How to turn yours into a company growth goldmine
If you’re a software company bringing a product to market, you’ve probably developed a plan for how you’ll do that.
But for many, this plan is essentially an internal piece with strategies and tactics... but contrary to popular belief, that isn’t what a product roadmap is.
A genuine product roadmap is so much more – it can be the difference between success and failure of your product or business.
In this short guide we’re going to explore what a roadmap really is, how to build one, how to capture and maintain one, and what you can use one for.
This is a valuable 12 minute read, but if you only have two minutes, jump here to read the key takeaways.
OK, let’s explore how your product roadmap can be a strategic hero piece that inspires internal and external stakeholders, attracts more customers, and ultimately grows your business.
Advice is only as valuable as the giver, so let’s meet the brains behind this eBook’s insights:
— CMO, Outpost24
Bob is a champion of customer value and experience. He’s an engineer by education, a marketer by occupation, and a product manager by inclination. He has led marketing, product management, and business development functions for large and small security and e-business companies in all regions of the world.
Bob’s eye for innovation has allowed him to identify and advise on new approaches for Episerver, Check Point Software, and Pointsec to name a few.
— CTO and Tech Lead, Monterro
Per is a powerhouse of insight, creativity, and advice at Monterro. He has over 20 years of experience in the software industry as a senior executive including as SVP, Global CTO and Managing Director EMEA at Episerver.
Over his illustrious career, he has become a huge believer that a culture of mutual respect between your departments, enables healthy and heated discussions that drive growth.
Ready?
Let’s do this.
Bob Egner“Many think of a product roadmap as a game plan for how to direct internal work. In reality this is only a fraction of what it can do.”
A product roadmap is a short, inspiring representation of your plans for future product capabilities and improvements – and how they solve specific customer problems.
It communicates not just how you aim to solve these problems, but also what differentiates your approach from your competitors, and how that approach adds value for the customer.
For a software company, it outlines the route to market for your offering which means it affects everyone in the organisation. This includes all internal teams and external stakeholders (such as existing and potential customers, and partners etc).
The problem is that product roadmaps are often confused for another crucial production document – a backlog.
A backlog is a detailed list of action points to be addressed for products in development. It sets a timeline for the development department to action those points and is used for internal audiences only.
A product roadmap on the other hand, adds the external stakeholder dimension and serves a higher purpose than a backlog – it’s an encapsulation of strategic intent.
The product roadmap aligns teams around vision and strategy and can also be used to signal ambition, win the right customers, keep current customers, and attract investors.
There are four key steps to building your product roadmap...
Per Ivansson“Determine the “Why” for your product – its strategic reason for being. Determine your audience and tailor the roadmap to resonate with them. Stay flexible – because your roadmap will change.”
Define why and how you solve your customers’ problem(s), how that connects to your product’s direction, and your company’s strategy and ambition. The result of these discussions should then be distilled into an engaging, high-level narrative.
The product manager provides critical insight in this stage, particularly through cultivating customer intimacy. This is where your product manager becomes a true customer advocate, gaining a detailed understanding (and prioritisation of) the issues your customers face, alternative solutions, how they expect to work with you, and the best ways to reach them.
Clearly, you can’t just take dictation from every customer and throw it all on a list – you’ll end up in the Henry Ford trap (with faster horses).
But equally, if you use too small a sample, or guess based on intuition, you can quickly end up with a misrepresentative view.
So to analyse customer needs more effectively, it pays to assemble a cross-functional team. This team should include representatives from all departments including: UI/UX design, engineering, sales, support, marketing, and finance amongst others. Establishing this team will also help ensure you align customer needs with business goals.
Focus your identified customer need using the following three lenses:
Identify the steps to realising your product vision and make a timeline based on priority.
This should be broken down into what you’re going to do:
Once you have this in place, your product owner and development teams can break these steps down into epics, user stories, features, and tasks.
Prioritisation will pit competing forces against each other – so expect a lot of healthy but heated discussion across departments.
For instance: Automation and analytics are vital to product success – especially for scalability, maintenance, and updates. But as they don’t sound exciting, no one pays for them or they may be expected by the customer– so it’s important to balance pragmatismagainst wow-factor features.
The product manager should lead this process and outline how your company can grow with your product roadmap.
