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Priorities Straight!
A Practical Guide to Smart Roadmap
Prioritization for Product Managers
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Contents
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Introduction
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Conclusion
Introduction
reating and maintaining a product roadmap is undoubtedly the product management task most fraught with
difficulty and unpleasantness. Since most product man-
addressed? The list of questions goes on and on, but rest assured
that you are not the first person facing these seemingly unanswerable questions, nor will you be the last.
This eBook aims to provide some practical guidance and advice
for product managers whove arrived at the intersection of product
management as a dark art and product management as a science
and have found themselves facing some tough decisions as they
map out the next leg of their products journey on their product
roadmap.
What to Expect
This eBook provides INTRODUCTORY-LEVEL information for prod-
uct managers who are looking for help prioritizing initiatives on their
product roadmap, or who simply need a refresher course on the
subject. In this eBook, well address:
Important prerequisites for roadmapping such as defining a clear
product vision, understanding the metrics that matter most to your
product, and gaining a good understanding of your customers.
Basic prioritization strategies you can apply to get your roadmap on
the right track while keeping your team in the loop.
How to maintain a healthy roadmap (and product!) over time by
avoiding common pitfalls like technical debt and feature bloat.
01
Before You Begin
Understanding the Major Influencers
Behind Every Roadmap Decision
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You can come up with the most beautiful vision for your product.
But its useless if the people involved in making the product a
success dont buy into it. To leverage the vision as the products true
north, to create alignment, and to facilitate effective collaboration,
the product vision must be shared everyone must have the same
vision. Without a shared vision, people follow their own goals
making it much harder to achieve product success.
- ROM A N P I C HL E R Pichler Consulting
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02
Get Your Priorities
Straight!
Basic Prioritization Strategies
to Get you on the Right Path
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There are only so many hours in a day and only so many resources at
your disposal, and for the last time: you simply cant do it all. Much
like managing your own time and prioritizing items in your day-today to-do list will ultimately help you be more productive; prioritizing the features you roll out, the UI tweaks you make, and other
roadmap initiatives will help you better distribute the resources you
have available for the maximum impact.
Every product team will have its own unique strategy for prioritizing
roadmap initiatives, and that strategy will be influenced by multiple
things beyond product vision and key metrics such as company and
product culture, development cycles, and beyond. That being said,
theres a few techniques you can consider working into your teams
process that will help you make better roadmap decisions, including
considering the impact theyll have on customers, facillitating collaborative roadmapping sessions with your team, plotting initiatives
on a matrix, and building a minimum viable feature in instances
where youre unsure about an initiative.
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The Doctor is In
Start by Diagnosing & Curing Customer Pain
Empathy is one of the most important skills in product management.
As a product manager youre responsible for not just knowing your
customer, but also understanding their pain, and solving it. This
means knowing the problems they face and providing solutions that
cure the most pressing pain first.
Feedback and complaints are excellent sources of information about
customer pain, if you use them to properly diagnose the pain. In
some cases, the prescribed fix is obvious; theres a bug and theyd
like to see it fixed. In other cases its a little more difficult to pinpoint
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How it Works
Lets say your customers say they want extra display settings added
to the control panel and you determine that they want those extra
settings because theyre are having a hard time reading items in
the control panel. Youve identified a pain point and diagnosed the
problem causing the pain, so your next step would be to determine where the solution to the pain should be on your roadmap. In
many cases, youll want to run some more tests to determine how
severe the pain is and how frequently it occurs before you prescribe
treatment.
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Youd want to first gauge the severity of the problem: Is it the vast
majority of customers or just a small percentage of customers being affected? For those affected, how hard is it to use the control
panel? Youd then want to determine the frequency of the pain: do
customers use the control panel every day? Or just periodically?
After youve done a triage of your customers pain, youll have a
better idea of what product areas could use work most and can use
this as a preliminary prioritization tool. If the pain is both severe and
frequent, the solution is both urgent and important, so put it first.
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A popular exercise for categorizing potential features based on resources is a matrix system. This is best done in a group setting as
it can help you and your team quickly decide which features are
worth it and which features arent without getting into the nitty
gritty of man-hours or story points.
Collaborative roadmapping exercises give participants insight into
how the sausage is made, which will come in handy down the line
when people are looking at the finished product and wondering why
their pet feature ended up in Q4 instead of Q3.
How it Works
Gather your team and any other relevant parties and go through
the features youre trying to make sense of one-by-one, working together to determine how much effort each will require to implement
and gauge how much impact each will have (more power to you if
you can use customer data to help estimate impact). Once youve
made these estimates, youll plot the initiatives on a matrix and use
it as a visual tool to help you identify the best opportunities for your
team to pursue.
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IMPACT
High Impact
Low Effort
High Impact
High Effort
BEST IDEAS
Low Impact
High Effort
Low Impact
Low Effort
WORST IDEAS
EFFORT
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simply too many factors to control for. Through brainstorming sessions and customer roundtables youve netted 17 different settings
that should be added to the product, which will require a decent
chunk of effort for your team to develop and launch.
With so much uncertainty around whether this big project will actually help your product, its a tough call how high-priority this feature
should be and whether its a feature worth adding at all--how do you
make that call? Well, do you need to implement all 17 of them to see
whether this enhancement is going to move the needle? Probably
not.
