8 Steps to Convert Your Timeline Roadmap to a Now-Next-Later

I’m assuming, that if you’ve landed on this page and want to convert your timeline roadmap to a Now-Next-Later, you’ve come to the realization that timeline roadmaps suck. So, first off, I want to congratulate you on that. They do suck. Big time. I won’t go into all the reasons why here, but if you need any further convincing (or think anyone on your team does) then I urge you to signup for our free course on How to Move from Timeline to Agile Roadmapping. On signing up you’ll be taken to a page that maps out exactly why timelines are bad for business, bad for customers and bad for the world. Ok… maybe not the world, but they certainly won’t make for a happy Product team.

I’m also assuming, since you’re here, that you know why the Now-Next-Later roadmap, and lean, agile roadmapping in general, is a much better approach. But again, if you want a refresher on that, lesson 2 in the course will see you right. Alternatively there’s a short, sharp explanation on the benefits of the Now-Next-Later framework in our Ultimate Guide to Product Roadmaps.

In short, the Now-Next-Later helps you stay outcome-focused and not out-put focused. Rather than a roadmap populated with specific features, you will have a strategic planning tool that prioritizes broader Initiatives, articulated as problems to solve, across three time horizons.

Within each Initiative are different Ideas, or experiments, you are exploring and validating as possible ways to solve that problem. In this way, the Now-Next-Later roadmap framework affords you the flexibility to experiment, learn and iterate to find the most successful solution that will drive your desired outcome. You are not committing to an exact feature too early, nor are you giving exact dates until you know for sure what you are going to build. But you are making a clear and easy to understand declaration of the important problems you are going to solve (for the business and/or the customer) and in what order you are going to tackle them.

Sounds good right? You want that for yourself don’t you? But if right now you’re sat in front of a well-established timeline roadmap around which all your product processes and stakeholder expectations are centered, how on earth do you get there? How do you go from that, to the better way of working that I’ve described? 

After all, a lot of work will have gone into that timeline roadmap, however troublesome it might be. So how do you transition to the Now-Next-Later roadmap without completely throwing out all that work and starting from scratch? Well, don’t despair, it is possible. Just work through the steps I’m going to walk you through in this article.

Let’s get started…

The 8 steps to converting your timeline roadmap to a Now-Next-Later  

1. Go get your Strategy and Vision
2. Check your OKRS
3. From features to problems 
4. Creating your Initiatives and Ideas
5. Aligning to your Product Objectives
6. Defining your time horizons
7. Getting your Initiatives in the right columns
8. Reviewing your Now-Next-Later roadmap

Step 1. Go get your Strategy and Vision 

Before we pick up your timeline roadmap and start the transition, we need to make sure you have solid foundations in place. The outcome-focused nature of the Now-Next-Later framework means it is intrinsically linked to the value your product is trying to drive for both your customers and your business. As such, any good Now-Next-Later roadmap is grounded in a strong Product Vision. 

We won’t dive into the art of creating a compelling and effective Product Vision here, but if you don’t have one, or think yours could do with a refresh, then be sure to check out our Product Vision Template for guidance on how best to create one, and our collection of good Product Vision examples to help spark ideas.

But if you have one, go get it and just double-check that your Vision…

• Is inspiring and motivating
• Includes details on your buyers and users
• Covers your value proposition and links back to the desired outcomes 
• Is unambiguous and not open to multiple interpretations

Step 2. Check your Objectives

The second pillar of your Now-Next-Later roadmap foundation is your Product Objectives. Regardless of the goal setting framework you favor (be it OKRs, a Strategy Map, GSM, Balanced Scorecard, or any other), you should have a set of things that you are trying to achieve as a product and a business. You may or may not have drilled down further to specific, measurable goals with exact targets, but at the very least you should have around 3 to 5 core product objectives. 

Again, if you think you’re lacking here, then it’s a good idea to work your way through our course on how to create Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). That is our preferred goal framework here at ProdPad and the one that most closely aligns with the Now-Next-Later approach. 

Gather your Objectives and have them to hand as you work through the next steps.

Step 3. From features to problems

The chances are, if you’re currently working with a timeline roadmap, the items you have on there are specific feature ideas, rather than broader themes, areas of focus or problems to solve. 

Structuring your roadmap as a series of specific feature ideas is a bad idea. Among other things, it creates an output mindset instead of an outcome-focused one. Why is this so important? Because measuring output isn’t relevant to a product’s success – you need to measure outcomes and have the confidence that you’ve solved the problem you intended to solve.