But they probably aren’t experts in the building or implementation of that product. So if you’re growing your company, a solid maturation step is to split the roles of a product manager and a product owner. The product owner should set and prioritise the work needed to ensure the most valuable and proper functionality of your product.
Step four, synthesise your input into one roadmap: one statement of direction, value, priority and ambition – all reflected by what you choose to do and not do.
Per IvanssonDon’t underestimate the importance of trust. Take the time to instill a culture where you’re all seen as peers and everyone’s input is valued. And ensure all teams understand why this is important – you’ll reap the rewards.”
Defining your strategy and expertly communicating it – that’s the real value.
But it can be helpful to anchor the narrative to something ‘tangible’ such as a Powerpoint slide.
We’ve also seen quick videos, chalk-talks, webinars, blog posts – but format isn’t the important thing: a clear and exciting narrative is.
It can also be beneficial to include the past in this narrative too. This shows you’ve delivered on previous promises, that you’re on a journey and have come a long way already, and can build trust around your ability to achieve current goals.
It’s vital you only have one roadmap – used for internal and external teams. If you separate these out (one roadmap for internal channels and separate external ones) it’s likely the external one will quickly become overladen with ‘extra features’ to attract customers.
This can be extremely demoralising for development and threaten your cross company alignment and buy-in.
Bob EgnerIt’s important that the plan is realistic and that a Project Manager doesn’t promise too much in the product roadmap. Otherwise the development team can feel that they’re always behind, or that the plan isn’t realistic, or that the roadmap isn’t relevant.
Teams across your organisation can draw value from the roadmap. For example:
DevOps teams get definition and prioritisation of actions for execution, and an outline of what delivery will need to look like.
Marketing can establish value based messaging, storytelling and brand positioning.
Sales can create sales enablement material focused on differentiation and product narrative.
Customer success teams get visibility on what’s coming and use it to drive intelligent cross-sell and up-sell.
Development operations get an outline of what delivery might look like.
All teams can also gain understanding of the requirements of/changes needed in the customer’s environment to get the most out of the product. It also highlights how and when changes should happen e.g. international expansion.
Crucially, it ensures all of the above is tied back to value.
These areas guide executive leaders and the CEO to better direct the company towards its goal: to attract more customers, add more value, and ultimately grow your company.
The roadmap provides you with a battleplan to pick apart, challenge rigorously, and forge into a robust map for your whole company.
First, to ensure that your product roadmap empowers your teams, you need great lines of communication so each department can see how their contribution is tied to the overall narrative. This is particularly true to help the development department see the vision and buy into it.
To maintain a product roadmap, we recommend a quarterly update. Depending on market changes this may simply be validation of current direction. But it also allows for another vital function – to take things away that aren’t working and adapt to emerging trends.
And don’t be afraid to change the roadmap. Since it’s not a development backlog with dates, there should be no commitments riding on sequence or content.
In fact, you should always point out the fine print “roadmap priorities may change at any time” to remind your audience.
Per Ivansson“Prioritisation changes need to be thought through. E.g. Sales might move a feature from a long term goal to a short term one to appeal to a growing customer need. This could cause major headaches for the development team”
As you reevaluate, prioritisation can also change but it’s crucial you consider the impact the change will have on your teams. Again, the impact on the development department is of particular concern.
Remember, this all comes back to communicating your product vision to the customer. So if you make substantive changes, let customers know.
They may be planning their future based on a product or feature. If you cancel it or move it out, they should know (and know why).
And that’s it. – A product roadmap can provide much more value than just telling development what to build next – it is a way to help all stakeholders see your vision of how you plan to change their world. It’s a strategic and engaging hero piece that can be used to drive your business forward – it’s customer-centric, based on a rigorous business case, and adequately prioritised.
Now you know how to build, maintain, and use one for your business. Here are our key takeaways...
A good roadmap
to internal and external stakeholders. Make it visually attractive, inspiring, and connect it to a bold and easily communicable narrative.
to empower teams and build trust with your customers.
to ensure each team knows the value they can extract from the roadmap and crucially, how the task they’re working on contributes to the overall vision It also helps them to know what to prioritise.
We’re Monterro, an investment firm (of the get-your-hands-dirty with strategy and operational support variety) that helps Nordic software companies hit their biggest growth goals.
