Product roadmaps have traditionally been used for feasibility testing and rollout planning. But product roadmaps assume you know what you’ll be building for the next 18–24 months, which you don’t. This is where traction roadmaps come in.
Don’t create a product roadmap. Use a traction roadmap instead.
Unlike a product roadmap, a traction roadmap isn’t output oriented, but outcome oriented. You already learned about an outcome-oriented metric in the previous chapter, which fits the bill perfectly: traction. You also know how to measure it three years into the future with your minimum success criteria.
But while three years is the right time frame for sizing the viability of your idea, for the reasons covered in the last chapter, it’s still too far out into the future for determining your idea’s feasibility—i.e., how you’ll pull it off.
You need a way to break your MSC goal into shorter-term milestones. These intermediate milestones will help you visualize your journey as more manageable stages and chart a stage-based rollout plan. That’s what we’ll cover in this chapter, which focuses on stress testing feasibility (Figure 4-1).
Figure 4-1. Stress testing feasibility
Charting a Traction Ramp
In the last chapter we saw Steve struggling to figure out how he’d meet his goal of having roughly 1,600 ...
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