A Now-Next-Later roadmap should never be populated with a series of cards or items that are specific feature ideas but is, in fact, structured around a two level hierarchy –  namely, Roadmap Initiatives and their corresponding Ideas. 

These Initiatives are focused on the problem to solve – the broader customer or business value you’re trying to deliver – and the Ideas within each Initiative are the possible ways you could go about solving that problem and delivering that value. Depending on where the Initiative sits on your roadmap those Ideas will be a list of possibilities that still need to be considered, researched, and explored. Or they’re Ideas you have run discovery on, validated, and are ready to proceed with.

So, how do you take a bunch of feature ideas from your timeline roadmap and convert them into this Initiative > Ideas structure? Get yourself a whiteboard (virtual or otherwise) and follow these steps.

Firstly, make a sticky note for every item on your timeline roadmap and stick them on your board. Now you’re going to do an Affinity Mapping exercise.  

Gather your team around (or do this on your own if you’re so inclined) and group these sticky notes by theme. Don’t be tempted to consider certain areas of the product a theme, or particular user personas. Those examples are not outcome-focused – and being out-come focused is key to the Now-Next-Later roadmap framework! The Now-Next-Later is designed to keep you results-orientated and make certain you’re prioritizing what will create the most value and building things that will help you succeed and grow. 

In order for your NNL to be most effective, you’ll want to group your feature sticky notes based on the problems they are trying to solve. That problem could be related to your customers, or even to your business.

For example, you might have a bunch of features on your timeline that are ideas related to helping your customers share content more easily, or features that are all attempts to improve collaboration for your users. In these cases, your problem to solve could be ‘How can we help customers collaborate more effectively?’ 

So have a look through all the sticky notes on your board and think about the value the feature would bring (to the customer and/or the business) if it were successful. Now think about that value as the solution to a broader problem. Now articulate that problem in a short sentence – we find questions work well, particularly for things in your Later column (but we’ll come back to that). That is your theme/problem to solve title. 

Now continue through all of your sticky notes and when you identify a problem to solve that is already captured on your board, move that feature sticky note over to that group. Remember to keep your problems to solve broader than the specific solution that one particular feature would bring. For example, you might have a feature which is a Slack integration – at this stage, keep the problem to solve much broader – in this example it could be something like ‘How can we help our customers increase collaboration with other departments?’ Later on we will come back to each problem and get more specific – but more on that later.  

Step 4. Creating your Initiatives and Ideas

The groupings you’ve created with your Affinity Mapping session are going to become your Roadmap Initiatives with their related Ideas. With just a little more work, we’ll get you from a board of stickies to a list of Initiatives ready to start mapping onto your Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

Let’s start with picking off any groupings on your board that have a lot of feature sticky notes within them. If you don’t have any groups with more than 4 or 5 features, then you can go ahead and skip to the next step! But if there are one or more groups with 5+ features within them, you’ll want to spend some time looking at those. 

You’ll need to break down any problems where you have a large list of features all trying to solve that issue. Let’s use an example to illustrate this….

Once you are happy that you have your problems-to-solve broken down to the right level, you have successfully reframed a bunch of specific feature-related roadmap items into a series of broader initiatives. 

The feature roadmap items that you have in each grouping then become your Ideas for how to solve each of those problems. 
 

Step 5. Aligning to your product objectives

The last step in finalizing these Initiatives is to map them back to your Product Objectives. This is an essential component of the Now-Next-Later roadmap format. The outcome-focused nature of the Now-Next-Later roadmap framework requires that everything on your roadmap is not only focused on delivering value in the form of solving a problem, but also by contributing to the achievement of your Product Objectives. 

So, looking back to step 2, grab your core Product Objectives (that no doubt align to some extent with your overall business objectives) and give each a color, icon, or flag of some sort. 

Now go back to your Initiative groupings, one by one, and determine which Objective each of them is helping to achieve. Color code the grouping (or add the flag or icon to the group) with the relevant Objective or Objectives (remember, it can help you achieve more than one of your objectives). 

Now you have a set of nicely agile roadmap Initiatives that are outcome-focused and linked to your Objectives. 

Next up is the timing. How do you now take what was once mapped out on a timeline and translate it into the Now-Next-Later framework?

Step 6. Defining your time horizons

The first stage is to define your time horizons. This is important because everyone can have different interpretations of what now, next, and later mean. You need to be explicit about how you’re defining these horizons so you’re setting the right expectations with your stakeholders. 

