Scenario Planning in your Roadmap

I found this interesting line reading the December issue of Product Bytes from Rich Mironov the author of Art of Product Management.

Our goal for scenario planning is not to predict the future, but instead to prepare for it: have well-thought-out answers for a handful of possibilities, and practice reacting strategically to outside events.

This is an important point, very important. Change is going to happen and how you prepare for it is going to separate you from the followers. I would suggest that you begin allocating an hour every week to review your roadmap to ensure the strategies and assumptions are still accurate. (Tell me you don’t want one hour every week to think strategy, and I know we can eliminate something from your schedule to find an hour.)

Every week you ask, what could possibly change every week? Consider the following possibilities: a) a new mega customer with a contractual commitment for certain features, b) a senior developer has left the company, c) a natural disaster, d) a competitor launched a preemptive feature into the market ahead of you, and e) a financial market meltdown. I would bet a pretty safe wager that three or more of these happened to you last year. True some of these may be major and some unlikely, but bugs are an ever-present disruption among other daily events that derail your plans.

What can you do to plan for alternate outcomes? We discussed the usage of success statements in a previous post which will define a happy path to success. As I was reminded by someone, planning for success does not guarantee success. Running a simple scenario planning technique on each of your succes statements will help you plan for potential alternate outcomes. The technique states that for each statement to ask yourself the following three questions: 1) what is a possible alternate outcome, 2) what is your recommended course of action and 3) what course of action would you avoid.

This simple technique will provide some comfort that you have run your options through some possible outcomes and show the readers of your plan that success is not guaranteed but you are ready for change. Remember a ‘fail to plan’ is a ‘plan to fail’.