idea Storm etc.