How Outcome-Based Roadmaps Can Save You From Just Making a Load of Pointless Stuff

Friends! Romans! Product managers! Lend me your ears! In the constantly evolving and iterating world of product management, there’s a challenge that plagues us all: building products that users actually need and love. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of churning out features left and right without a clear direction or purpose.

But don’t panic, my friends, for there’s a cure: the outcome-based roadmap. Say goodbye to the days of endless feature-driven timeline roadmaps that lead to a sea of pointless stuff that no one uses.

Let me take you on a journey across the stormy seas of purposeful product planning and show you how outcome-based roadmaps can be your compass to success. It’s a lovely place, where products actually solve people’s problems, and the people who make those products feel like their work actually matters.

What is an outcome-based roadmap?

Imagine a roadmap that doesn’t just list a bunch of features to be built, but instead focuses on the desired outcomes those features will bring. An outcome-based roadmap is your secret weapon against the chaos of aimless product development.

It’s a strategic plan that aligns your efforts with the overarching goals and objectives of your product vision. Instead of drowning in a laundry list of features, you’ll be steering towards meaningful outcomes that create real value for your users and your business, by creating solutions at the problem level. In other words, first, you work out what your users want to do, then you find a way to make that happen.

When you adopt an outcome-based product roadmap, you’re shifting your perspective from “What should we build?” to “What do we want to achieve?” This approach forces you to think about the end results first and then work backward to determine the features and actions necessary to achieve those results.

It’s a customer-centric approach that ensures you’re not just building features for the sake of it, but rather, you’re crafting solutions that directly address user needs and business goals. By focusing on outcomes instead of output, you’re setting a clear direction for your team and fostering a shared sense of purpose.

It’s also a very powerful way of communicating your strategy to all sorts of stakeholders. A good outcome-based roadmap should be so easy to understand that someone could walk in off the street knowing nothing about your product, take a couple of minutes, and come away understanding the “what”, “how”, and “why” of your plan.

By adopting an outcome-based roadmap, product teams can benefit from increased visibility into the desired business outcomes, clarity on the team’s strategic direction, autonomy in decision-making to achieve those outcomes, and more space for user feedback and iteration. This approach ultimately leads to better-informed decisions, improved customer satisfaction, and increased business impact.

Why you should get rid of your feature-driven roadmap

Bid farewell to the days when your roadmap resembled a laundry list of “nice-to-haves” and random ideas thrown in. Feature-based roadmaps might seem like a clever way to make sure you’ve always got the next big thing in the pipeline. More often than not though, they lead to the infamous “feature bloat” – a graveyard of unused functionalities that drain resources and time.

By embracing an outcome-based approach, you’re not just building features for the sake of it. You’re building features that have a clear purpose and a measurable impact. 

One big problem with feature-driven roadmaps is that they lack a strategic context. They often stem from internal ideas or the pressure to keep up with competitors, rather than being grounded in actual user needs or business objectives. This can result in a product that’s cluttered with features but lacks a cohesive user experience.

With an outcome-based roadmap, you’re prioritizing what you’re working on based on its potential to drive the desired outcomes, ensuring that every feature or initiative has a meaningful role to play in the bigger picture. By tying these user stories into your plans, you can see exactly how the work you are doing is going to help the people who pay your bills.

Even better, outcome-based roadmaps encourage a shift in mindset within your team. Instead of celebrating the completion of features, you’re focusing on celebrating the achievement of outcomes. Not only does this boost morale, but it also keeps everyone aligned around what truly matters – delivering value to your users and achieving tangible results for the business.

Look, we’ve waxed lyrical before about why timeline roadmaps are holding you back, and how outcome-focused roadmaps are the best thing since someone looked at a loaf of bread and thought it looked a bit too chunky. And, to be honest, we’ll probably keep harping on about it. After all, we built our entire product around the idea that our Now-Next-Later roadmap will help you make the product that your users want.

Why switch over to an outcome-based product roadmap?

When you build an outcome-based roadmap, you’re fostering a culture of focus, where everyone is aligned on your goals and knows why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Communication becomes crystal clear as teams collaborate to work towards specific outcomes, creating a shared understanding of what success looks like.

In the words of Marty Cagan, founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group:

There are several benefits to this way of working:

First, the teams are more motivated when they are free to solve the problem the best way they see fit.

