How to build OKR-Driven Product Roadmaps ?

Title of the article - How to build OKR-Driven Product Roadmaps ?

[ Source Reference(s) - Product Managers from Microsoft ]

OKR stands for Objective & Key Results.

Product Management consists of many aspects but some way to put it in-terms of three main aspects are 1. How to deliver "value" to clients, 2. How to create a shared alignment with leadership team, stakeholders & 3 How to build accountability & cross-team ownership.

There are multiple prioritization techniques as we know like WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First recommended by SAFe) etc. Now to build OKR-Driven Product Roadmap, one of the best place to start the journey is to go by Goal-driven feature prioritization, means you define the goal & then build features to meet the goal. Say for example, the goal is to Increase checkout rate then probably Upgrade to the newer, faster checkout API could be one of the feature that can be attributed to this goal. Now you can access opportunities, ideas, solutions against this feature & start building a prioritized roadmap.

Now concept says Define your goal - Get alignment - Stack rank features - Deliver roadmap. However, in-reality we have often multiple fuzzier goals. The features are more like hypothesis - meaning we are not sure if the feature will indeed deliver the outcome we are after & Feature impact is not easily quantifiable as the features are far from the goal. So how do we upgrade your approach ? so that the product strategy indeed drives the results that each phase of the Product Development Cycle.

That's where OKR-driven prioritization comes into rescue. Objective is the top outcome that you want to achieve and Key Results (or Key Result Areas - KRAs) are the interim milestones or sub-outcomes that when achieved will move the needle towards the objectives. Goal gets broken into granular, measurable outcomes so that we can easily track our goal and start ideating features that can be more easily mapped to our goals. Key results are inherently measurable so it is easy to quantify & prioritize them an in-turn makes it easier to get alignment with client stakeholders, business sponsors and also the team.

Objective - say - Increase checkout rate

Then couple of Key Results (KRs) could be Reduce clicks to checkout, Reduce drop off at the payment screen etc. Now to Bake this OKRs into the product life cycle you need to follow a cyclic flow of Strategy - Backlog prioritization - Planning - Build - Launch. Remember my word ! the flow is cyclic and not linear thinking.

To build the backlog we can position the Objective at the top and the Key Results are at the second level nodes. Now pick-up one KR and think about Features. Agile Team owns the Solution space in-terms of building & implementing the features. Backlogs needs to be built based on conversation with customers keeping in mind that 80% business value comes from 20% of features !

Once you do all this, now go to JIRA or Rally and start creating Epic, Features & User Stories (& NOT before that). Then go to Product Planning step with key results & features being mapped to the quarterly timelines (across quarters). Now you can go to the extent of mapping your story points (at user story level) & feature points at feature level to the Q1, Q2 timelines etc ! Investment should be proportional to the intent of the product (Commonsense !)

Then you to build phase to leverage OKRs to Course-correct feature-strategy, Fine-tune feature scopes & to supplement sprint reports. If your learning evolves, you can do all these so as to stay close to the Key Results.

Now coming back to launch the features (or product), document launch dates so you can attribute KR impact, Drive sprint-retro meetings based on KR scores & Include KR scores into feature release communication.

So by keeping OKRs at the core, we have ensured that we have an outcome driven strategy from the day one & we also used OKRs to drive the engagement at every stage of the product life cycle. We also created a guiding framework by using OKRs. Use OKRs as means to an end.

If you like to become a proficient Product Owner, Product Manager or a Product Coach & if you want me to mentor you hands-on in-terms of all these concepts on the product space of agility then you can enroll in my appropriate lesson plan as part of my Agile Mentorship Program (AMP) whose link is shared in the comments section of this post.

Your business sponsors & business leaders together with stakeholders will love this technique of OKR based prioritization to build product roadmaps. Proof - my own experience with them all till date.

#objectivesandkeyresults #productroadmap #strategy #prioritization #productowner #productmanager #productcoach #agile