How to build a product roadmap
By: Adam Edgell-Bush
Tags: Startup, Product, Product Management

I wrote previously about how founders see fully formed versions of their product and company when they start their businesses. The visions often do not take into account all the work that will be required in getting there; the trials and tribulations of getting a product to market and finding your first customers.

Challenges exist throughout the startup journey, but one of the most difficult ones — and one in which we at Cleverly find ourselves today — is what to focus on next. When customers each want different things:

How do we build a product roadmap?

First, what is a roadmap? It is not a list of feature requests (or bug reports!). It is not the product of a brainstorming session or the dev team’s ideas for what to work on. It is a distillation of all of these things to create a plan for the product: what will be released and when.

As Eisenhower once (sort of) said: ‘a plan is useless but planning is invaluable’. And in building your product roadmap you will be forced to think in a way that will payoff in a number of different ways.

There will always be tradeoffs.

The Triangle of Truth … there is always a tradeoff between Good, Fast & Cheap

And whilst I am distilling the messages of this article into other people’s quotes, the other one to note is Steve Blank, the startup soothsayer who said ‘No business plan survives first contact with a customer’.

Roadmaps need to be flexible.

One of the most important reasons why this is the case is that product roadmaps do not exist in isolation. They are there to support business goals and as such, they need to change to support shifts in business focus, or for example to match the needs in current or prospective customers.

So, below we can provide the steps that we are going through at Cleverly in order to decide our own roadmap. As a company that utilises an agile approach, this is designed to be flexible and is subject to change but it has made sense to us in our present stage.

Define your business strategy

As mentioned above, the product roadmap — just like, for example, a marketing plan — supports the company’s strategy. As such, you should have a defined corporate strategy. For example, are you looking to target a particular segment of the market, with companies in a specific geographic region and of a particular size doing a limited set of activities? Are there particular pain points of your target market that you want to address before expanding your offering?

Ideate around your strategic objectives

One you have a defined strategy, you can then brainstorm around ways of delivering your value proposition. This element of the roadmap development process could include discussions around form factor; channel partners; acquisition channels and broad discussions of user experience.

Define associated features & functionality

Once things such as target market and channel strategy(s) are at least partially developed, you can look to overlay more defined features and functionality. For example, if you have determined that working with channel partners would be an acquisition that you would like to test (or better, have tested with some positive results), are there integrations that would make this more scalable? As you can probably tell by now, these are dynamic processes whereby in moving onto a subsequent stage the discovery process may influence decisions in previous stages.

Batch the above into releases

Once you have started to put together the list of features and functionality, these can be organised into releases. Companies differ in their desired frequency of releases or updates. Even if your company is one that opts for releasing often, features should be combined so as to more efficiently handle deployment and prior testing. When providing roadmap information to clients, as companies often do, it is also often useful to have these linked via themes or areas of focus to ensure they are engaged with your product but maintaining flexibility and corporate intelligence.

Visualise the above

This might seem like a ‘nice to have’ but for the sake of saving time in subsequent discussions, everyone involved should be able to actually see the roadmap. It is incredibly helpful in getting everyone in the company to see the strategy and development working in conjunction and facilitates making changes if required. There are a number of software options for producing roadmaps, in case it is beyond the scope of your project management tools.

Slightly more advanced

Document the critical path

The critical path is a term used in project management to illustrate, for example, the precedents that must be satisfied in order to progress through the project. For example, if you were building a house, the critical path may include steps such as: buy land, hire architect; approve drawings; appoint contractors. Technically speaking, the critical path is the shortest route by which the project outcomes can be realised as this is a function of completing everything you need to do up to any point in a project. This is really useful in being able to see the effects of changes on the roadmap.

As I say, we at Cleverly have been putting this together for ourselves for the next phase of the company’s growth.

This is a framework that we think works for our situation, and hope it may help you in thinking about your own product and its evolution.