Entries Tagged 'Roadmaps' ↓

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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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’.

EVERYONE claiming they are strategic. Will NO ONE ever acknowledge that their job or abilities are primarily tactical?  

To an extent this is false. Every task requires a strategy to complete it. If I start my day with an activity to execute a set of test cases, I will need a plan to execute the test cases and this makes me strategic. However, I suspect in the context above she was referring to being strategic in the grander sense of the strategy (i.e. the corporate strategy) and in this case she is right. Meet me on the fence!

Most employees are executing a corporate strategy or more likely something that has filtered down into the product strategy and therefore these employees are considered tactical and there is nothing wrong with this. Remember, without people the strategy does not exist, therefore your tactical roles are just as important. (I am not trying appease either side here or imply there are sides, we are all on the same team, but I sense “being strategic” is state of being important. My observation could be wrong.)

The people who are strategic are the people who are defining a strategy. We know from an earlier post that a strategy is a long term plan which means a Product Manager, who defines the roadmap, is by definition a strategic role. However the problems I see with most roadmaps are they are very tactical-based (putting a feature in your Q3 release is not a strategy) and do not articulate what success means or the plan to achieve success.

In a previous post, I discussed the need to consider primary activities and whether you have sufficient content in your roadmap to build on these activities to create additional value and minimize costs. Your roadmap will not end there, you also need to consider defining various strategies (e.g. competitive, operational, marketing, sales, technology, did I miss any?). These strategies will make up your product strategy and according to Michael Porter, must formulate a strategy that leads towards differentiation, cost leadership, or focus in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

In future posts I will dig into how product management can influence the strategy behind each one of the components of your product strategy.

Building a roadmap is starting to sound like a lot of work isn’t? It should, done right it is the most important document you can develop. Your product (and career) depends on it.