Embrace the Inconvenient Truths of Product

Marty Cagan recently wrote about his frustration with the all-too-common process of creating product roadmaps, the process of painstakingly putting together a ‘plan’ for the coming months and quarters, signed off by a vast set of stakeholders.

His article on the Inconvenient Truths of Product resonated with us, as he outlined two very good reasons why this style of roadmapping simply doesn’t work:

“The first such truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work.”

“If that’s not bad enough, the second inconvenient truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable and feasible, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it actually delivers the expected business value.”

As we’ve mentioned before, our previous version of the product roadmap tool was built with the intention to help organise these ‘old style’ roadmaps, quarter-by-quarter, month-by-month, on a feature-level granularity. We got that all wrong.

Last year, we released a new version of the roadmap that suits us and our users much better. It throws out the notion that your roadmap needs to be so granular, and accepts the uncertainty that will always exist when building a product.

Marty Cagan very accurately sums up those two inconvenient truths and urges product teams to embrace them.

The ProdPad Roadmap Tool is designed with these facts in mind, with the goal of helping you embrace the fact that you don’t know exactly what should be in your long-term product plans.  We want you to remain flexible while still providing your team with a sense of product direction.  As a result, our roadmap software features the following:

• Three columns: Current, Near term, and Future
  You can rename these if you wish, but they are purposely given high-level, non-date-specific titles so as not to imply promises of delivery that just aren’t certain.  However, they still provide your team with the insight they need to keep moving in the right direction.
• Time versus Certainty axes
  A concept for roadmaps we first heard about at a talk at ProductCamp London, organises your roadmap items by time and by the likelyhood that you’ll get to them.  Drag and drop roadmap cards across columns or above and below other cards to build out and update your roadmap.
• High-level ‘Roadmap Cards’ instead of features
  Features are simply too granular and likely to change, and just end up cluttering the roadmap. Rather, with the ProdPad roadmap creation tool, you create Roadmap Cards, which represent high-level chunks of work to be completed. These are less likely to change on a weekly basis, and allow you to associate any number of ideas or features to the cards, giving you that crucial link to your product backlog.

Are you embracing these inconvenient truths and changing your roadmapping habits? We’d love to get your feedback. Get in touch at hello@prodpad.com any time!