- Creating Good Roadmaps: 6 Practical Steps for Product Leaders
- By Matt Walton
- The Nuggets translation Project
- Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
- Translator: QiaoN
- Proofreader: renyuhuiharrison, Fengziyin1234
By Matt Walton, February 15, 2018
There have been many articles written about the process of developing a product roadmap, especially six excellent articles written by my own team. But there is surprisingly little written about the role of the product owner.
I think the product owner’s behavior is often the root cause of a “bad” roadmap. Without their thoughtful leadership, product managers may not be able to deliver a “good” roadmap in return. That’s because product leadership is really hard and — often misunderstood — very different from the job of a product manager.
I define a good roadmap as one that is understood and felt by the team. It includes the right questions to drive the company’s strategy and is useful both inside and outside the team.
This article introduces my thoughts on your role as a product owner to make sure your team has a good roadmap.
1. Dominance
Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make as a product owner is to believe that you should ultimately drive the roadmap. It’s very easy to make this mistake if your role is changing and getting less hands-on at a fast-moving startup, or if you’re just taking on a leadership role.
This mistake is not only made by product leaders, but also by founders, ceos, or other members of the leadership team. Their sense of self-dominance can make it harder: not only do you need to avoid falling into the trap yourself, but you also need to make sure others don’t fall in or push you into it.
That’s why you should avoid getting your hands dirty in the process of creating a roadmap and forgetting what’s important: motivating, coaching, and questioning your team.
In order to provide the right solutions, your team needs to understand the problems and be motivated to solve them.
The collaborative process through which your product manager and his team define the problem space and prioritize opportunities is just as valuable as the roadmap that emerges from the process.
The team also has more time than you do to understand the potential impact of different candidate roadmaps. They are often closer to the user and therefore can correctly understand the nuances of potential problems and solutions.
A roadmap, whether sent directly to them or made them feel like contributors rather than owners, will inevitably lead to a worse solution. Teams will have a more limited understanding of problems and may lack motivation because people don’t trust them to spend their time doing the right things.
It’s hard to stay hands-off, especially when you see that the road map they’ve laid out is very different from what you’ve done yourself, or when you’re under pressure to make sure certain things are covered. But for these reasons, you should avoid direct intervention whenever possible.
So, as a product owner, if you don’t interfere with the roadmap, how do you make sure your team has a good roadmap? What is your role?
The Agile Onion map, and where you should be as a product owner
2. Goals, vision, mission and strategy
In order for your team to develop an effective roadmap, they need to understand the context of the business. As the product owner, you need to interpret the company’s strategy as something useful to the product people and make sure they understand it.
As a product owner, you may be involved in defining your company’s goals, or responsible for the vision of the product, or something that may have been set. In any case, your job is to ensure that the direction of the team is always there, as is the North Star, that the rest of the leadership team supports you, and that your own team understands you. This is important to ensure that any plans they end up making all move towards the same common goal. You need to constantly tell the story of the product and show that people are working towards that goal every day.
At FutureLearn, we have a purpose (why we exist), a vision (what we strive to create) and a mission (how we do it in the years to come).
Our company strategy is based on this mission, and we review it every 12 months. The strategy sets out what we need to do in the coming year to get closer to achieving our mission. This year, we have six strategic goals.
One of our strategic objectives, for example, is to “grow the number of paying senior students [schools that are motivated to develop their own careers]”.
There are many ways you can develop your vision and strategy, but it’s important to make sure they exist and are understood.
3. Team organization, tasks and metrics
As a product owner, your biggest impact on the product roadmap is how you organize your team and define their mission.
Since the early days of FutureLearn, we have built our product teams around strategic goals. We have a cross-functional team working on each goal, rather than targeting a specific set of features or parts of the product. We found this to be successful because it kept the team focused on the impact they were having rather than the features they were building and maintaining.
Each team’s mission reflects strategic goals. In addition, each team has a metric that serves as a key measure of success. For the growth example above, we count course enrollments and work toward monthly goals.
