Target Your Roadmap
I remember being lazy and regretting it instantly. The roadmap I had created so successfully for our developers proved decidedly unsuccessful with our sales team.
What had started out as an opportunistic cost-benefit analysis of the effort required to design a dedicated roadmap for our sales people, ended up as a cruel Product Management 101 lesson: don't just show any roadmap to any stakeholder. And you don't just walk away from that mistake either.
Allow me to elaborate.
"Hey Marco, you know that we need more than just the JIRA backlog, don't you? Here, check out these three epics; clearly, they build up to something bigger, but where can we find the vision for that?"
The thing I love about my developers is how hopelessly tactless they are. The thing I hate about my developers is how hopelessly tactless they are. Mostly, it depends on my mood which feeling prevails. The tactlessness remains.
So it happened that I consolidated all my knowledge into one document: vision statement, target users, user goals, business goals, technical dependencies, product themes, features and prioritisation. Oh, and target quarters, to gamify the planning exercise a bit; planning is no fun without antagonising your developers, so adding target quarters to release features in makes for energising planning sessions: "Hey Marco, you can't just go write arbitrary dates without consulting the team!" That.
Anyway, after several iterations, the team did get used to my way of building roadmaps; it served their purpose as it helped them understand how they contribute to delivering value to the user, the customer and the business. In the process, that allowed them better to architect their designs, as well as anticipate dependencies and technical debt. Douze points from the developer team.
Word reached me that the sales team were dissatisfied about their lack of insight into future development of the product. How were they going to sell anything to the customer if they couldn't entice them with what was upcoming? That's just elementary, so why won't the Product Manager do it already?
The "it" here, you understand, is the roadmap. Tomorrow, I'll talk about how I messed that up. And how I had to make amends.