The Importance of Having a RoadMap — Debbie Ogana

Debbie is passionate about building products that make the user’s life easy. She has experience in Project and Product Management and has been able to spearhead the development and delivery of exceptional products and services to customers. She is the Lead Product Manager at Mint Digital Bank and is currently working on Lending, Core Banking, and Savings Products.

“Most of us want to make the world a better place to live in, let’s start by building products that work” — Debbie Ogana

In very simple terms, what is a roadmap?

A product roadmap is a high-level, strategic document that outlines the phases of a product’s development. Product roadmaps are crucial for aligning multiple teams across the organization around product strategy, and for when different goals and milestones will be achieved. From a product management standpoint, they’re also useful for allowing different team members — especially developers — to focus on the most important tasks, make quick decisions, and avoid scope creep. Your product roadmaps should communicate the vision and progress of what’s coming next for your product given that it is an important asset for aligning teams and valuable stakeholders — including executives, engineering, marketing, customer success, and sales — around your strategy and priorities.

Why are these roadmaps important?

Roadmaps form an integral part of product development. They are very important because;

• They communicate the ‘why’ behind your product
• It helps you as a product manager to prioritize product tasks and initiatives
• With a well-defined product roadmap, you can track progress toward product goals
• The product roadmap helps you as a Product Manager to coordinate activities across teams.
• Product roadmaps create transparency, internally and externally.

Also, the product roadmap is important because it is the one document that will keep the development of the product on track, and generally ensure that everyone involved in the process is on the same page.

What are the questions you ask when building a roadmap and Who should participate in roadmap planning?

When defining your product roadmap is important to start with;

• Which products or features are you building?
• Why are you building these features?
• When are you building those products or features?
• What are the goals of the features you are building?

It’s important to answer these questions even before you start your road-mapping.

As per who should participate in road-mapping, anyone who is part of the product development process can participate in the planning of the roadmap.

• The Product Manager — He/she is primarily responsible for the product roadmap. So the PM will serve as the driver of the roadmap planning.
• The Engineering Team — A CTO/Engineering Lead can act in this capacity. Its always important to involve the Engineering team, because they advise on the technicalities involved in building a particular feature.
• The Business or Executive Stakeholders

What makes a good roadmap; What should a roadmap include?

Your product roadmap will typically contain the following;

• The feature you want to build
• The goal of the feature. Or you can say the expected outcome
• The estimated delivery timeframe
• The metrics
• The status marker.

When creating your product roadmap, it’s always best to begin with your product’s vision. Normally you would derive the product’s vision from your company’s larger strategic objectives. You should be able to confidently say why users would want to use your product and why it is worthwhile for your company to invest in it. Afterward, convert that high-level vision into actionable goals. Next, turn those product goals into your product roadmap. Finally, move from your roadmap to your backlog- This is where tools like Jira become handy.
Starting at the highest level, and working your way strategically down into the details, is the best way to stay focused and on track toward your main objectives — and to avoid losing sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

What software/tools can be used to draw up roadmaps?

So these tools can be leveraged for road-mapping;

• Roadmunk
• Aha
• Productplan.

While these tools are good to use, I prefer to use confluence (An Atlassian documentation tool) for my road-mapping. Reason being that it gives me the flexibility to configure to my preference.

After the discussion session, we had questions from the members of the community, here are some of them.

When joining a new team do you just use whatever existing road-mapping style they have or pitch new ones you think will be better?

While it’s necessary to understand and have a full grasp of the roadmap handed to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean you must adopt the style of the road-mapping. If you have better ideas of road-mapping you think will be beneficial to the team, please always feel free to share.

What would you say is the role of the Product Marketing Manager? Normally, I hear this statement “the product manager is responsible for putting the product on the shelf while the product marketer is responsible for taking the product off the shelf”, Do you think the PMM should play a huge part in the product development as much as the Product Manager? As a Product Manager with previous experience in Product Marketing, I believe the PMM knows more of the market and that joint effort would lead to building a customer-centric product. What are your thoughts on this

To be sincere, you are not wrong at all. My few years in Product development have taught me that products cannot succeed fully without the presence of product marketing. So to answer your question, the product marketer is an integral part of the team and their major role is to develop effective marketing strategies that would drive sales of the product and also ensure strategic brand positioning.