Second, the team is not off the hook just by delivering a requested feature or project; the feature must actually work (as measured by the key results) otherwise the team needs to try a different approach to the solution.

Third, no matter where the idea for the solution comes from, very often the initial approach doesn’t actually work out, and rather than pretending this is not the case, this model embraces that likelihood.

An outcome-based roadmap provides a framework for making tough prioritization decisions. When you have limited resources and an abundance of ideas, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. But if you’re focused on outcomes, you can evaluate each potential feature or initiative based on its potential to contribute to those outcomes. This leads to a more strategic allocation of resources and prevents you from getting sidetracked by shiny but irrelevant features.

And let’s not forget the cherry on top – your product decisions become more data-driven as you constantly evaluate whether your features are actually delivering the outcomes you intended. If they’re not, you can change your approach and iterate again.

This feedback loop keeps your roadmap agile and responsive, allowing you to make informed adjustments based on real-world usage and market feedback.

What are the benefits of creating an outcome-based roadmap?

In case you’re not convinced yet, here are a few more reasons for making the shift away from feature-based roadmaps:

1. Strategic alignment: An outcome-based roadmap ensures that your product efforts are directly aligned with your overall business goals and objectives. Unlike a timeline-based roadmap that may focus solely on deadlines, an outcome-driven approach keeps everyone focused on achieving meaningful results.
2. Customer-centric approach: Outcome-based roadmaps prioritize delivering value to users by focusing on their needs and problems. This contrasts with timeline-based roadmaps that might prioritize feature completion without considering the user’s actual experience or what they really want.
3. Flexibility and adaptability: Outcome-based roadmaps are inherently more flexible because they prioritize outcomes over specific features or tasks. This means you can adjust your strategy based on changing market conditions, user feedback, and emerging opportunities.
4. Continuous Learning: With an outcome-based approach, you’re constantly learning from the impact of your features. This feedback loop helps you make data-driven decisions and refine your product strategy over time. In contrast, timeline-based roadmaps might not allow for as much learning until after features are already built.
5. Focus on Value: Outcome-based roadmaps encourage a focus on delivering value and solving problems rather than simply adhering to a predetermined timeline. This leads to a more meaningful product that users find beneficial, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
6. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Outcome-based roadmaps foster collaboration between different teams and departments. Everyone understands the purpose of their work and how it contributes to the desired outcomes, leading to improved teamwork and communication.
7. Better Prioritization: Outcome-based roadmaps naturally prioritize features and initiatives based on their potential impact on outcomes. This prevents the inclusion of low-value features that can clutter timeline-based roadmaps.
8. Reduced Feature Bloat: Timeline-based roadmaps can sometimes lead to a “checklist” mentality, resulting in a product with an excessive number of features. Outcome-based roadmaps focus on features that directly contribute to desired outcomes, reducing the risk of feature bloat.
9. Alignment with User Needs: Outcome-based roadmaps keep your product aligned with the evolving needs and preferences of your users. By constantly evaluating whether the outcomes are being met, you can ensure that your product remains relevant and valuable.
10. Clear Communication: Outcome-based roadmaps are easier to communicate to stakeholders and team members. They focus on the why behind your product decisions, making it clear how each feature or initiative contributes to the bigger picture.
11. Reduced Waste: Outcome-based roadmaps minimize the risk of investing time and resources into features that don’t drive the desired results. This reduction in waste is especially important in fast-paced industries where resources are limited.
12. User-Centric Iteration: With outcomes as the guiding star, your product development becomes an iterative process centered around continuous improvement based on real-world impact. This approach is more responsive to user needs than a timeline-driven approach.

Outcome-based roadmapping leads to a better product. By focusing on achieving desired outcomes and creating real value for your customers, the product team can build a product that truly solves customer problems and aligns with business goals. Your customers will be happier with what you put in their hands, and chances are you’ll see increased user adoption, and have a stronger competitive advantage in the market.

Tying your outcomes directly to your objectives

Think of your objectives as the North Star guiding your ship through the stormy seas of product development. Your outcomes are the islands you want to reach along the way. An outcome-based roadmap excels at linking these islands directly to your objectives.

