Product Roadmap Guide

Question 1

Key Product Manager Skills

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Product Roadmap

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Product Roadmap Goals

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Product Top Down Strategic Planning Process

Answer 4

Product Vision > Product Goals

Product Roadmap > Release Plan and Backlog

Question 5

Advantages of Top Down Strategic Planning

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Developing Product Strategy

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Developing Product Goals

Answer 7

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

Question 8

Product Goal Examples

Answer 8

Competitive Differentiation, Customer Delight
Technical Improvements, Sustain Product Features Improve Customer Satisfaction, Increase Lifetime Value Upsell New Services, Reduce Churn,
Expand Geographically, Mobile Adoption

Question 9

Using Metrics to Define Roadmap

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Customer Success and Product Engagement Metrics

Answer 10

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)

Question 11

Business Oriented Metrics

Answer 11

CAC (S and M exp / # of customers acqd)
LTV  (Avg. Rev per acc / rev churn rate)
MRR
ARR
ARPU
Conversion

Question 12

Utilizing Metrics

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Places to gather product information

Answer 13

Customer Feedback 
Competition
Sales and Customer Service
Analyst Research
Analytics and Metrics (from other in-house products)

Question 14

Creating Themes

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Methods of Prioritization

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Costs of Implementation

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Execution

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Release

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

Common Communication Pitfalls (or Do NOTS)

Answer 19

Let sales drive the conversation
Let engineering miss the bigger picture
Overshare Roadmap Details with Sales or Customers