Focus on what matters when going from product vision to product roadmap. Held at the Agile Product Delivery meetups and one of the favourites for our Lunch & Learn sessions..

1. 1
Focus
On
What
Matters
Pieter-Jan Hoogendijk
Rogier Krijgsman

2. From Vision
To Roadmap
Today we’ll be talking about focus on what
matters when going from product vision to
product roadmap

3. Where
Products
Come From
Creating and maintaining a product roadmap
is undoubtedly one of a product manager’s
toughest and unpleasant tasks.

4. How it
Feels
Product Managers are constantly asked to
come up with new ideas and new features,
that we “know” will delight our users,
or at the very least satisfy them.

5. But we can’t look
into the future
Since most product managers do not have
psychic abilities, figuring out what to build
is a truly challenging part of the job

6. Unless you’ve been working in the movie industry

7. Start with your
Product Vision
Understand
Your Value
Simplest
Product
Keeping
it focused

8. Start with your
Product Vision

9. Where are
you going?
Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way
you go.

10. Guiding force
behind every
decision
If you don’t have a destination in mind, you’re
going to have a hard time building a map
that will take you there.

11. Focus
on the
Why
The product vision is the overarching goal
you are aiming for, the reason WHY for
creating the product.

12. Your vision goes
beyond your
product
To capture and share
the world’s moments

13. Verb.
Target.
Outcome.
“make transportation as reliable
as running water, everywhere,
for everyone.”

14. Verb.
Target.
Outcome.
Connect the world’s professionals
to make them more productive
and successful.”

15. Verb.
Target.
Outcome.
Organise the world’s information,
make it universally accessible

16. Verb.
Target.
Outcome.
Find and discover anything,
you might want to buy online

17. Strategies Change
Vision Don't
(or rarely)
It provides continued purpose in an ever-
changing world, provides motivation when it
gets tough, and helps effective collaboration.

18. Your Vision
enables focus
It is a first filter for new ideas and change
requests: Anything that helps you move
closer to your vision is helpful and should
be considered; anything that doesn’t, is
should probably be discarded.

19. Understand
Your Value

20. Focus on Your
Customers
Without customers, you don’t have a
product or business, so if you want to
keep them (happy), it’s in your best
interest to serve their needs.

21. Where
we should
focus
Customer
SolutionsProblems
use
addresses
have
1
2 3

22. Reality?!
We love
solutions
Customer
SolutionsProblems
use
addresses
have
2
3 1

24. From their Heart
to their Wallet
“To get customers, you need to go from the
heart to the brain to the wallet.”
– Gary Vaynerchuk

25. Empathy
is Key
As product manager you’re responsible
for not just knowing your customer, but
to understand and solve their pain

26. Love Your
Haters
Feedback and complaints are great sources
of information about customer pain, if you
use them to properly diagnose the pain.

27. Prioritise
Your
Assumptions
Prioritise your assumptions (risks)
if you don't focus on highest risks first,
you’ll might end up with wrong results

28. Plenty
Of
ToolsLean Canvas Experimentation
Board
Empathy MapBusiness Model Canvas Value-Proposition CanvasOpportunity Canvas
Product Canvas Test & Learning CardsExperiment Map

29. Lean
Canvas

30. Validate
Assumptions
Early
Maximize for speed, learning, and focus by
minimizing the time of each iteration and
iterate as many times as possible…

31. Focus on
Actionable
Metrics
Actionable metrics tie specific and
repeatable actions to observed results
and avoids focusing on vanity

32. Focus
on your
learnings
The Validation Board is a great tool to help
product managers stay focused on
learnings and taking action

33. Learnings
should
hurt
Your initial assumptions
rarely survive first contact
with customers

34. The Simplest
Product

35. You can’t
do everything
There are only so many hours in a
day and only so many resources at
your disposal, and for the last time:
you simply can’t do it all.

36. Power of Gall’s
Law
All complex systems that work evolved from
simpler systems that worked.
If you want to build a complex system
that works, build a simpler system first,
and then improve it over time.

37. Scalpel
Easy to market/explain
Easy to adopt
Does one thing well
Quick to build and test

38. Army Knife
Hard to market/explain
Hard to adopt
Does nothing well
Long time to build

39. Staying Small
Forces Focus
Staying small forces to focus on what
matters: Product development, taking
care of customers , and not much else.

40. Your first product
release must be
1. A solution to a real problem that exists today
2. Easy to build, test and refine
3. Easy to explain to a customer
4. Easy to adopt for users

41. Focus on
a subset of the
entire workflow
To make a simple product, you need to
decide where it starts and stops.

42. Automate your travel, expense and
invoice management
42

43. Focus
where you
add value
Start at the first step in the workflow where
you add value (faster, easier etc) and
stop where you no longer add value

44. Focus on your
core product
So many companies which keep launching
product after product without getting their
core product right. Instead at Airbnb they
take several iterations to get the core
product experience right before
they do anything new.

45. Keeping
it focused

46. The road to
bloatware
Avoid “Just this once for just this customer”,
because before you know it you start telling
people your product is a Swiss Army knife.

47. Product
Death
Cycle

48. Don’t overpack
your product
Everything you add into the mix adds
weight and has implications on everything
else your product already does.

49. Avoid distraction
by the competition
Don’t let competition distract from vision or
dictate roadmap decisions, don't ignore them,
but don’t let them prioritise for you.
Adding bells and whistles just to match the
competition will ultimately distract you
long-term goals.

51. Strike the
right balance
It’s all about the right balance between
features and functionality and maintaining
focus on your product vision.

52. The Fight for
Attention
“Every feature, widget, or interface control
competes. Loading up the screen with stuff
that is used 10% of the time means the stuff
that’s used 90% of the time has to fight for
attention. That’s not a good experience. “
- Jason Fried, Basecamp

53. Who’ll use it
and how often
Always consider whether something new has
the potential to take away from something
you have that’s working, because it can
sometimes be hard to remove a feature
once people get used to it.
Des Trainer, Intercom

54. Types of Work
on a Roadmap
1. Improving a feature (+ customer satisfaction)
2. Getting more people to use it (+ % adoption)
3. Getting people to use it more (+ frequency/user)
4. A new feature to support a new workflow

55. Thanks for
your attention
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