Product Roadmaps Relaunched

Chapter 11. Relaunching Roadmaps in Your Organization

What you’ll learn in this chapter

How to assess your organization’s “roadmap health”

Whether to course-correct or have a full relaunch

If you’ve read through this whole book, it’s probably because, like many other product people, you’ve grown frustrated with the traditional roadmapping process.

Likely your organization is either bogged down in a futile effort to predict the unpredictable, or your team has given up on roadmaps and is operating sprint to sprint or customer demand to customer demand.

If you’ve read this far, though, you know a roadmap can be so much more than a doomed wish list of features and dates. You’ve seen the examples of how companies like Slack, Contactually, Tesla, and Chef communicate their product vision and show clearly how they will achieve it and their business objectives by solving market problems.

Throughout this book, we’ve tried to show you how organizations like these use roadmaps to:

• Put the organization’s plans in a strategic context

• Focus on delivering value to customers and the organization

• Embrace learning as part of a successful product development process

• Rally the organization around a single set of priorities

• Get customers excited about the product’s direction

At the same time, we’ve tried to show how these organizations avoid:

• Making promises product teams aren’t confident they will deliver on

• A wasteful process of up-front design and estimation

• Conflating a roadmap with a project plan or a release ...