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Setting Roadmaps
Next the product leader builds a roadmap to sequence discovery and delivery efforts, providing clarity to upstream and downstream stakeholders on what will be changing, and roughly when.
A context’s roadmap should be publicly (and easily) accessible across the organization. Make it as easy as clicking a link.
Find Initiatives
Product leaders organize discovery and delivery efforts around problems-to-solve that can “move the needle” on the goals. If the prioritized levers established some problems to explore, then the nature of the problem can drive the definition of some Criteria to spark ideas for experimentation and discovery. Given the problem, what characteristics would a “good” idea have? For a given problem area, gauge the uncertainty you face, with a Prompt.
Find a prompt for product discovery, like these questions from Marty Cagan’s book “Inspired”:
- Are your customers who you think they are?
- Do they really have the problems you think they have?
- How does the customer solve this problem today?
- What would be required for them to switch?
- Where can we find real users and customers to validate our ideas on?
This is where product leaders set the balance between discovery and delivery needs. When uncertainty is high, criteria should invite ideas for discovery. When uncertainty is low, criteria should invite ideas for swift delivery of value.
Next the product leaders create or employ a system that can cast a wide net across stakeholders (and SMEs like product developers) to collect Ideas. The product leaders vet these ideas continuously, against the criteria, to narrow down to a set of promising Opportunities, for further consideration. Opportunities are assessed for uncertainty, by listing the open questions and unvalidated assumptions circulating around each one. This gauge of uncertainty is used to steer the evolution of an opportunity into some change initiative for the product.
Initiatives can take the form of:
- an exploration - to validate ideas about markets, users, or competition with research (high uncertainty)
- an experiment - to test a Hypothesis (moderate uncertainty)
- a product change - to drive development planning and the delivery of value (low uncertainty)
Target investment/spend dates for each initiative (for all kinds of initiatives) in rough horizons or timeframes like “Now”, “Next”, and “Later”. When dependencies drive a need for tighter synchronization, these Roadmaps can be refined to show initiatives (fueling execution) against specific (e.g. monthly) dates on a timeline. Remember, roadmaps are just communication tools (not contracts), used to show intent and help manage dependencies within the organization (and sometimes, cautiously, used to show intent with customers).
Frame Next Quarter
Initiatives provide fuel for learning more about the problem space. Learning is achieved when we see evidence that our product enhancements are impacting customers in a way that enables the business to win. And it is the execution within Teams that drive the learning.
A quick sidebar on the relationship between Contexts and Teams:
A team is a small group of people who:
- Share a set of goals
- Share a backlog of work
- Share a way of working (e.g. from stand-ups to configuration mgmt)
- Share authority to make changes (both to assets and to their ways of working)
Leaders in contexts make decisions to create strategy. Members of teams make changes to improve assets. Some contexts are vast enough, that they require leadership teams that treat decision making as their work (i.e. visible in a backlog) and treat the strategy as an asset to change. Most teams have leadership in place, but do not require a dedicated context to set their decision authority and manage a strategy.
Contexts allocate much of their budget to sponsor existing (or form new) Teams that support the context’s goals. A common pattern is a context that sponsors (i.e. funds) 3-5 teams to execute its strategy and responsibilities.
This pattern is also typical of product leadership contexts. The product context assesses whether the teams currently sponsored with their budget provide sufficient capacity and skills to fulfill its responsibilities (”run the business”) and drive learning on its initiatives (”change the business”), over the next quarter. If not, then a Decision can be framed to consider asking for additional budget (usually from the parent context) to expand capacity in teams.
To frame the next quarter, leaders focus on the initiatives that are active or targeted in the next quarter. They work with downstream stakeholders (i.e. leaders of the teams that execute discovery and delivery) to arrive at short-term Sub-Goals that can be achieved within the next quarter. For explorations, these sub-goals might frame some interviews or research intent. For experiments, they might be to validate (or invalidate) a specific hypothesis. For product changes, they describe the expected impact of the change (as an objective) that can reasonably be accomplished next quarter. These sub-goals will trace up to the product’s overall strategic goals for the next year.
Supplementing the sub-goals with observable (and ideally measurable) Desired Outcomes sets the stage for short feedback loops of learning, which is powerful for any kind of initiative.
These sub-goals will drive the planning of work in the teams. Constrain the amount of planning (and work in the next quarter) for an initiative by framing it as a Bet. The syntax of a bet sets expectations around willingness-to-spend for specific learning objectives, while acknowledging the uncertainty in the “game”. It helps product leaders effectively communicate with teams so they can maximize the learning and minimize the spend.
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