Product Management Roadmaps
I've been speaking with lots of clients recently about this topic, and wanted to get input from the blog.
How many of you and your product management teams have an internal roadmap? Everyone thinks product roadmap when you use the word but, I'm talking about the internal team and its plans.
As a critical part of our respective organizations, it would seem logical that we understand our priorities, our pains, and have a path (roadmap) on how we plan to get there.
What goals or issues to we plan to deal with this year?
Will we do a better job gathering and responding to customer feedback, or perhaps building better requirements to hand off to development?
Will we implement a strategic or customer advisory council to validate our direction?
There are so many facets to product management, and it would be easy to get lost in the amount of interaction we have with our customers, both internally an externally.
The easiest approach I've seen to date is to interview our key constituents and customers. We can ask them what they do and do not like about our planning processes and list out the key issues or challenges.
Armed with that data, we can ask our management to prioritize the list and give us guidance on which problems to solve and perhaps how.
I've created a survey below, would love to see where the blog is on this topic.
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Comments (3)
Interesting. A common practice for Agile teams is to hold a retrospective either at the end of the iteration or a release or after a major milestone. The goal is to highlight what worked and did not work and add items to the backlog where tasks should be taken to improve. This is different from your product backlog and sprint backlog and becomes the backlog to "being a better team." Product Management teams should meet regularly to hash out their team backlog, add items, remove items and prioritize the remaining items. I'd suggest, as Peter does, inviting stakeholders to the team as well.
Posted by Stewart Rogers | August 30, 2008 3:19 PM
Listening to your customers will only take you so far. Price-based competition and commoditization are two outcomes that will happen even if you, and particularly if you listen to your customers. If you are in a startup that has IPO's during your tornado, the stock stall is approaching. Listening to your customers doesn't take care of that either. The latter requires a new disruptive technology, but doing so with an existing product fails. This is why you need to be working a product and technology roadmap beyond your current product line. Moving into the late market you also need to be ready to innovate the service and demand sides of your product, as well as transition to SaaS.
If you are overwhelmed with your to do list, back off, delegate, and focus on enabling, rather than doing. You need some whitespace.
Posted by David Locke | September 24, 2008 11:16 AM
Great advice David, but I am wondering if you missed the context to this post specifically.
Posted by Stewart Rogers | September 25, 2008 12:51 PM