Issues with old style Product Roadmap

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Summary #

ref The reason that both Jeff Patton and Marty Cagan struggle with the old style “product roadmap” is that most people assume that when something goes on the product roadmap, that the team has every intention of building and launching this.

• The problem is that if the product discovery team is truly doing product discovery, especially when they are validating the ideas with real customers and users as well as stakeholders, then they’ll typically find that at least half of what is on the roadmap is simply not worth doing (usually because the customer doesn’t value it as much as we had hoped, but there are several other reasons that we may decide this is not worth building).

  • So if the product roadmap has this baggage that can lead to serious waste of time and effort, Jeff Patton’s idea was to reposition the Roadmap as the “Opportunity Backlog.”

  • What Jeff is advocating is that the Product Owner maintain a prioritized list of opportunities in the form of an opportunity backlog.

  • As a reminder, the three most important questions on an opportunity assessment are:

    1. What problem are we trying to solve? (why are we doing this)
    2. Who are we trying to solve this problem for? (target persona)
    3. How will we know if we succeed? (what is the outcome we are hoping for)

Podcast #

ref In this podcast Marty Cagan mentions the similar point: Almost all of those assumptions, or many of those assumptions turn out not to be true. So, the business plans today, most people I think rightly scoff at a typical old school business plan, just because they know it’s going to prove to be ridiculously misleading. Today we really highlight ‘what are those assumptions and what are the risks?’ and we tackle them.

That’s why he recommends instead establishing a prioritized set of business problems *(Opportunity Backlog) to solve*, and letting the product team discover and iterate on the best solutions for those problems: