Decision-making steps need before planning a roadmap

Planning a new roadmap is often done in a rush, quickly, make sure we take the most relevant topics into the plans, and get work for the engineering teams that are pushing us to hurry, otherwise they'll have nothing to do.

This is the sad reality of product development in many companies. Let's talk about the most important aspects to look into before planning a roadmap.

Assess strategic alignment

This is probably one of the biggest gaps companies have. Roadmaps are typically:

• Filled with customer requests
• Projects that weren't finished on time
• Demands from sales to be able to close a deal
• Plenty of bugs and projects to keep the product running

I'm not going to say that some of these can be very important, but rarely are they packed together. They tend to be more of a miscellaneous of different activities that support different areas of the business. But there is no focus, and teams rarely stop and look if what is planned, or already in the roadmap, is moving the strategic goals forward. Meaning these strategies either don't get support, or they progress very slowly.

And you also need to remember that alignment also means that your teams are aligned in their efforts and goals. This includes sales, marketing, support, services, and any other involved.

Discover opportunities

Before you commit to starting to implement something in your roadmap, you should discover if this opportunity is real:

• Do you have a clear understanding of the problem you solve, who is affected by it?
• Is there enough need in the market to make it meaningful to solve the problem?
• Do you know what the technical solution, and the design (UX), should be?

Discovery is a critical part of helping you decide if moving forward with an opportunity makes sense or not. Too much focus is put on keeping teams busy, when it would be better to spend more time understanding and discovering more about the opportunity, to really bet on the most relevant opportunities.

Stay calm and bring clarity

Demands from different stakeholders will keep coming: sales will have requests, management will come up with the latest and greatest idea for the product, and support will bring endless lists of requests to be implemented. Your job is not to go around saying no left and right.

If you have a clear strategy, a way to measure strategic alignment, and to discover opportunities, you are equipped to make decisions, and justify them to others, not that you are doing this feature because your leader told you to do it, but because it aligns with a company's strategic goal to expand in a certain market.

Is not about saying no, but making clear why decisions are made, and explaining the reasons behind. This will make it clear to other teams to understand the decision-making process.

One-offs will continue, and it's not the end of the world, but you want to ensure that most of your roadmap is geared towards driving your strategy and increasing the chances of success for your product.

Have a system

Define a process. What are the different stages you need to go through to make sure that you really are working on the best opportunities for your product. Having a system doesn't mean that it needs to be stiff, and that will not allow for flexibility.

You don't want to have to go through tons of quality gates, review processes to make sure that the different steps are followed. But neither do you want to ignore your decision-making process.

I've built a system that has helped the different product teams I've led to find opportunities that are relevant to the company's strategic goals. You can find more about it in the Product Operations Framework.