Crazy Roadmapping Season

Impact is the real measure of success for a product team, but to keep us fueled along the race, we need to remember to celebrate the milestones that guide us along that uncertain path towards impact.

🏁 One of the milestones during this hectic time of the year is creating a roadmap that aligns all stakeholders.

⛑ That is HARD work. It requires getting different perspectives OUTSIDE of people’s heads and putting them into a tangible piece that we can all agree upon.

⏳ Way before a company kicks off their typical roadmap dates, I start my own preparation. While everyone is still head down on delivery, I start shifting my focus to the months ahead. Delivery continues, yes, but in parallel I pivot my focus more intensely to customer insights, and pay more intentional attention to the market signals. I also tune into anything I hear around company ambitions that may help give guidance on how we translate insights into a meaningful plan.

📍 Of course I don’t this alone nor in a day or a week. This is a constant effort driven by the discipline of capturing data on a daily and weekly basis: that customer call, this support email, that sales colleague feedback, and this business metric trend. I just invite people over to more intentionally move into that direction of planning.

🏀 The actual work is done little by little and in collaboration with all sorts of people. My main partners in crime are, of course, the product designer and the engineering lead. But there are also the business analysts, the head of sales, the lawyer, the finance partner, and the list goes on.

🗓 It involves preparing workshops in advance, identifying key inputs and key stakeholders to involve, identifying the right activities for the type of people, the time available, and the outputs we want to get from all of it.

😤 It requires having many bad and painful conversations until we finally tune into one another to have more successful ones.

📹 And in the end it is all simplified and captured in a set of slides to present for others to make sense of (my least favorite part, I confess). All told through a story that hopefully inspires. A story that promises to create a certain future. And it comes with that scary feeling that we don’t know what the future holds, but with a belief that we can change it.

🎉 Today I celebrate that milestone because after weeks and weeks of collaborative work we have gotten to a point of agreement. It wasn’t an easy ride and while I might have hated moments of it, it is precisely the fact that it was so difficult what makes today so satisfying: that we strived to get here.

😌 Let’s stop and celebrate and leave the unknowns to the future.

Wishing you all a not-so-crazy roadmapping season 😉