The Roadmap Responsibility

At one point in my career I worked at a start up technology company who was really interested in getting that next sale, that next logo that they can put in their sales pitches and investor presentations. So of course the product managers scurry revising and creating their roadmaps and putting dates and milestones, etc. It's easy to put together a roadmap, as product managers we know the market, the customers, and the competition. What's hard is to put together a credible roadmap.

We have all seen roadmaps that we look back on a year later and just wonder "What happened to all of those plans and ideas?" It was likely because we didn't get real buy in and commitment. When that happens the road map just becomes a slide that some product manager created. There is no sense of true partnership or responsibility on the part of the team for delivery.

So here are a couple of tips that I have found helpful:

1. If you don't have buy in from the whole team, don't put dates or even quarters in your roadmap. When the sales team shows this roadmap they are going to get asked "When will you release feature ABC?". The answer is simple, this is a plan and we are working planning the release of that feature and we will let you know as soon as we have feature ABC committed for delivery. Be honest and truthful with clients, it will pay off.
2. Create the intial draft of the roadmap with everyone's input. It's easy for a product manager to go off and do all of this research and present a road map to the team. A better way to do that is to go to engineering and ask them for what improvements do they want to see. Perhaps there are infrastructure improvements that can make the support teams work a lot easier. Maybe some internal tools to debug issues to lower the cost of customer service. There are a lot of ideas, include everyone!
3. Make sure you have a product development process that provides clarity and transparency into how resources are being allocated and how the roadmap will get implemented. As a product manager you will get graded on what gets implemented, not what you define or want.
   

Just some initial thoughts on such a difficult subject. Obviously there is more to it than just this blog post, but these are helpful lessons I've learned.