One of the most common questions we get when coaching product managers is: how do I create a roadmap? There's a great visual we often reference to show 20 different prioritization techniques you can use to create a roadmap:
However, there's one thing none of these techniques does well: help make sure that your roadmap is taking the product down the path to some end state. So the Vision-Led Product Management roadmap involves balancing between 3 buckets of product development:
Rather than force teams to make an impossibly-hard decision to choose work from just one of these buckets, we know that, in reality, most teams must juggle all 3 of these simultaneously. We'll use an example roadmap from our imaginary Chuckwagon home-cooking app to explain the theory in action:
Let's take a deep dive on each section of the roadmap:
Along the left edge, you'll note the 3 buckets color coded for the rest of the buckets. You'll also note a percentage below each bucket - that's the amount of total product development capacity allocated to that bucket over a long time horizon like a quarter or year. The idea is that you spend most of the time debating those allocation percentages with executives rather than what specifically goes into each bucket (which the product squad can decide).
The ratio of buckets depends ultimately on product maturity. Early on, you're probably spending 80% of your time building out your vision for a better customer journey, and since there are few customers using the product, you don't have many iterations to make because there's little feedback. When you find product-market fit, you're probably going to spend a lot more time (60%) iterating on conversion funnels to scale like crazy. As the product matures, you'll hit a plateau, and that's the time to start spending more time on innovation - either related to building the next generation of the product or an adjacent product that continues to help customers achieve their outcome.
Note how the iterations bucket also includes a Buffer / TBD box for consumers - the reality is you don't know what feedback might come in that requires immediate attention. This box lets stakeholders know that some capacity is reserved for urgent fixes - you don't want to have zero slack in your roadmap, because something always comes up.
Even though Chuckwagon is a B2C product, the team must not forget about their internal operations team as a key stakeholder that affects the customer experience and the ultimate success of the product. So we include a persona swim lane so stakeholders can see who is expected to benefit from the work in flight.
Note this persona column assumes you've taken a persona-based approach to organizing your team - if you've taken another approach, you could put KPIs or tech layers in this column instead. Check out this other blog post if you'd like to read more about our thoughts on how to organize product squads.
In order to reduce risk of solving the wrong problem for customers or building the wrong solution, we use a concept we call Invest Proportionate to Confidence.
It manifests as a stage-gated alpha / beta / general availability concept to roll new changes out. The idea is that the number of users affected by a change starts small as you gather evidence, both quantitative (ex. usage) and qualitative (ex. positive feedback), to build confidence in spending more time on the change and rolling it out to more users. This visual layout helps stakeholders understand that status of different changes.
A few notes on the statuses:
The idea behind the actual feature boxes under each status column is to provide a short, clear description of the work. You'd likely have additional content that links from the roadmap visual to provide details on each feature based on its status:
There's a lot more to roadmapping than we wrote up here, but hopefully this gives you a sense of how to create a roadmap using Vision-Led Product Management. For a deeper dive on this roadmap, check out this other blog post: How to Scope a New Feature.