A product roadmap is a tool to explain your product strategy and the steps taken to realize your product vision. Use a product prioritization framework to determine your top priorities and adhere to a structured process.
Prioritize Your Product Roadmap Around Your Product Vision
Planning your product roadmap is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a product lead. You must ruthlessly prioritize your product roadmap and have a compelling product vision if you want to achieve that. Simply put, it's so simple to get drawn in by everything that you end up shipping a subpar item.
A product roadmap does not consist of grouping various features and distributing them among your various products. That is a list of features. The roadmap is a narrative that outlines your product's goals and the steps you must take to get there. A roadmap outlines the steps that must be taken and explains how each step advances the overall goal. Prioritizing a roadmap is comparable to creating and editing a story in this sense.
How to understand what to prioritize?
Your product vision serves as a filter for decisions that will assist you in setting priorities. It is important to prioritize anything that moves your product closer to the direction you want it to go in. Throw something out if it doesn't help your product move closer to your product vision.
So, it raises a question: where does that "something" come from?
Not just features but also opportunities and issues that you hope to solve should be included in your roadmap. These possibilities may influence your decision to change or add new features.
- Pay close attention to the feedback you receive directly from customers to spot opportunities that fit with your product vision. Feedback from customers also enables you to spot issues that can be fixed to satisfy your current clientele.
- You can find information in support tickets, in-app analytics, and customer reviews that reveal the product's flaws. In order to determine where your customers encounter problems that prevent them from getting the most value out of your product and might turn them away, you can also look at usage patterns.
- It's important to pay attention to this feedback, but you shouldn't write down every suggestion you receive on your Roadmap
Where does the organization struggle?
The majority of organizations, if not all of them, talk about prioritization, but many have trouble doing it well. These issues can be attributed to making prioritisation decisions based on inaccurate information and failing to secure support for those decisions.
Let's examine the reasons behind those struggles in more detail.
- Decisions not being tied to product vision and strategic objectives
Some organisations rely on their gut feelings when making decisions rather than gathering data to help them. When the people making the product decisions believe they already know everything there is to know about the customer, this is frequently the result. Even in inexperienced product organizations, the gut instinct approach is used.
Other businesses base their decisions on what seems simple or the "low-hanging fruit." This strategy also referred to as a feature factory, is typical in businesses that only prioritize output.
Both instances are warning signs that a company either lacks a clear product vision or is implementing one that is poorly understood.
- Priorities are driven by the latest sales prospect
Sometimes when they have a clear product vision, organizations still struggle because their attention is constantly diverted by requests coming from the sales team.
Receiving a steady stream of sales requests is common in B2B and enterprise settings. The sales team may believe that their requests are necessary to land a significant new account, but frequently these are things that conflict with realizing the product vision.
- Loud, eager stakeholders raising concerns about prioritization
A product team may use data to inform their prioritization choices while still having trouble concentrating. This frequently occurs when they are confronted with vociferous, fervent requests from organizational stakeholders. These stakeholders, who frequently represent executives, contend that a certain feature is necessary for the product to succeed, whether or not it is directly related to the product vision.
These requests may result in products that do not advance the product's vision or, at the very least, divert attention from other tasks and slow down the product team.
How to prioritize product roadmap for JTBD
1. Gather Product Feedback
Gathering all of your feature requests and product feedback in one location will help you get an overview and begin the process of prioritizing your product roadmap. You need to keep tabs on which client provided the feedback or asked for a feature.
Understanding the feedback and what your customers are actually requesting is crucial when you collect feedback. Ask questions to learn more about the use case, the motivation behind the feature request, and the core issue. You can also find out from them how significant the feedback is. You can test your suggested solutions with these clients to make sure you're on the same page once you know the specifics of the feedback.
2. Identify Improvement
Some product development is influenced more by your company's strategic goals for the product than it is by customer feedback. Let's take the example of wanting to increase your free trial to paid conversion rate. In that case, you must examine your data carefully to identify any potential improvements. Most likely, you already have a list of strategic adjustments that you would like to make but that no one, in particular, has specifically requested from you.
3. Collect Actionable data
To better understand your customer's problems and the reasons they need them solved, gather feedback and data from a variety of sources.
You must rely on market research and interviews with prospective buyers and users when launching a new product. Find opportunities where your new product can assist customers in resolving their issues using the findings from your research.
4. Know high-value initiatives
Keep the initiatives that will bring your product closer to your vision and drop the ones that don't.
Plotting initiatives on a matrix that compares the value to effort can be useful because they can align with your product vision in different ways. The y-axis should show the contribution each initiative makes to achieving your product vision (i.e. the value it delivers). The relative amount of effort required to implement each initiative should be shown on the x-axis.
The placement of the initiatives on the matrix can be used to determine which ones should be completed first.
5. Receive support from stakeholders for your newly prioritized product roadmap.
It is one thing to create a roadmap based on your product vision. You need executives and stakeholders to support that roadmap in order to execute successfully toward your product vision.
Be open and honest about the method you used to develop your product roadmap in order to achieve that alignment. Allow stakeholders access to your roadmap and the information you relied on to guide your choices. Make it clear how the choices you make for your roadmap relate to your product vision and strategic objectives.
Building credibility involves disclosing information and outlining your reasoning for decisions. Your stakeholders will be able to tell that your roadmap is founded on logic and data rather than intuition.
Conclusion
Your product roadmap is a tool you can use to explain your product strategy and the steps you're taking to realize your product vision. Your roadmap will change as your team advances and you gain new knowledge. Remember to keep your product vision at the forefront of your decision-making to keep your roadmap effective despite that change. It can be difficult to prioritize your roadmap as you expand and receive more customer feedback and feature requests. Use a product prioritization framework to determine your top priorities and adhere to a structured process that takes into account both customer feedback and your strategic priorities.