#7 The Product Roadmap
A roadmap is an expression of your strategy. It shows how projects fit together and provides a rough time estimate.
Roadmaps are a richly debated topic. On the one hand, they help teams to see how all the projects fit together. And with technology teams with long lead-time projects, it’s good to have advance notice of upcoming projects. On the other hand, a four-quarter roadmap provides false confidence, given uncertainty about what will work or not. Given this uncertainty, it’s tough to guess the timing of projects.
When I share a roadmap, I express confidence about the next quarter’s projects but highlight that the content and timing of the subsequent quarters are highly speculative. There’s lots of near-term learning that will cause plans to change.
Here’s a stylized version of the Netflix roadmap halfway through 2005:
The roadmap articulates the focus and organization of the product team. Completing the exercise is straightforward once the teams define the strategies, proxy metrics, and projects for their swimlanes. The roadmap is an artifact — an expression — of your product strategy.
However, the roadmap can show only some of the work. It is a high-level view that outlines the key projects in each swim lane and provides the best guess of their timing. What’s missing in the Netflix example above is the technology infrastructure work. I also chose not to include the work in help and account.
The roadmap tells a story about how the overall strategy for the product team might play out over time. When I put it together, I thought of the company’s board as the primary audience—they don’t need all the details.
One note on organizing product teams: I favor structures where each product leader has a clear proxy metric that communicates what success looks like in their area. A product leader/team is often dedicated to the company’s high-level strategies. Todd, the product leader for personalization, had his “percentage of members who rate at least 50 movies in their first six weeks” metric. Meghan, the product leader, focused on creating a more straightforward customer experience and had her “percentage of members who add at least three titles to their queue” metric. Proxy metrics provide radical role clarity.
Product Strategy Exercise (#9)
For each of your product swimlanes or pods, outline the projects against each strategy over four quarters. Put all of the projects into a roadmap like the one above.
In the next essay, I will share ideas about how to encourage big, long-term thinking as you define your product strategy:
Enjoy,
Gib
Gibson Biddle
November 2024 Update: Sign up for my new 3-hour virtual “Product Strategy Workshop” on Maven. (Monthly cohorts from 9–12 am PT.)
PPS. Here’s an index of all the articles in this series:
- Intro: How to Define Your Product Strategy
- #1 “The DHM Model”
- #2 “From DHM to Product Strategy”
- #3 “The Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lock-up”
- #4 “Proxy Metrics”
- #5 “Working Bottom-up”
- #6 “A Product Strategy for Each Swimlane”
- #7 “The Product Roadmap”
- #8 “The GLEe Model”
- #9 “The GEM Model”
- #10 “How to Run A Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting”
- #11 “A Case Study: Netflix 2020”
- #12 “A Startup Case Study: Chegg”
- #13 “TLDR: Summary of the Product Strategy Frameworks”
November 2024 Update: Sign up for my new 3-hour virtual “Product Strategy Workshop” on Maven. (Monthly cohorts from 9–12 am PT.)
Click here to purchase my self-paced Product Strategy Workshop on Teachable for $200 off the regular $699 price. The course includes recorded talks, PDFs, my essays, and pre-formatted Google Slides so you can complete your product strategy independently. You can also “try before you buy” — the first two modules are free.
