From Product Roadmap to Problem Roadmaps
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a high-level visualization of a product over time. It outlines the vision, priorities and progress of the product. It should have the following characteristics:
- Clearly communicates deliverables and the expectations for where the product is going and why.
- Is linked to the product strategy.
- Is flexible to change to cater for customer feedback and competitive landscape.
- Shows the short and long term goals for the product to the team as well as stakeholders
From Product Features to Problem Roadmap
Product roadmaps are normally based on the features. Features that will be implemented for your product, and the timelines over which they would be implemented.
However, focusing on features can lead the product managers astray. If you think about the features, and try to prioritize them based on various factors, for example the value added, development time etc, then you may be developing features that are not really adding value for the users. This can result in a big, fat product roadmap which has features that are over 6 months old, but may not be of any value to the customer anymore.
With a problem roadmap, we look for the most pressing customer needs, and purposefully exclude the potential solutions to that problem.
Problems can then be easily communicated across various teams within organization, bringing everyone on the same page, and agreeing on the higher priority problems of their customers.
It also allows us to validate our solutions as quickly as possible, gather customer feedback and incorporate in the roadmap, to understand whether the problem was solved or not.
If the problem is not solved, it may be because we did not have a good understanding of the problem, or the solution was not effective enough. But the problem remains the same, and so the product’s focus is not diverged.
Also, when talking about features, you are directly talking about the solutions and not the problems that need to be solved.
One drawback of this is that there may be solutions or features out there which are far simpler and effective in solving the real problems of the users, instead of sticking to just one solution translated into a feature.
How do we build a problem roadmap?
In my current company, we follow the “problem roadmap” strategy. A year is divided into four increments (representing each quarter). At the beginning of each increment, we go through the process of creating a roadmap. In order to do that, we follow these steps:
- List all the problems that your customers are facing.
- Share the problems list across the product team, and get a vote on them.
- Prioritize the list of problems with the strongest at the top.
- Pick up one problem for each agile team to solve during that increment and have relative OKRs defined for that.
- Each team then validates the problem, conducts customer research and build a prototype to test it in a smaller focus group.
- Once the prototype is validated, the teams start building the feature inside the product.
- Once the minimum viable feature set is developed by the team, its released to the customer to gather more feedback through in-app feedback and surveys.
- At the end of the increment, based on customer’s feedback and research, the team validates whether the OKRs were met or not and whether the problem was solved. And the roadmap is adjusted accordingly for the next increment.
