Skip to main content

Some Industry Practice and Thoughts on Roadmaps

Recently, I signed up for doing an internal talk about roadmaps, and what they are generally all about. I figured this post would be a good start to get myself into crystallizing the message up front.

Keeping in mind, roadmaps are but one component in an extremely complex domain involving many sciences, so this is one of those scratching-the-surface-posts.

Who's saying what out there

Before we start inventing our own wheels, it's nice to review what is the state of roadmaps out there. Perhaps there is some "industry best practice" ;)

So I'll begin by collecting information from the first, best sources I know about.

I happen to follow a couple of product management authorities on Twitter: Melissa Perri and John Cutler. Then recently, our internal head of product recently pointed out Roman Pichler. Finally, there's the venerable Marty Cagan who I reckoned has written a thing or two about roadmaps, and that was indeed the case.

Note that each of these have published lots of more writing and even books on the surrounding subjects of product management, but here I've just gone through what I could quickly find online, going roughly from older to more recent:

Marty Cagan

... has written a lot of seminal work on the topic, and these are the ones I quickly found have to do with roadmaps in particular:

In Product Roadmaps (Jan 2009), he lays down some foundations and terminology that just makes sense, like what a product roadmap is, the product strategy that needs to be behind it, and so on. He points out the danger of getting lost in feature requests, wishing we'll focus more on simpler, higher level plans of delivering user value. Sounds wise!

In The Alternative to Roadmaps (Sep 2015) and the correlating FAQ, he repeats the issues of traditional feature focus, and goes deeper into the underlying causes that bring teams in that direction. He suggests The Product Vision combined with Business Objectives (recommending OKRs in particular), while concrete tasks go to the Product Backlog.

Roman Pichler

Being a trainer, he offers sound basics and easy-to-understand frameworks as preparation for his strategy and roadmap course (see the Prerequisites and Prep Work section), and he has a collection of blog posts online on the subject, and books.

He repeats Cagan's plea to focus on outcomes (using the words goals and benefits), and shares some very neat templates. Fit the roadmap in between the strategy and backlog, and keep it simple. I really do like Pichler's structured and simple way of explaining the material, plus the tips for getting buy-in.

Melissa Perri

... wrote Rethinking the Product Roadmap (May, 2014), also suggesting we replace the traditional, over-filled, over-detailed roadmaps. She thoroughly illustrates the current issues, and suggests the Problem Roadmap to remedy. I understand problem here as being the inverse or negated form of outcome/objectives/goals/benefits mentioned earlier. She also suggests a quarterly cycle to explore/validate the problem at hand.

In Effective Product Roadmaps (Feb, 2017), Perri refines the approach and gives some very solid examples of what a better roadmap could be. Adding context (vision, challenge, target condition) on top, she picks up the term theme (which Cagan also mentioned has caused some confusion in product management history), and applies it to individual areas that have hypothesis/outcomes. Each theme can also be in a particular stage: Discovery or Delivery. Finally, she imagines this roadmap being part of a cross-team Portfolio Roadmap.

She recently published a very interesting sounding book called Escaping the Build Trap.

John Cutler

... is a prolific writer on the subject, often tracing the discussion back to systems thinking and organizational, cultural aspects.

A Map from Goals, Around Assumptions, Through Tasks, Towards Results (Sep, 2016) introduces a structured expression of Because/By/While/Without, suggesting that solutions are recursively problems (with finer solutions). It reminds me a bit of User Stories, forcing us to think about The Why.

He advises how to Stop Setting Up Product Roadmaps To Fail (Apr, 2016).

He repeats the sentiment that the others have made before him: Keep Features Off Your Roadmap (Feb, 2017)

And a big collection of thought-provoking 40 Roadmap Item Questions (Mar, 2018)

The need for a "solid roadmap that everyone understands" is a race to the bottom on some level (twitter thread from Dec, 2018).


So, that's about what I have time for reading up on in advance of my talk, so I'll end the post there. Let me know if I definitely missed some important sources on what roadmaps are all about!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --