Entries Tagged 'Roadmaps' ↓
February 9th, 2010 — Product Management, Roadmaps, Strategy
I suspect that one of the major impacts to your roadmap is a budget change. And by change, I mean a reduction in available funds for product development. I suspect a lot of you dealt with this last year as you suffered through many rounds in workforce reduction. I am curious how you handled that.
Picture this scenario, late last fall you reviewed all your feature requests, dusted off the roadmap, the business case is shiny again and it is all aligned with your vision and the corporate vision. With your budget approved, you are ready for 2010. Enter January 2010 and due to slightly missing the Q4 numbers you are now forced to chop $75,000 from your budget. Basically the equivalent of one developer. What do you do?
- Band together with the other product lines and pray for Management to realize that chopping 75k is guaranteed to affect more than 75k in revenue this year?
- Offer to combine forces with another product to share revenue (knowing that you will likely never be able to undo this) in hopes that your new increased revenue will offset your requirement to reduce cost?
- Suck it up, chop the developer and leave the roadmap unchanged and modify the business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost but leaving the revenue numbers unchanged? The more with less scenario or in this case same with less.
- Suck it up, chop the developer and scale back the roadmap and business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost and revenue numbers?
I am less inclined to do anything that will affect revenue for future years. Depending on how many rounds of workforce reduction you have survived, I am less comfortable selling the same with less scenario. If you are in your first or second round, go with that. Teams generally perform better after the first and second cuts. I am not hopeful they will “see the light” and let you keep a full team in hopes of achieving your revenue targets. Although, this is probably the scenario I start with. Sell the vision, sell the facts and get buy-in on the business case. Failing that, cut, reduce and move forward.
I am hopeful someone will share a situation where a budget cut has affected their roadmap and how they responded.
I meant no offense to any development types by suggesting we cut you, it was a just a random example. We really hate cutting our roadmap in any scenario.
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October 7th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
Seems to be a hot topic this week, there has been many discussions about strategy and roadmaps. Is it roadmap update season already?
Steve Johnson said: “Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features.”
OnPM said: “re:Roadmap: R a hi-level *plan* based on what is known today. May include strategy (good or bad) but may not.”
OnPM also offered up a couple posts to read: What’s the deal with Product Roadmaps? and Agile/Scrum and Product Roadmaps.
It seems from the discussions and comments that the general consensus is that if you open PowerPoint, plot out a timelines and insert features into the timeline, you might have what is considered by some as roadmap, but not a strategy. It also seems that most agree that your roadmap is your strategy. So what is missing? What information do you need in your roadmap to make it a strategy?
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September 15th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
 I swear I have written half a dozen posts in my head in the past week, either while driving or walking. I really need to learn to channel my inner Winston Churchill diction skills. Alas those ideas are lost for now.
Over the past month I have been mentally wrestling with change. Death, taxes and change are about the only things guaranteed. With respect to change, you can be guaranteed change will happen and will affect something.
Change can and will come from market conditions, sales, marketing, customers, executives, support, engineering and many more sources. Change can and will affect everything including revenue, cost, project plans, feasibility, roadmaps and many more.
As product mangers, every day you have to deal with change. Every day you have to deal with the effect of that change on your product. The successful product managers, the ones who cope with change the best, are the ones with a sound strategy that reduces the risk of change and/or enables them to respond to the change.
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July 31st, 2009 — Leadership, Product Management, Roadmaps, Strategy
 Another great article from McKinsey. Do you subscribe? I just finished reading “Leadership lessons for hard times by Dennis Carey, Michael Patsalos-Fox, and Michael Useem. Here are some thought provoking comments…
Phil Hildebrand, of HealthMarkets, and Steve Miller, of Delphi, both remarked on the importance of decisiveness to prevent problems from escalating. But it can be hard to achieve in the absence of perfect data.
Did he mean perfect or accurate? What are you measuring to help you make decisions?
“The world moves at a pace that requires strategy to be front and center all of the time,” says NCR’s Bill Nuti.
How often you are reviewing your strategy? Weekly? Why not?
“People will take any hill, walk into the worst situation, if they have faith in your leadership and know what your strategy and objectives are,” says Tyco’s Breen.
There is lots of talk in the industry about leadership and communication. As product managers, with a constant craving to ask why, you have to believe that the others on the team as asking why too. Share your ideas and tell them why and listen to feedback.
