The Role of Product Roadmaps in Software Development

In product development, few topics spark as much debate as product roadmaps. Growing up, I was taught that in polite company, one should avoid discussing religion and politics. In a software company, you can add product roadmaps to that list as well.

The Debate Over Product Roadmaps

Builders often dread roadmaps, while businesses see them as essential for planning. My stance? With a few key adjustments, product organizations should use roadmaps to enhance visibility and foster shared insights. This approach can transform roadmaps into a supportive tool for builders and, most importantly, for the customers we all aim to serve.

Product roadmaps are crucial for providing strategic direction, aligning teams, and ensuring the success of product launches and organizational objectives. They also help address the concerns of other business units about the timing and content of upcoming releases. The real issue lies in rigid, top-down, business-dictated, time-bound roadmaps.

The Pitfalls of Rigid Roadmaps

In my experience, rigid roadmaps can hinder the growth of product organizations and achieving desired business outcomes for several reasons:

1. Perception: Excluding builders from the discovery process and encountering technical challenges after commitments are made can lead to scope creep, jeopardizing deadlines, and damaging team credibility.

2. Lack of Involvement: When businesses assign solutions without builder input, it creates top-down directives that disconnect teams from feeling creatively involved.

3. Apathy Toward Innovation: Strict adherence to roadmap deadlines can discourage innovation, as meeting timeframes takes precedence over developing comprehensive solutions for customer problems.

4. Neglect of Technical Investments: Business-assigned builds often overlook investments in platform improvements and technical infrastructure in favor of immediate revenue projects.

Enforcing time-bound roadmaps can foster a mercenary product culture that sidelines builder input and stifles innovation. Conversely, prioritizing problem-solving over meeting deadlines enhances ownership experiences for product teams and leads to more impactful results.

The Dangers of Abandoning Roadmaps

However, eliminating release commitments and visualizations has significant negative consequences for both the business and product teams:

1. Strategic Audit: Without visual tools, business leaders struggle to provide strategic feedback, leading to doubts about the relevance of the work.

2. Unnoticed Releases: Product launches become reactionary and often go unnoticed, causing companies to be perceived as disjointed and leading to complaints about low usage due to lack of awareness.

3. Technical Overlaps: Without a defined product plan, product teams may encounter overlaps in objectives and technical domains, resulting in confusion and disorganization.

A Balanced Approach: The Solution

Release visualization must stay, but ownership of this process should shift from the executive level to the product team. This adjustment, along with three key amendments, profoundly transformed a product team I collaborated with, which was previously hesitant to commit.

1. Improved Inquiry Skills: Product teams should lead problem-solving for their products. Effective inquiry with other business units involves prioritizing problem-solving over immediate solutions. Refining the questions asked by product teams has yielded better results. Simple changes like asking:

• What specific problem are you aiming to solve?
• Should we engage directly with the customer, alongside my technical lead, to gather insights?
• Can you describe how customers currently address this problem?
• What's your vision of success, and how will we measure customer satisfaction?

2. Key Customer Exercise: Empower your product team to create a visual tool to articulate their purpose. Let them choose a name they feel comfortable with for this document. Here's how I introduced this concept to a hesitant product team: "Team, I need a document by next week to present to our five largest customers. It should outline the technology we plan to release to address their problems. If successful, they can confirm or refocus our efforts even before we start coding. It's a win-win." The resulting document often resembles a roadmap, but with the key difference being that they were the authors.

3. Business, Customer, Technical Balance: Establish a quarterly focus on addressing business, customer, and technical challenges equally, allowing for flexibility as needed. The product manager worked with their team to achieve this balance and reported any deviations company-wide with explanations. Leveraging our product software, the team could promptly identify any overemphasis in specific categories. When the engineering team encountered conflicts between requested technical investments and pressing business goals, they addressed them more directly. This simple change proved highly effective.

Takeaway

By shifting ownership of roadmaps to product teams and fostering a problem-solving culture, we can make roadmaps a valuable tool for both builders and businesses, driving better outcomes for our customers.