For the product owner, defining the mission and having an agreement with the team on how to measure success is one of the biggest ways you can direct your team. If you’re going to question your team’s decisions, doing this well is worth your time and effort, and will make things clearer.
In our organization, this approach works in other ways than product functionality. Today, most people in a company, including marketing, business development, and content disciplines, can work in cross-functional teams with product managers, software engineers, and designers on common strategic goals.
FutureLearn’s cross-functional team
This highly collaborative and matrix approach has its own challenges — as a product owner, you need to work closely with others on the leadership team to arrive at ways to organize and define tasks that apply not only to product people, but also to other business people. This may require some compromise, but you also need to be understanding, flexible and tenacious.
4. Build alignment and encourage communication
At FutureLearn, we organize optimization speed by giving cross-functional teams autonomy. Once teams have tasks and metrics, they are given broad latitude and the right to accomplish them as they see fit.
This means THAT I play another key leadership role in ensuring consistency across teams: encouraging communication and seeking consistency across the overall product portfolio.
When we first made sure that the product manager, not me, was in charge of the roadmap, this autonomy expanded into when the roadmap was reviewed and how it was presented.
This makes the roadmap very useful for the team itself, but for the rest of the business as a whole, it can be quite confusing and less useful for each team to take a similar but different approach. It is difficult for others to plan and integrate the impact of team changes. This meant that the final roadmap failed to achieve its two main goals: smooth communication and stakeholder support.
How did we solve this problem? We mapped the roadmap review process for all teams to the overall quarterly business planning process and defined the standard meaning of “now,” “next,” and “after.” We also agreed on how to manage and present them.
This allowed the product management team to share their development plans with each other, and I was able to provide some high-level guidance on the planning background.
We achieve consistency by encouraging teams to participate in each other’s Sprint reviews, as well as bi-weekly product management group meetings. We also make sure that important issues are presented to the company at monthly all-hands meetings.
5. Mentor your team
Another big impact you can have on the roadmap comes from how you coach your team. If possible, refrain from telling your team members what their roadmap should look like. For these reasons, this may not be very productive.
No matter what, your role should continue to ask good questions of your team. You should push them in the direction of key insights or research, highlight related issues that other teams are working on, and help them think about the bigger picture. Your fresh perspective will benefit them and challenge any silly ideas that make their plans fail to accomplish the agreed tasks or conflict with the company’s goals/vision.
There are many ways to do this. One-on-one, sharing documents, encouraging them to communicate with others, and so on. This should be an ongoing process — not just when reviewing the roadmap.
6. Create a product-friendly culture
Finally, companies need a “product-friendly” culture to achieve this. Your other key role should be to cultivate this. What you do here depends on the organizational structure, the people in senior positions and their work habits.
Often, this involves gaining support for the roadmap driven approach principle and encouraging everyone to focus on what we want to see rather than what we think should be established. It also means working with others on the leadership team to agree on a clear set of strategic priorities and to protect the team from unusual demands. You may need to be more involved in business development to do this.
Knowing what questions to ask gives insight into what the CEO and other stakeholders are thinking, and is a valuable set of skills you can focus on developing. In general, it’s probably best to be honest with them about what you’re trying to do, which also gives them a chance to talk about their expectations.
Encourage your team to link their successes and achievements to what is planned in the roadmap, which helps them build, strengthen, and maintain trust in the process. In essence, the key is constant communication and celebration.
The role of the product owner in the roadmap
In practice, every company is different, and a certain leadership role will step in to tackle a different set of challenges to help their team develop a roadmap.
However, wherever you are, remember that your role in the product roadmap is to ensure that:
- Your team leads their roadmap
- There is a clear strategic context framework for their work, and the team’s mission and methods for assessing success are clear
- The processes, frameworks, and rhythms of the roadmap are consistent, understood by your team, and effective throughout the organization
- There are processes in place to encourage communication and collaboration between teams
- Encourage, support, and challenge your team
- You cultivate and maintain a product-friendly culture
If you can do all of this, you’ll find that your team will naturally have good roadmaps and, just as importantly, will be keen to implement them. In the end, it’s what you put in the hands of the end user that matters.
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