Each feature or initiative you plan and create becomes a strategic step towards reaching those objectives, ensuring that every effort is purposeful and contributes meaningfully to achieving your product vision.

For sustainable success, start with your why and iterate your way to the right what.

Bruce McCarthy, founder of Product Culture

Tying your outcomes directly to your objectives is a crucial step in creating effective outcome-based roadmaps. By clearly defining your goals and establishing metrics, such as Objectives and Key Results (OKRS), to measure the impact of your work, you’re helping your product team to remain aligned with the desired outcomes and focused on delivering value. 

It also empowers your team members by giving them a sense of purpose and ownership over the impact that their personal contribution makes. It also gives them a sense of psychological safety, knowing that their job doesn’t live or die on hitting a specific and possibly unrealistic deadline, but rather on the quality and effectiveness of their work.

Working toward outcomes also avoids the whole “feature factory” problem, because you’re not even necessarily going to be creating a new feature to solve the problem you’re looking at. You might adapt existing functionality, or even end up removing a problem caused by one of your features. The point is to experiment, iterate, and find the right way to get the outcome you’re trying for.

Why Now-Next-Later is our favorite outcome-based roadmap

The fundamental change between Now-Next-Later (NNL) and a timeline roadmap is that we’ve removed time from the top. As soon as you have a timeline at the top, it forces you to put dates on everything in the roadmap, just by the way it’s formatted.

If you’re a product manager working like this, what you’re actually doing is penalizing yourself. You’re forcing yourself to put specific dates on everything you make, which we all know is a lie.

You have to have dates for some things. We don’t live in La-La-Land. There are certain parts of our work that just have to be done by a certain time, such as legal requirements or contractual commitments.

But sometimes it’s more of a fuzzy window that you need to keep on the horizon. You can articulate that concept on an NNL roadmap without necessarily giving the pixel-perfect direction as to exactly when it’s going to land, saving you from having to line up exactly when a whole bunch of other things will land around it like Tetris blocks.

That’s where you start running into the problem of over-project managing, and having to add tons of buffer in order to fit things into the roadmap. By removing the date, it removes that pressure.

Working to horizons, not dates based on guesswork

One of the main reasons that NNL roadmaps exist is because they are easier to relate to in terms of spatial understanding – it’s more about the time horizons.

“Horizons” has an interesting connotation if you think about it in terms of the spatial sense: you’re standing here on the deck of your metaphorical ship, and what’s on the horizon?

Well, you can see the stuff that’s right in front of you. Now, right in front of you, because it’s right here, it’s clear. The most relevant stuff, that’s closest to where you are and what you need to do, has the most visible details.

Meanwhile,  when you’re looking at what’s next, you can’t really see them properly because they’re further away – they’re fuzzy and you have less clarity. And so you need to gradually get closer to them to understand what they’re eventually going to look like. 

The further away it is, the less you know about it, and the later you’ll actually end up working on it. You’re just seeing the tops of the sails over the horizon.

You don’t have to break it down into tons of detail, but it is important to identify what’s in the Later column so you know what’s coming over the horizon, and where you’re planning to end up.

 Solving problems, not making features for the sake of features

Another key aspect of NNL is that it encourages you to take a step up. It’s not about putting a list of features in your Now,  in your Next, and in your Later. It’s about articulating the problems that you’re tackling in those time frames. By articulating the problems it makes you prioritize at the problem level.

When you’re prioritizing at the problem level, you can break each problem down and then prioritize which particular experiments you might run in order to solve each of those problems. some of those experiments might turn into features that solve those problems. Some of those experiments might be taking away features or changing features, or may not even be feature-related at all.

But you are prioritizing at the problems first, and therefore making more impactful product decisions by understanding which problems are going to solve the problems first. You’re sorting the boulders before you’re sorting the pebbles before you’re sorting the sand. And, ultimately, each of those boulders, each of those problems tied to initiatives on your roadmap, should in turn be tied back to your objectives.

Outcome-based roadmaps are the stars that guide you on your product development journey. By saying “bon voyage” to the era of pointless features and embracing a strategic focus on outcomes, you’ll not only be saving yourself from a load of aimless work but also paving the way for products that truly make an impact.

So, take a step back, re-evaluate your roadmap strategy, and let the guiding light of outcomes lead you to the shores of success. Your users, your team, and your bottom line will thank you for it.