Problem-Based Roadmaps

Frustrated that your company seems like a feature factory? Plenty of new features are being shipped, but none of them are widely adopted and celebrated by customers. Maybe your team is working hard to copy what seems like the key features you are missing from competitors, but you struggle to catch up and overtake them. Maybe it’s frustration around deadlines? Features work as promised, but they only ship after teams miss three or four deadlines.

All these problems can be solved with problem-based roadmaps (PBRs). PBRs should be the standard for every modern organization, and yet, very few organizations use them well.?

Problem-based roadmaps are centered around validated customer problems. The work is complete when the customers report their problem has a satisfying solution. Let’s take a practical example, I want my posts to look like they were written by a professional writer. A traditional roadmap item would be to add “spelling and grammar checker”, “integrate ChatGPT to rewrite my posts”, “build a writing course”, “offer content on professional writing”, or “create a marketplace for freelance ghostwriters.”

What does it mean that a post looks like it was written by a professional writer? It means many different things to different people. For me, it means that they are clear, easy to follow and understand, and make you pause and think. How would I know that I am successful? Well, if they make you pause and think, then hopefully, that leads to comments and reposts or shares.?

A perfect roadmap item: Help professionals who write as a side hobby create content that engages and provokes more thought. Desired outcomes: double the average number of comments and reposts/shares. Those two items completely change how a team thinks.?

First, you have the exact threshold that makes this feature a killer product. There is no point in building a “spelling and grammar checker” because it will not help double the comments and shares. It’s a dud. Let’s move on.

A competitor has great content helping to become better at professional writing. Have I tried it? No. Do I want to take a course? No, I don’t have time. Back to brainstorming. How about a research tool that shows you the trending topics in the area of interest to help me stay topical? That could be better. What if we show you the most controversial topics (e.g., using sentiment analysis)? That is interesting indeed. Understanding the problem well helps you leapfrog whatever your competitors use to differentiate.

The team can generate multiple solutions and break solutions into multiple milestones. They promise to help me get more comments and shares, but they don’t say exactly how yet. This gives the team full control over the scope. They can remove certain aspects of the solution or pivot to an easier-to-build alternative without disappointing the customer.?

Problem-Based Roadmaps give you many additional advantages. They force the team to focus on problem validation before they can suggest any solutions. Whatever you will build will address a significant problem for your customers, and even if the initial idea doesn’t work out as planned, with a deep understanding of the problem space, the team will be able to quickly pivot to a superior alternative.

A product-Based Roadmap allows the team to continue learning and validating until the last reasonable moment. If you have a roadmap that stretches six months into the future, the team can start learning and validating ideas at least three months before the engineering team needs to have a final solution specced out.

PBRs focus on outcomes, not on outcomes. They remove the incentive to ship many features fast, making the team appear productive while unnecessarily adding to the complexity of the product and the cost of maintaining it.?

There are multiple ways of structuring the problems to be solved. Organizations that use personas, tend to include Who, e.g., professionals who write as a side hobby. Organizations that follow the Jobs to be Done methodology might prefer to replace the Who with When and Where or circumstances, e.g., when writing content for Linkedin. Then add the necessary details on what constitutes the problem, e.g., not creating posts that are thought-provoking. When possible, use direct comments from customers. Finally, include the outcomes customers are seeking, for example, doubling the engagement, i.e., comments and reposts.?

FAQ: Frequently, your customers will have experience using one of the competing products. Instead of describing the problem, they will prefer to tell you which competitor’s feature you should replicate. An easy way to turn the conversation is to ask them:?

• What does it help you to do (what job does it help you complete)?
• What problem does it help you address? In what circumstances do you use it? What does it solve?
• What do you hope to gain from it? In what way does it help you be more successful??

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