What went wrong with my road mapping?
Creating a solid roadmap is important if you want to make sure your product is a success ✌️
But sometimes it's hard to get it right and mistakes can be made that end up hurting your strategy or making your goals impossible to achieve. Based on my experience, I can share some examples of common product roadmap mistakes and offer some tips to help you avoid them.
Let’s agree on a definition for product roadmapping, what is it?
A product roadmap is a tool to share the big picture, priorities, and progress of a product over time.
What are the important details that we should include in our roadmap?
The roadmap must communicate key milestones, timelines, strategic significance, team responsibilities, and possible roadblocks.
What are some common mistakes that I encountered in the past when creating a road map?
The roadmap is too much to handle - It's important to keep in mind that the roadmap is not meant for dumping all your ideas, features, and functionalities. Instead, your roadmap items should have clear goals, strategic significance, a high-level timeline, and most importantly, an action plan.
Setting unrealistic deadlines - It's important to be realistic about how long it will take to complete. By setting realistic timelines for roadmap items, you can avoid these problems and build credibility with your team and stakeholders.
Failing to communicate using a roadmap - When the idea in the roadmap is not shared clearly, it can cause problems such as misunderstandings and disagreements among the people involved. It is important to communicate well and frequently so that everyone is working together towards the same goals.
Is there any way to prevent making common errors when developing a roadmap for your product?
Yes, always make sure to follow the key principles listed below during the road mapping process.
Design for success - align goals with the organization's desired market position and competitive landscape.
Collaboration is the key - include people from different departments in the roadmap creation process.
Effectively prioritization - think about what your customers want, what potential opportunities are out there in the market, and what your team is capable of doing.
Allow it to evolve - ensuring that the roadmap has the flexibility to adapt while still maintaining the product vision.
Clear communication - Use simple methods to convey the overall vision, objectives, and planned actions in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.
Frequent check-ins - it's important to have regular meetings to review the roadmap and update the document, so everyone knows about any changes.
I came across a quote by Jack Dorsey from Square and it goes like this: "Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect."
I think it's a great reminder to pay attention to the details and not get lost in too many of them.
Cheers,
Ebin
