Dear Productees,
We hope this week has treated you all well. We are back at it again with another week of Product Gems #10 πππ!
Last week, we talked about the final step in the product development process; Product Lifecycle Management! Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an essential part of the product development process, which encompasses everything from the inception of an idea to the product's end-of-life.
Here are all of the steps to Product development Cycle
Idea Generation: The first step in product development is generating ideas for new products or identifying areas for improvement in existing products. This can come from various sources, such as customer feedback, industry trends, or internal brainstorming sessions.
Market Research: After identifying a potential product idea, market research is conducted to determine its feasibility, potential demand, target market, and competition. This can involve surveys, focus groups, interviews, and secondary research on industry trends, consumer behavior, and market size.
Product Planning: Based on the insights gathered from market research, a plan is developed for the product, including its features, design, and functionality. This may involve creating sketches, 3D models, or digital prototypes.
Prototype Development: A prototype is developed to test the product and identify any potential issues or areas for improvement. This can involve creating a physical prototype or a digital model, depending on the type of product being developed.
Testing and Validation: Once the prototype is developed, it is tested to ensure that it meets the desired specifications and functions as intended. This may involve user testing, quality control testing, and other types of validation.
Launch Planning: Once the product is tested and validated, it is ready to be launched. This involves developing marketing materials, creating a distribution strategy, and identifying potential partners or retailers.
Post-Launch Evaluation: After the product has been launched, it is important to evaluate its success and identify any areas for improvement. This may involve collecting feedback from customers, analyzing sales data, and making adjustments to the product or marketing strategy as needed.
Product Life Cycle Management: Once the product has been successfully launched, it is important to manage its life cycle by continuously improving its features and functionality, monitoring the market and competition, and adjusting the marketing and distribution strategy as needed.
Now that is covered, it is time present a surprise. I would like to present to you a new approach. I thought it would be good for you all to hear about product from different perspectives in my network. With that being said, I present to you all to Nikil Ramanathan. Nikil currently works as a Senior Product Manager at Jackpocket. He has extensive experience working as a product manager for Amazon and WeWork. So please, help me give a warm welcome to NIKIL RAMANATHAN!!!!!!
How to Create an Effective Product Roadmap
A common question I get from more Junior Product Managers that are starting to take the next step in their PM career is the following:
How do I go about creating a product roadmap for my team?
On the surface, it seems straightforward. There are countless resources and articles on the subject of product roadmaps. However, putting it in practice is much harder, even for experienced product managers. Often times, the environments product leaders are working in make it difficult to identify the overall company vision, strategy, and goals, which in turn make it more difficult for the product team to build a roadmap.
So how do product managers navigate the ambiguity and deliver on a product roadmap?
Before we jump into how to develop a product roadmap, itβs first helpful to define what a product roadmap is NOT.
A product roadmap is NOT a list of features.
A product roadmap is NOT a list of solutions.
A product roadmap is NOT a product delivery plan.
So what is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a guide that maps out the strategy and direction of your product that aligns to your companyβs goals and objectives.
In order to create an effective product roadmap, you should strive to first have a few pieces in place.
Defining the product is a key element of product management as you might remember from the first edition of Product Gems.
βDefine the product by creating a product vision, road map, and backlog. This involves setting clear goals and priorities and communicating them to the development team.β
You should have a clearly defined product vision. A great product vision identifies the purpose of your product, where your product is going, and how your future aspirations will be accomplished. These are typically not time-bound.
The product vision is likely set by the leader of your product teamβa Chief Product Officerβor the most senior leader of the product organization and requires input from your entire product organization.
From this product vision, there are two ways you can move forward with a roadmap.
The first is by creating an objective-based roadmap. This type of roadmap takes your existing product vision and aligns it to specific goals. These can be your company goals or objectives. Your company may call these their big rocks. Your company may define these at the product team level. These goals are typically time-bound, often quarterly or yearly.
Once those goals are outlined, you must then specify your key results. The key results should be quantifiable and be controllable and measurable by your product team. The objective/key results model, popularized by Andy Grove at Intel, is a great way to set your product roadmap.
For example, letβs say my product vision is to delight sports fans by offering access to live games, real-time stats, and high streaming quality at a low cost.
An objective that aligns with this vision may be to:
Expand to new international sports markets
A key result against this objective may be to:
Increase customer acquisition by 10%
Notice that this still gives your product team the luxury to determine what markets to target, what offering they will provide, and how they will go-to-market. This can be outlined by key customer themes and business opportunities or through specific customer ideas.
Again, at the roadmap level, these should not be specific features or solutions. The roadmap should give room for product discovery, user testing, and idea validation in order to identify what the right features or solutions are to drive the business outcomes the product team owns.
The second option is an outcome-based roadmap. This type of roadmap takes the existing product vision and aligns it to customer problems, which are represented by business outcomes. By framing the roadmap through a set of customer problems, you can focus on how to solve problems rather than jumping into implementation. Furthermore, you can identify leading indicators for these problems and use product discovery to identify which of a series of solutions drives the objective you want to achieve.
Using the same example, for company x, my product vision is to delight sports fans by offering access to live games, real-time stats, and high streaming quality at a low cost.
A few customer problems I could solve would be:
I want to watch games with others including my friends and family
I want to watch sports I canβt watch anywhere else
I want to be able to customize my experience
I could then identify the leading indicators for these customer problems. These might look like
% of users who have a device registered across multiple locations
% of users who watched multiple sports in a single day
% of users who spent more than an hour engaging with the app without watching content
Again, in an outcome-based roadmap, there are no features or solutions outlined. Rather these customer problems present ideas and opportunities that can be validated with customers over time. There are many ways to solve these problems; the point of the roadmap is to focus on solving these problems to achieve the business outcome you desire.
An effective visual of an objective or outcome-based roadmap model can be seen below:
The key takeaway here is that product roadmaps focus on the product strategy and enable the product discovery process. They are not about product delivery. In fact, roadmaps ideas or opportunities are very rarely time-bound. Yes, the objectives and outcomes to focus on should be time-bound to give focus to the highest priority goals. But until you validate the idea or opportunity, you cannot determine the feature solution, and thus you cannot commit to a delivery date.
While some company leaders may challenge you to commit to projects and features in your roadmap, aim to avoid committing to project or feature delivery dates so that you have room to discover and validate the most important problems to solve.
Most importantly, no matter what format you choose, make sure you work with the rest of your product team to articulate a singular product vision that can guide how you approach building your product teamβs roadmap.
If you liked this post, check out my personal newsletter at nikilr.substack.com where I offer weekly observations on life.
With that, it is a wrap. Thank you Nikil for sharing your product perspective; we greatly appreciate it.Β Until next time!!!
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Product Forward,
George βHonchoβ Nunez
Product Gems Founder & CEO