Product Roadmap Guide Flashcards
(19 cards)
Key Product Manager Skills
Transparency - about your prioritization/roadmap
No - be able to say it and explain why
Prioritize while balancing the needs of customers
stakeholders.
Evidence-based decision-making
Metrics-driven when determining which opportunities to pursue.
Product Roadmap
a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product, often over time
Defines a strategic view of where the product is headed over the mid to long term; The roadmap is tied to the organization’s vision and strategic goals, often for the next 12 or more months
Product Roadmap Goals
Describing your vision and strategy
Providing a guiding document for strategy execution
Aligning internal stakeholders
Facilitating discussion of various options for scenario planning
Communicating progress and status of product development
Helping to communicate the strategy to external stakeholders
Product Top Down Strategic Planning Process
Product Vision > Product Goals
Product Roadmap > Release Plan and Backlog
Advantages of Top Down Strategic Planning
Facilitates productive discussions about future initiatives that tie directly to the product vision and goals
By sharing a high-level product vision, you can get the executive team, marketing, support, engineering management and the rest of the organization on board with the strategy
Developing Product Strategy
Spend time before you begin planning your roadmap determining the product’s mission, and then distill it into a simple statement your stakeholders can understand.
This includes product vision, the problems it solves, its target customers, and its value to the marketplace
Developing Product Goals
From the product vision you can derive product goals that will in turn influence the initiatives that are on your roadmap
Coming up with product goals is the step that helps you translate your product strategy into an executable plan
Product Goal Examples
Competitive Differentiation, Customer Delight
Technical Improvements, Sustain Product Features Improve Customer Satisfaction, Increase Lifetime Value Upsell New Services, Reduce Churn,
Expand Geographically, Mobile Adoption
Using Metrics to Define Roadmap
By defining the right metrics early, you can get better insight to guide your product decisions and your product roadmap
Describe their hypothesis, define a test, and measure - PMs do the same by setting goals and then setting metrics for those goals
the metrics you choose depend on the stage of your product, your industry, the type of product, and the size of your company
the most important consideration is to focus on a limited number of metrics that really matter - these are metrics that tie back to the organization’s top-line goals and business results
Customer Success and Product Engagement Metrics
Product usage / adoption (sign in, frequency, sharing)
Percent of users who take a specific action
Feature usage (usage vs. other features)
Which customer type is using certain features
Retention rate
Quality (NPS or average bugs)
Business Oriented Metrics
CAC (S and M exp / # of customers acqd) LTV (Avg. Rev per acc / rev churn rate) MRR ARR ARPU Conversion
Utilizing Metrics
These are actionable metrics that tie back to the strategic goals and initiatives you put on your product roadmap.
Revise the goals and metrics periodically — as the product matures, the metrics will need to change and likely grow with it
Places to gather product information
Customer Feedback Competition Sales and Customer Service Analyst Research Analytics and Metrics (from other in-house products)
Creating Themes
Group initiatives together into themes, so you can organize your roadmap in a way that describes value to customers and other stakeholders
Themes should be driven by the product’s strategic goals; if you can get executive alignment on the goals first, it’s easier to create themes that align with those goals
As part of the process it’s essential to discuss the metrics and KPIs that define whether the goal has been met
It is imperative to educate stakeholders about how you define the theme, how you are measuring success, and of course providing some detail about what is included in the theme
One of the key things you do as a product manager is communicate; getting the executive team and other stakeholders on board with your vision is essential.
Methods of Prioritization
Value vs. Complexity
Evaluate every opportunity based on its business value and its relative complexity to implement
Weighted Scoring
use the Value versus Complexity model, but layer in scoring to arrive at an objective result
Buy A Feature
an activity you can use with customers or stakeholders to prioritize a set of potential features
Opportunity Scoring
the idea is to measure and rank opportunities based on their importance versus customer satisfaction
Costs of Implementation
time to implement
level of expertise required
monetary cost
opportunity cost
none of your possible features or other initiatives can be added in a vacuum — you have to weigh each feature addition or bug fix for its value to the product as well as the business, but you must also consider the implementation cost against every other possible initiative
Execution
Once you have prioritized initiatives to reflect your strategic goals and reached a consensus among key stakeholders as to what will be included on the roadmap, it’s time to translate product vision into actionable steps
The roadmap you use now must become more detailed;
You’ll want to allocate resources for each initiative, assign ownership of initiatives to different team members, and designate release dates
Make sure each team within the engineering department knows what they are working on, and understands how their projects contribute to the bigger picture
You might find it easiest to create custom roadmaps for technical audiences that are more granular than those used at higher levels of the organization
Release
Once plans have been determined and engineers have been set in motion, it’s important to make sure all parties in your organization are on the same page
Use a high-level roadmap that communicates product direction, and be sure to exclude specific dates when presenting to customer-facing teams
The marketing team should understand the positioning of the new product or feature set so they can successfully bring it to market
The sales team should understand how the product will solve customers’ problems so they can show prospects its value.
Common Communication Pitfalls (or Do NOTS)
Let sales drive the conversation
Let engineering miss the bigger picture
Overshare Roadmap Details with Sales or Customers
