The new product roadmap

John Purcell at DoiT describes how business leaders can shift away from traditional product roadmaps to improve the product development process

Businesses have been built around their product roadmaps for decades, and while they are useful for internal and external stakeholders to understand the current and future direction of the product, they often leave a lot to be desired.

For one, they don’t guarantee success. Research from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen once found that over 30,000 products are introduced each year, 95% of which fail. Similarly, 92% of startups fail within their first three years. 

The value of roadmaps varies greatly across the business: marketing might simply use it to guide which product or capabilities they should promote next, while product teams might see it as a direct to-do list, and go-to-market teams as the cornerstone of their engagement with current customers and prospects.

As customers double down on a simultaneous need for ROI and a desire to keep up with the rapidly evolving technology landscape, there are likely to be more and more requests to see your roadmap. However, before diving headfirst into the answer, it’s vital that businesses first assess what the customer is really looking to gain from this interaction to avoid burning more bridges than they build.

Customers who sign on due to the promise of what will come often end up disappointed as it isn’t always possible to stick to the deadlines the roadmap sets out. The simple reason for this is that nobody can predict the future. Priorities can change at the drop of a hat, uncontrollable market forces can alter the direction a business wants or has to take, or development might not go as well as hoped.

Unfortunately, companies that blindly stick to the deadlines and plans in their roadmap risk wasting time, money, morale, and even innovation by pivoting too late and making bad decisions during the development process.

Uncovering the ask

One of the main drivers behind a product roadmap is to satiate customers who want to understand what’s on the horizon. But it’s often not as simple as that.

Instead of simply presenting the roadmap, I would advise that businesses first understand why the customer is asking, which can be one of multiple reasons. Perhaps they are suffering from a software bug that’s impacting their work and they want to know when its fix is planned, perhaps a new use case has arisen that the product doesn’t quite support, or perhaps they simply want reassurance that your business is moving with the times.

Each of these underlying reasons can be solved in a way that isn’t just sending over the roadmap. This could be assigning a team to investigate the issues they’re having with the product and presenting a fix, investing in a seamless feature request process for new use cases that might emerge and feeding back actions to the customer, or presenting evidence that the business is aware of evolving market trends and acting accordingly.

Having a constructive, two-way conversation will be a far more effective way to resolve any of these concerns than sending over a slide deck explaining the year’s deliverables. Not only will it get to the bottom of their request, but it will make them feel valued and that their feedback is important to the business and its future investments.

The added context provided by both parties will also lead to a more productive and profitable relationship going forward.

Don’t get tied down

Shifting away from the concept of a strict product roadmap can also bring value internally. It can foster a culture of constant innovation and excitement rather than quarterly pressure to meet development deadlines, which could result in progress for the sake of progress.

Customers will also be kept on side with a continuous delivery strategy as they’re regularly reminded about the product’s actual capabilities, rather than being reassured with hypothetical promises.

Furthermore, by forgoing a structured timeline, developments can be released as and when they’re available instead of at a set time. Without this level of flexibility built into your organisation, strategic pivots – which are inevitable – will be far more disruptive than they need to be. Progress and innovation will be unnecessarily stifled as a result, leading to unhappy customers, especially when deadlines are missed.

My advice would be to question the traditional product roadmap and adapt it so it suits the requirements of a modern age characterised by constant innovation. Nobody has a crystal ball, meaning that agility and continuous development must be prioritised so changes in customer demands and requirements don’t throw your entire business off-kilter.

Refusing to run your business with a strict structure can seem daunting, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the positive feedback from customers, staff, and partners after continuous innovation is placed at your core.

John Purcell is Chief Product Officer at DoiT

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Tirachard