I’ve been thinking about something, which I believe you’ve been thinking about too.
We often talk more about the work instead of getting sh*t done.
Try reflecting on your days if the following hits you:
- High chance that you’re as busy as possible
- You probably attend several weekly meeting marathons
- You do know you talk a lot about work
- You probably don’t know who’s doing the work itself
Does any of the above speak to you?
If so, you’ve probably been a victim of a poorly defined product roadmap.
With many roadmaps, teams struggle to speed up decision-making. Without a choice, discussing the work to agree on what to do next becomes routine. That sucks!
Let’s change that.
We will take this monthly premium episode to address the following topics:
- Five trapping roadmaps
- How incorrectly roadmaps are often born
- How roadmaps should be born
- Leading practices
Note: Free subscribers will get an overview of this episode, which will take 5 minutes of reading time, while premium get full access - an in-depth overview.
The Five Trapping Roadmaps Crippling Product Teams
Roadmaps aren’t evil by design. Yet, they often block teams from thriving. Even worse, they get in the way of progressing fast enough.
After 17+ years of working with digital products, I sadly recognize that most roadmaps burden teams. If you doubt what I say, take a minute to reflect on the following questions:
- Have you ever been excited about crafting a product roadmap?
- Has your team ever delivered everything on the roadmap?
- Have you ever agreed to everything on the roadmap?
- When you think about your roadmap, what kind of feeling does it trigger?
In short, roadmaps aim to accelerate decision-making by clarifying what to do. Theoretically, they enable teams to focus on what matters most while ignoring the rest. They should pave the way to achieving meaningful goals. Yet, they often derail, and instead of enabling teams to achieve goals, roadmaps become the goal itself.
Throughout my product journey, I’ve stumbled upon 5 roadmaps that will undoubtedly trap teams. They are:
- Project Mask → If your roadmap looks like a Gantt chart, it’s a project roadmap instead of a product roadmap. This type of roadmap beautifully defines who does what and by whom, fooling us perfectly. With this type of roadmap, most product managers will become project managers.
- Feature Focus → When your roadmap represents an extensive feature list, you have little chance of thriving. If the features are correct, you’ll deliver value to customers and collect value for the business. Yet, life isn’t that simple. Most features don’t create value. For me, feature roadmaps are fake, no more, no less.
- Silo Roadmap → Tech roadmap, design roadmap, product roadmap, business roadmap, etc. Some organizations like creating multiple roadmaps. When that’s the case, forget about cross-collaboration. No one will collaborate when everyone has their agenda.
- Multiple Objectives → Multiple objectives + an endless list of key results = confusion. Nobody knows what truly matters when leaders fail to make the hard calls. Eventually, someone realizes that feature roadmaps will go nowhere, and they move towards outcomes. Yet, they often fall short because all goals must be achieved by the end of the next quarter.
- Christmas Wishlist → Some roadmaps look like a 6-year-old Christmas wishlist. It has everything there, but nobody can ever tell the big picture. The result is dreadful. Teams will go into a divide-and-conquer approach without knowing what success looks like.
The above is a sad outcome. It’s meant to be helpful but ends up trapping teams. Before discussing the wrong roadmaps and how to break free from them, we need to understand how they come into existence.
How Bad Roadmaps Are Often Born
Digital product management is relatively young, and companies are still adapting. I believe it will still take some time to improve and start running smoothly.
Many of us read Marty Cagan’s outstanding books, which I continuously recommend. Yet, the reality is anything but close to what Cagan suggests. In my experience, I observe two different realities:
- Promised Land → What product folks expect to see whenever they land a new gig product related, some expectations: empowerment, outcomes, leadership, discovery, experimentation, etc.
- Harsh Reality → What product folks surprisingly stumble upon whenever working with digital products. A few hard-to-swallow aspects are prescriptive roadmaps, pleasing business, focus on features, intention to outcomes, etc.
What’s your reality?
If you’re part of the promised land, creating value is a piece of cake because you have the elements you need to win the game. Yet, if you’re part of the harsh reality, driving value is almost mission impossible.
From my experience, it’s unlikely you have everything from the promised land, but it’s most likely you’ve got several elements from the harsh reality. Yet, you can break free from that when you understand where to take action.
For now, let’s focus on roadmaps.
Most roadmaps are born within the elements of what I call harsh reality. I don’t believe people intentionally create bad roadmaps. Why would anyone do that? Sadly, too many weird roadmaps give product teams a free pass to the feature factory club.
Here are five elements bad roadmaps share while being created:
- Low to no involvement of product teams → C-level or equivalent get-together to define the future. They believe in knowing best what teams should deliver and reject involving product teams in such decisions.
- Opinions over evidence → Some executives believe something is a good idea, and then it becomes a good idea, a new roadmap item without evidence backing it up. Everyone will have opinions, but only a few will have evidence supporting them.
- Project thinking instead of product thinking → Many teams believe they use Agile frameworks, but this belief evaporates when they see their roadmaps. Some roadmaps represent a mask to project management because, by doing it, we believe that everything is predictable and that teams' estimates are precise and binding (we don’t know what we don’t know).
- Reality denial → Why should you care about reality when you could speculate about everything? Unfortunately, too many roadmaps are born in meeting rooms without contact with customers or those doing the work. The more people speculate, the more they believe they are right.
- Lack of trust → Sadly, too many leaders don’t trust their product teams. They believe they cannot decide what to deliver, which has an awful result: Teams are reduced to doers instead of achievers.
The above isn’t uncommon. On the contrary, it’s pretty standard.
Now, let’s dissect each of the five wrong roadmap types and bring ideas on breaking free from them.
1. Project Mask
We don’t know what we don’t know. It’s hard to accept that. Yet, we keep getting into trouble because we deny that.
A quote from the military world stuck with me: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” I tweaked that to our product world to the following:
No plan survives contact with customers.
The more we think we can plan, the more time we invest in the wrong things: