Late last year, I sat down with one of my consulting customers, D., the VP Product of a relatively mature startup. We discussed his roadmap for this year, and he naturally began listing his features. I stopped him and didn’t want to go down this path. Instead, I wanted to know why he included every feature there, what the end goal was, and why everything was important for the company. I felt like he was open to these questions, we had a good discussion and things started to fall into place.
During our next meeting, I asked the same questions as in the previous conversation, to ensure everything still made sense to us. It led to a fascinating discussion about the roadmap. In fact, we did not discuss features, but rather the three pillars that the company must stand on during the next year. Finding the first two pillars was easy (we ended up using the same two that we defined at the first meeting), but defining the third one was more challenging. We went back and forth, feeling as if nothing was working, but 15 minutes before the end of the meeting, we cracked it and were able to articulate what he really needed.
As soon as we figured it out, we retold the story and put all the pillars in place. Looking at them from above, we could see how they complement one another, which helped take the company to new heights.
At the end of our meeting, he was honest and told me that when I asked him, again and again, to talk about the roadmap from scratch, he felt frustrated that we were wasting so much time on it. He’d wanted to close the features and know that he finished the roadmap. But at that point, he fully understood why I had insisted on doing it more thoroughly and was delighted with how we eventually figured things out. At this point, it was much easier to add features to the roadmap because they were there to demonstrate the overall story. They naturally fell into place, and priorities became much clearer.
How do you create your roadmap? Are you rushing to prioritize features and get it over with? Here’s why you shouldn’t, as well as an alternative way to think about it.
The Magic of Hard Work
People tend to prioritize features since it’s much more tangible, and often is the bottom line that the organization is looking for. Unfortunately, your company typically doesn’t know to ask for a different kind of roadmap, which is what they truly need. They want faster horses, as they have never seen a car before.
To create the roadmap your company really needs, you must be willing to walk in a more abstract world. You need to prioritize what you’re trying to achieve, not what you are trying to do, and you need to tie that to what’s essential for the business. When you force yourself to stay at these levels and leave features aside, you can suddenly see what truly matters, and that’s where the magic happens.
Staying at the abstract, higher-level has a few benefits, that are worth the hard work (and it really is hard, so give yourself some room for trial and error).
The first benefit is that it allows you to stick to an external point of view rather than an internal one. An external point of view focuses on the value to the customer, business results, or even the essence of a strategic advantage that you need to maintain. When you don’t allow yourself to talk about features (simply ban any feature in the room for the sake of the discussion), you must express what you want to do in other means, and it forces you to think about it differently until you get to the real essence.
The second benefit is that it is much easier to see the bigger picture this way. Instead of piecing a 1000-piece puzzle together, you are now only working on a 12-piece one. Unlike a real puzzle where all the pieces lie in front of you and you can see them clearly, in the roadmap process if you work on the 1000 pieces there is no way you can process all of them in your head to understand what’s important and what’s not. That’s where all sorts of scoring and prioritization frameworks thrive – to simply allow you to understand which pieces you want to start considering for real. But the real pillars that make up the bigger picture won’t come from selecting certain features with a scoring mechanism. They will come from asking hard questions and seeking the deeper answers, while willing to deal with not-so-pleasant realities that you will uncover along the way.
This brings me to the third benefit of this hard work of abstract thinking: once you understand the bigger picture, you can decide how you want to break it down into smaller pieces that make sense. They wouldn’t necessarily be the same as the original pieces you had in mind. Generally speaking, we are looking for a MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) breakdown. That is – a few (my recommendation is to go with three or four) big areas, each distinct from the other ones, that also work together to build the bigger picture. They often build one on top of the other or cover different dimensions that make up the whole that we are looking for. There could be many MECE breakdowns for your roadmap, so don’t stop exploring them until you feel you found the right one. Which is it? The one that helps you tell the story clearly, and that truly shows how you are going to meet your goal. Like with true love, you’ll know when you get there.
It is crucial to keep the discussions in the problem space, focusing on the value, not the solution. When everything comes together, it makes sense, and it sticks. You will feel that you got to the bottom of it and connected to the core of how to succeed, not just how to try hard and hope that you are in the right direction. You will be able to tell a story around it, making it easier to understand, communicate, and remember. Having reached MECE (where everything falls into place), you realize you have thoroughly considered everything.
Prioritizing Without Features
This abstract MECE, outcome-based work can be applied in multiple ways, depending on the company stage and its specific challenges. However, one thing should always be there: an end goal.
You should start your roadmap efforts by defining and refining its goal. Say a roadmap is for 12 or 18 months – where do you want to be by the end of it? What would be considered a success? It’s only once you have full alignment on that that you can start planning towards it. Now, remember that we left features out of the discussion, so what should you plan exactly?
Since your end goal is not to deliver a feature but rather to deliver value or reach certain business results, your path to this goal should be expressed in the same way. To reach certain business results, say an ARR target, you need to reach interim goals along the way. It could be smaller ARR numbers that are in the path to the larger one, but it also could be softer or related goals like demonstrating viability in a new market segment, providing additional value (for example to additional personas or by supporting additional use cases), faster onboarding, reducing churn rates and so on. It could be that to meet your goals, you will need to breakthrough something that is stopping you from getting there, like brand perception, selling to smaller or larger organizations (which often has an impact on how marketing and sales work and not just on product features), or even the efficiency of how you work internally in order to keep your competitive advantage.
What about timelines? Notice that I didn’t discuss timelines at all in this article. They are left for later stages of the roadmap creation, just like features. While timeline considerations can definitely impact the final roadmap (since sometimes if something can’t happen soon enough it’s best to not do it at all), you need to initially figure out the order in which things should proceed, regardless of how long each step takes along the way.
It is at these levels that you want to find a path that makes sense. By not allowing yourself to discuss features, you are forcing yourself to find a roadmap that will help the entire organization meet the goals together because everyone will go on the same route, not just in the same general direction.