Instead, you can borrow from the Lean Startup principles Ries outlines in his book and take the minimum viable product approach at
the feature level. Start by selecting one or two customization options
that your preliminary research shows will be popular and implement
those as smaller chunks of work in an upcoming release. Then, use
your predefined KPIs to prove (or disprove) your hypothesis that
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You can probably throw the ones that fall into that second bucket
out--you are likely never going to have extra resources and the list of
things you want to put on your roadmap is only going to get longer. If you
cant demonstrate the value of those
features now, you most likely wont be
able to down the line either--unless, of
course they pop up again in the form
of customer requests, in which case
youll have an opportunity to revisit
and reassess them.
The items that belong to the first category, however, can be some
of the most challenging for product managers to prioritize. Sure,
theyre important, but perhaps they dont seem urgent or dont want
to push off everything else on your plate to get them done, so these
features often wind up rotting away in your product backlog. Rather
than put off a decision, why dont you dig a little deeper and ask
yourself this: Is this an item your organization HAS to do or simply
WANTS to do?
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When its a resource intensive want to do, you really need to build
out the business case to determine whether its a worthy cause. If
after building out the business case you determine that it is indeed
a worthy cause, then your organization may want to reallocate resources on hold to tackle the initiative.
Surprisingly, its the the have to do items that are the trickiest because its inevitable that youll have to take care of them sooner or
later. The worst possible outcome is that the have to do project
suddenly becomes a have to do NOW project and ends up taking
up everyones time at an inopportune moment when you have a
closing window of opportunity for something else.
Liken this to your dentist telling you at a checkup that youll need
your wisdom teeth out...eventually. Youre left with two options: 1.
Put the procedure off until your wisdom teeth start growing in and
causing such excruciating pain that you have to reschedule your
family vacation to go get them taken out, or 2. Have them removed
at your earliest convenience, and despite being out-of-commission
for a few days, not missing your family vacation or other important
events.
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Its best to take care of these have to do items at your convenience and on your own terms, rather than leave them looming in
the background of your product backlog because it allows you to
have a bit more control.
When you uncover a have to do item in your backlog you may
have an opportunity to take the minimum viable feature route
before you dedicate lots of resources to it. If you cant make it into
a MVF, and its not yet an urgent have to do item you, break the
project down into smaller parts to incorporate as part of your next
two or three releases. No one wants to be the product manager
making their entire dev team spend three months on platform upgrades and database migrations, but if its a have to do, sooner
is almost always your best bet.
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03
Maintaining a
Healthy Roadmap
Feeding Your Roadmap a Balanced Diet
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Maintaining A
Healthy Roadmap
Feeding Your Roadmap a Balanced Diet
It can be tempting to load up your roadmaps near-term releases with projects and features that all aim to do the same thing so
you can meet a short-term goal. It can also be difficult to resist the
temptation to cram in as many shiny new toys as possible; theyre
fun to spec out, they get customers and sales teams excited, and
they usually have some positive revenue implications.
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Be sure you dont jump the gun on feedback. When you allow customer requests to simmer for a bit, you give yourself the opportunity to collect feedback from more customers and validate whether
the request is worth acting on and whether the customer who first
requested the feature still wants it the next time you talk to them.
Getting away from knee-jerk prioritization is key to any successful
product strategy. Customers also dont always know what they need;
they may know what they think they want, but they rarely know what
is actually possible and they have a very limited perspective (their
own). You should be looking at the entire market, not just listening
to feedback from the vocal minority.
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them healthy and ensure that they arent getting in the way of your
products core function.
Its all about striking the right balance between features and functionality and maintaining focus on your product vision. You should
always consider whether something new has the potential to take
away from something you already have thats working great, because
it can sometimes be hard to remove functionality once people get
used to it.
Its not about ten features versus seven, its about the right four
versus the wrong eight (or the right eight versus the wrong four).
Its also about the right place and the right time to reveal the right
features. Every feature, widget, or interface control competes.
Loading up the screen with stuff that is used 10% of the time means
the stuff thats used 90% of the time has to fight for attention.
Thats not a good experience. The experience should be light,
flowing, and comfortable, not heavy, clunky, and frustrating.
J A SON F R I E D Basecamp
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Conclusion
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roadmap they should see that the most important issues are being
addressed and have a better perspective of the scope of the various
things involved in the care and keeping of a successful product.
If your vision is clear and your navigation skills are successful, your
roadmaps audience will gain a deeper appreciation of what your
team is working on; theyll see that both todays work, tomorrows
tasks, and sprints during the weeks and months to come build toward something significant. If you remember to focus on pursuing
your vision, solving customer problems, and constantly taking the
path with the greatest impact, youll have an easier time getting
where youd like to be and getting team buy-in to your plans.
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VISIT USERVOICE.COM
Get Your
Priorities Straight!
A Practical Guide to Smart Roadmap
Prioritization for Product Managers
B Y HE ATHE R M C C L OSKE Y
Inbound & Content Marketing Manager, UserVoice
Heather McCloskey is a former broadcast news producer turned product
managment & marketing nerd. When shes not researching or writing, she
can be found putting pedal to the metal behind a sewing machine or
painting watercolor comics.