Sustain Product Roadmap
The Product Roadmap provides a simple view of how the product will grow towards its vision. As a forward looking view, the roadmap does not set fixed priorities or deadlines. Rather it is a fluid view that evolves as our understanding of customers’ needs evolves. Roadmaps are influenced by concerns in addition to the customers’ needs. These may include our capability and capacity to deliver change and the business, financial and legal context in which our product operates.
In A Nutshell
Our Product Roadmap needs to be as realistic as we can make and as accessible to our customers and other stakeholders as possible. Accessibility needs both ease of access and ease of understanding.
We promote ease of understanding by keeping our Product Roadmap simple. Rather than planning a detailed schedule (that will most likely be wrong) we keep our timescales broad. An effective pattern is Now, Next and Later. These horizons are, perhaps, 3 months, 6 months and longer. Out to 3 months - NOW - we can be relatively certain items will be delivered - though there is always the possibility of the organisation pivoting. NEXT is substantially less certain so we keep these roadmap items abstract. LATER is essentially a set of “may-be” items.
Our roadmaps is aligned to priorities rather than precise dates. This allows the roadmap to remain fluid and to evolve readily in response to the changing needs of our customers and to changing circumstances in the business environment. The reliability of priorities is reduced as we look further into the future.
Our roadmap may have several distinct types of requirements defined within it. Each type of requirement should be clearly distinguished (e.g. by colour):
Customer - customer needs are always present and should be the primary content of the roadmap
Technology - we must avoid technological obsolescence so technology innovation can be reflected in the roadmap
Ways of Working - new productivity tools and new techniques that will be introduced by the team