One of the most incredible balancing acts as a product manager is balancing their strategic and tactical roles. There has been a constant debate about what is more important and where product managers should spend more time. Suppose a product manager’s role is to deliver great products with incredible business value and wow user experiences. Both parts are equally important, and one cannot exist without the other. Product managers must chalk out a strong strategy and have well-defined goals for the product or business. The tactical planning and execution are derived from here.
Tactical product management is the execution part of product management. The ground-level activities and tasks stem from the product strategy to achieve the goals and objectives of the business.
What is a product roadmap?
The product roadmap is a tactical representation of the overall strategy exercise – as the name suggests, a roadmap to achieve the business’s strategic goals. It is a living document that breaks down the strategic goals into Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) or tasks and creates a time-bound plan of action, helping teams to have a clear direction to execute. Each action item is time-bound to have specific priority based on market conditions, impact, effort (and other parameters considered for business), clear markers for progress and metrics for a successful outcome.
Depending on your organizational structure and business, the number of teams and people working on the product roadmap might vary but usually consists of – UX, Engineering, Testing, Sales, Marketing, Operations and Customer Success. The product roadmap, however, is owned by the product team, and it is up to the product manager to prioritize the features, the direction of the product and requests from stakeholders and align teams on the product direction.
Types of roadmaps?
Depending on the business and the granularity that it needs to achieve, there are many different types of roadmaps that teams can choose from to make it relevant to them. A few common ones are listed below:
- Strategy roadmap: This is the 100 feet view or a high-level roadmap to align teams on business strategy and objectives. Showcases the overall strategic goals and metrics to achieve them. Usually great for leadership reviews and showcasing progress at a strategic level.
- EPICS roadmap: This is an excellent roadmap to help organize upcoming work. By grouping related features into epics, this roadmap illustrates position across multiple releases, communicates critical themes, and assists in prioritization decisions.
- Features Roadmap: The features roadmap showcases the plan/ status of the product at a granular level. It is an excellent tool for communicating what features customers and other teams can expect in the future and for clarity about when they can expect it.
- Technology Roadmap: Tech roadmaps are used by internal teams to build technology requirements. It is used to formulate the use of specific technologies for specific features and allocate resources accordingly. This then ties in with the overall strategy and product roadmap.
- Releases Roadmap: Perhaps one of the essential roadmaps for team collaboration, the releases roadmap organizes release cycles for the product and the responsibilities of various teams to bring features to the market. Release roadmaps create synergies between marketing, sales, customer success and other groups while coordinating releases and mapping out the activities that need to take place before a feature/ set of features goes live.
Key features of successful product roadmaps
Here are a few key things to remember while building a great product roadmap. For all teams to align with the plan, it must be simple, easy to understand and follow.
- It breaks down the product vision and strategic themes into actionable items.
- It conveys product strategy and direction.
- All actionable items have a clearly defined business outcome and associated metrics.
- Time-bound and predicts product state and development over the medium to long term.
- It is a collaboration tool for all teams involved. Important to discuss and brainstorm all goals and actions. It could pave the way for better features/ products.
Product roadmaps defined, used and maintained correctly are great tools for collaboration, team alignment and tracking product progress (or a lack of it). However, many product managers also tend to overcomplicate things where managing the roadmap becomes cumbersome and time-consuming for the product team. Roadmaps must be a tool that solves a product manager’s time.
A roadmap is a primary step toward building a great product. Ensure that it is up to date, maintained and well-defined to showcase progress and provide a clear path towards developing a winning product.