Discussion: Issue #31

When you have questions about roadmaps, it pays to talk to someone who has spent way too much of her life thinking about them. Janna Bastow – co-founder of both Mind the Product and ProdPad – has been trying to fix the problems of roadmaps for most of her professional life. She hacked together the first version of ProdPad to solve her own problem, then began selling to other product people to help them do the same. She joins us on this episode to give advice for anyone ready to break up with their roadmap.

In this episode, sponsored by Amplitude, listen to learn about:

• Roadmaps
• Becoming outcome-driven
• Whether every product needs a roadmap

Our notes:

• Roadmaps are prototypes for your strategy.
• Use them the same way you use UX prototypes:
• use them to solicit feedback and kick-off conversation with stakeholders
• make sure they are disposable and don’t treat changes on them as failures, rather as achievements – we learned something important about our strategy!
• don’t fall in love with them and don’t commit to them strongly
• List (user and business) problems you plan to solve, and not features you want to deliver
• It allows you to keep doing discovery and find better and better ways to solve problems
• …but it still allows you to solicit feedback from stakeholders: they want to see problems solved, not features delivered anyway
• Have priorities, but don’t put dates on your roadmap
• OK, sometimes you have real deadlines (GDPR, an important trade show etc.). It’s important to manage those as needed.
• But don’t create artificial deadlines and pressure just by putting dates on the roadmap. You won’t be able to keep to them, ever, which will just eradicate trust between the stakeholders and cause burnout in the teams.
• Management often tries to use dates on roadmaps as a forcing function for development speed. Don’t let them. It never works.
• People will leave buffers to make sure they seem to meet deadlines. However, work is like a gas: it fills up the available space. Which means a perpetual downwards spiral of leaving buffers, slowing down because you “have time”, adjusting the deadlines and adding a bigger and bigger buffer…
• If you push real hard, you can sometimes meet deadlines, but at the cost of incurring tech debt.
• As an experiment, we updated our latest roadmap according to these principles and we really liked the results.

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