Download to read offline
Uploaded byProduct Anonymous
Stop wasting time with roadmaps!
The document discusses roadmaps and their usefulness and drawbacks. It notes that while roadmaps are commonly used to communicate goals and plans, they often become outdated, lack clarity of purpose, and can lead teams to focus on specifics too far in advance instead of iterative development. However, roadmaps don't have to be bad if they focus on problems to solve rather than detailed plans, keep the format simple, and remember that the roadmap should work for the team rather than being the main objective. The rest of the document provides examples of better roadmapping practices and SEEK's new product roadmap as an example.
More Related Content
Similar to Stop wasting time with roadmaps!
Stop wasting time with roadmaps!
- 1. Stop wasting time withroadmaps SEEK Product – February 2018
- 2. So, what isa roadmap? 2
- 3.
- 4. “Road maps showpeople how they can travel from one place to another“ – dictionary.com “A company roadmap is a document to capture and quickly convey its big-picture plans and objectives “ – prodplan.com 4
- 5. “a document tocapture and quickly convey a team’s big-picture goals, specific objectives and their imagined path to sucess” – me 5
- 6. Why are theyused so much? 6
- 7. 7 The first purposeis because the management of a company wants to make sure that the teams are working on the highest value items first, relevant to the company strategy. The second purpose is because businesses may have date-based commitments. The roadmap is where they see and track those commitments. Source: Adapted from SVPG.com
- 8. So they’re pretty useful!!Great! but, didn’t you say……. 8
- 9. They’re a waste oftime. I did say that. Sorry. Here’s a few reasons why. 9
- 10. 1 - Theintended goals / purpose are not stated, or are not clear. 10 Source: Not sure, found it on Pintrest
- 11. 2 - Theyare often far too specific 11 Source: Receptive.io
- 12. 3 - Theydo not account for “time to value”. Iteration is almost always needed to realise the full value of a new product/feature. 12 Source: Dave Bignell product fail
- 13. 4 - Detailon a roadmap can lead teams to auto-pilot. They build what they put down on paper often months in advance. 13 Source: Aha.com – a company selling Product Management software……….
- 14. 5 - Roadmaps areoften created in Excel / PowerPoint and then shared via email. As soon as anything changes, the distributed copies are out of date. Keeping stakeholders up to date can drain a lot of time this way. 14
- 15. 15 "Many untested hypotheses,based on assumptions, plotted in an uncertain future, baring no resemblance to reality" - Jared Spool, uie.com
- 16. So roadmaps suck! 16 …butthey really don’t have to.
- 17. 17 Biggie’s top tipsfor better roadmaps 1. Your roadmap should show where you intend to take your product and what problems you will try to solve to get there. 2. Choose the granularity relative to the timeframe and audience. 3. Avoid specificity. Focus on problems, JTBD or objectives as descriptors of intent. The future is unknowable 4. Keep the format simple, centralised and accessible; minimise your effort to produce. 5. Always remember that the roadmap works for you! It is a tool, it is not your job.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20. New Product Roadmap– as at 19th February 2018 Priority Theme Channel / Product Objective Key Results Current initiatives (and potential next items) Have a Real Relationship with Every Candidate Attract all candidates SEO To dramatically improve candidate’s to discover relevant SEEK job ads via SEO • 2.6M SERP SEO visits mthly • Company SERP scale • Indexing pages for Company Reviews Best search and match experience Discover To increase candidates onsite with relevant job ads To increase candidate engagement in events which are known to drive deeper loyalty (app installs, jobmail sign up) • 0.5 interest connections per visit • 0.13 Loyalty events per visit • Interest signals (C2C) scale • SEEK Learning on site optimisations • Tealium integration Hobbit To increase the relevant jobs shown to candidates • TBC • TBC Job search TBC • Development of Experimentation Framework • Refactoring search endpoint Apps (iOS & Android) To increase candidate engagement with apps • 13.3m Visits to the app mthly • 0.05 IOS and 0.1 for android Loyalty events per visit • 0.5 IOS and 0.45 Android Interest signals per visit • Push opt-in Optimisation on IOS • Profile onboarding optimisation • Sign in optimisations to address loyalty KR • Android Deep Linking • Follow company on IOS Notifications To increase candidate engagement with SEEK’s proactive communication • 4.5m Visits from notifications • 35% of Profiles updated their last role title in 6mths • New recommendations push notifications • WRU Optimisation (daily send) Alexa* To enable candidates to easily browse key SEEK content on Alexa • Ongoing monitoring Juicy (Data Depth To significantly increase the amount of value information we know about candidates to help them stand out • Experiment goal: >5% of logged-in candidates exposed will update their • Experiment on SERP to nudge for salary and RTW to test collection scale Confidential Source: SEEK
Editor's Notes
- #2 I hated roadmaps. In a way, I still so, but im getting over it. So, Nic thought it’d be a good idea for me to do a talk. Bit of therapy.
- #3 My journey started when I joined SEEK and had to start producing RM’s. Associate, no idea what I was doing, tried and failed loads. So – I started off on a typical journey of understanding.
- #4 Road maps – really old. Like 2000 years old. More recently, used with the advent of cars. This one from late 19th century and the earliest time I could find the phrase road map used on something. Couldn’t find the first business to use it in the sense we recognise it today.
- #5 Two slightly different definitions for two slightly different words I feel as though the truth lies somewhere in between these definitions
- #7 So we know what a roadmap is and where I think it came from…. But what isn’t clear to me, is why they’re used so much by so many.
- #8 Dug around a few of my favourite thinkers to see what they had to say. Marty Cagan – doesn’t love roadmaps. But what he does say is they generally all serve two purposes.
- #9 They’re popular They’ve been around for literally a thousand years. They serve a couple of pretty important purposes…
- #10 …but I still hated them. They sucked, wasted way too much of my time and didn’t seem to add any value to anything. Not my team, not me.
- #13 I made this mess….
- #17 So whilst allowing conformation bias confirm what I wanted to be true….. If these things are reasons roadmaps suck, maybe I could just not do those things, and roadmaps would suck less. ….SO ive put some tips together for anyone else that might be struggling with “the point”of roadmaps.
- #18 Less than 2 weeks – ok, put down the colour of the thing youre building. >4 weeks – sort of ok, but still some wiggle room to change if we learn something new 3 months– getting pretty vague here in terms of time estimates and specifications on what ‘might’ end up in the system. These should be open to change and impacts from near term work. 6 months – fantasy land if you think you know what you’ll be doing in 6 months. 12 months – please…..