While acknowledging current difficulties, it is just as important to emphasize what is being done to build a company’s longer-term health. Fishman, like others, has spent much time talking about his company’s mid- and long-term strategy…
The reality is that there is never a valid excuse for taking your eye off the long-term strategy. Sure your definition of long-term might be different someone else’s definition of long-term, but you need to be constantly planning and feeding the planning engine with data.
If you don’t invest in the future and don’t plan for the future, there won’t be one.—George Buckley, chairman, president, and CEO of 3M
Not sure I need to add anything else to this.
Image Source: The McKinsey Quarterly |
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July 11th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy, Win/Loss Analysis
| This is a bit of a recap article as my head has just been jammed with distractions over the past two weeks.
Over the past 6 months (almost half-year anniversary!) I have jumped in and out of a few topics including roadmaps, strategy and win loss analysis. From time to time, I recall some of the posts and the following question pops into my head – “How does doing X make me strategic?” It doesn’t. Just having a roadmap doesn’t make you strategic. Just doing win/loss doesn’t make you strategic. They are, however excellent supporting activities.
As we know from previous articles, your roadmap is the record of communication for your strategy. Included in that document is the plan, the vision, your mission, your value network and all of the supporting material that you have accumulated for your roadmap.
So just doing win loss analysis won’t make you strategic, but if you tie it back as either an activity that extends or validates your roadmap then it is strategic.
You might be wondering about roadmap because in one paragraph I said having a roadmap doesn’t make you strategic but in the other I said that it is strategy. Having a roadmap where you plot out these features in these releases at these times is hardly being strategic. However, if you have put the time in to document the plan, why it is the plan and what the end looks like, you now have a strategic document and can consider yourself strategic.
Strategy is hard and you have to put a lot of time and effort into it. Every activity has (should have?) potential to affect your roadmap and you need to be prepared to record and articulate it.
More on these topics through time. I would like to take the time to thank the readers, the commenters and the people who share my posts. Much appreciated!
For an added bonus to this post and in case you missed them, here are the three most viewed posts since the start of this blog:
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June 21st, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
 It’s easy and I have the answer for you. It boils down to one answering one simple question.
Is this a roadmap supporting activity?
You know I believe that your roadmap is your strategy and that it needs constant attention and caring. It changes daily, whether you want to believe that or not.
Product management is a strategic function and your daily work routine consists of a series of tasks, or activities that range from meetings, answering email and writing (and likely many, many more). Each activity you perform through the day should be validating your roadmap, delivering your roadmap or extending your roadmap. If you can justify an activity as being a roadmap supporting activity then please proceed.
So there you have it, a simple pre-meeting question or summary, in conclusion statement for each activity throughout the day.
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June 11th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
 Ahhhh roadmaps… if you have heard me speak, you know that I believe your roadmap is your most important document. I have probably written that in the archives somewhere too. It should be reviewed weekly, maybe you change it maybe you do not. You should carry it with you at all times and you should know it cold. That being said, is it spelled roadmap or road map? Stupid spell check.
One of the most important aspects of your roadmap is your product vision. Your vision is one of the pillars in your strategy along with your mission statement and value network. Often people will confuse mission and vision statements. Your vision statement will focus on the future and your mission statement will focus on the present. You absolutely need to own both the vision and mission for your product. Even the agilists will tell you, the product manager, to own this.
Joel Spolsky reprinted an article by Jim Highsmith. Scary, but this article originally appeared in August 2001, almost 8 years ago. Despite that, I think it is very relevant to where we are today. The article offers a simple vision framework from Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm. It follows the form:
- For (target customer)
- Who (statement of the need or opportunity)
- The (product name) is a (product category)
- That (key benefit, compelling reason to buy)
- Unlike (primary competitive alternative)
- Our product (statement of primary differentiation)
You will likely adjust your vision over-time as markets evolve but I think this gives you a great framework for developing an easy to understand and communicate vision. Developing your vision is one of those writing exercises that is a REALLY important task that will require you to put the time in to get it right. You need to define your vision and mission statements, champion them and constantly test them on various audiences.
Does anyone have another framework or an example of vision statements that they like better than Moore’s?
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June 11th, 2009 — Pricing, Product Management, ProductCamp, Roadmaps, Win/Loss Analysis
 This past weekend (and back in May for ProductCamp RTP) I had the honour of having my proposed session selected by my peers at Product Camp Atlanta. The discussion that the topics generate is what lifts the value of the session. I have posted my slides on slideshare.net (slideshare is youtube for product management) so you can access the resources embedded.
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