Banks Should Maintain Two Different Product Roadmaps

Tip 9: Build two product roadmaps -- a "now-next-later" roadmap and a “WAI” roadmap.

Product roadmaps are far less common than they ought to be and, for banks that have them, we commonly hear “yeah, but it’s old and we haven’t revisited it.” The value of using them is to shift teams toward delivering value rather than delivering to capacity, which tends to leave heavy-hitters working on less-valuable items.

The first roadmap you should have for your product is “now-next-later” (NNL).

The NNL serves as a vision, a compass, and a plan. This will help you communicate priorities, break work into time-based chunks, and easily reorganize when needed.

• Now: Immediate items. Have the most detail. Tied directly to impact (KPIs, OKRs, etc.)
• Next: Mutable items, but with distinct ties to value. Can change in requirements and priority as 'now' items are worked on.
• Later: These are things to talk about. There is a belief that they can add value to the product, but aren't deemed as immediately impactful as 'now' or 'next' items...yet.

With the NNL roamap, teams focus on the order of to-dos rather than specific dates to fit work into. The items in each list can be shuffled and reordered to ensure a constant focus on value and results.

The second roadmap we recommend organizations keep is the “WAI” - or, wild @$$ ideas roadmap.

WAI is an input roadmap.

This is the place where all of those stakeholder ideas and wishes from various members of other teams are documented. You don’t want them clouding your view of priorities and objectives; at the same time, it’s important to ensure outside perspectives are considered from time to time.

With a WAI, whenever one of those stakeholders asks, “remember that idea I brought up?”, you’re ready.