A good option for when you’re weaning a team off a timeline roadmap is to use more exact time parameters like fiscal quarters.

Remember, you don’t even have to stick to Now, Next, and Later as your time horizon headings! You can adopt the process and principles of the Now-Next-Later without being tied to those exact terms.

In fact, even in ProdPad, we allow our customers to customize the column headings and call them whatever they want. You might want to be more explicit about the time brackets for each and call them ‘This quarter’, ‘Next quarter’, and ‘The future’.

Once you’ve decided what you mean by Now, Next, and Later, you’ll be able to roughly map the periods on your timeline to these horizons.

Step 7. Getting your Initiatives in the right columns

So now you have a bunch of Initiatives with their Ideas, and a set of well-defined time horizons, now you need to combine the two and distribute those initiatives across your Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

Here are the steps to follow:

1. In order to roughly match the priority order you had on your timeline roadmap (so you’re not completely dismantling all the stakeholder expectations that already exist), take each Initiative and look at the Ideas. Find the Idea that was place soonest on your old timeline roadmap – now assign the entire Initiative to the time horizon column that corresponds to that date on your timeline
2. Once you’ve been through each Initiative and placed it based on where the earliest feature was on your previous timeline, then you need to go back to each initiative and sense-check whether those feature ideas are actually right for the NNL stage you’ve placed them. You want to do this based on the stage each feature is at. How validated is this feature? How confident are you that this feature is going to solve that problem? Place in now next later based on that- does it need more discovery to validate it? Then put it over in next or later. Have you done a lot of that validation work? Are you pretty confident it’s the right thing to do to solve that problem? Then put that in now – it’s ready. 
   
   Essentially, the placement on the NNL roadmap should correlate to the degree of confidence you’ve reached for the Ideas within each Initiative. And the level of confidence you have will be influenced by the work you’ve done and the amount of time you’ve spent on the idea. 
   
   Broadly speaking, the placement of Initiatives on your NNL should look something like this. 

3. You’ll notice that the Initiative title is different for each time horizon column. As your Initiatives move from right to left, working through your process and maturing, you’ll be able to narrow the problem down and get more specific. It’s also helpful to update your Initiative titles and descriptions to reflect that. 
   
   So, based on these maturity stages, do any of the Initiatives on your NNL need to shift? Is there an Initiative in the Now column with Ideas that haven’t been validated yet? Are there feature ideas that need more discovery done before you can confidently say that they are the right solution to that problem and are what you should be building? If so, move it back to the next column to allow time to do that research and validation work. 
   
4. Remember to watch out for any hard deadlines that need to be hit. If it’s important that something is shipped by a certain date, then you won’t have the flexibility to move it back. Make sure you’ve checked through everything for any hard dates like these and have your Initiative in the relevant time horizon column.

If something has to move (and there’s no hard time sensitivity to prevent that), remember to make a note of the change so you have a list of where you’ve significantly diverged from the priority order as it appeared on the previous timeline. You’ll likely need to communicate those changes to your stakeholders when you present your new NNL roadmap. But do not fear, you have solid reasons for pushing it back – it will enable you to validate the idea, ensuring you’re spending expensive development time on something that stands a better chance of driving the results that are strategically important.

Step 8. Reviewing your Now-Next-Later roadmap

For the most part, where your Initiatives are placed is based on where they were on your timeline. Now it’s time to sense check that placement now that they are reframed around problems to solve and linked to your objectives. 

So take a step back and look at what you have. Are these the most important problems to solve? Did you struggle to associate any of these Initiatives with your Objectives? If so, should you be doing them at all?

At an Initiative level, are these feature Ideas still the right ones to work on? Now that you’ve grouped the feature ideas under the problems to solve, have you got multiple features that are working to solve the same problem? Do you need all of them? Or is one likely to prove far more effective than the others? In which case, consider ditching the other feature Ideas so you’re being as efficient with your resources as possible. If you can solve the problem with one feature rather than three, great – build and measure that one feature and then move on to the next problem to solve.

This is one way in which the Now-Next-Later format helps you solve more problems in less time! Deliver more value, faster. You’re more efficient and effective working in this way and staying focused on the problem to solve rather than being a feature factory.

I would love to hear from you after you’ve made the transition from timeline roadmap to Now-Next-Later. Heck, I’d even like to see your new Now-Next-Later and offer my thoughts. So please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know how the move goes. Good luck, you won’t regret it.