The document discusses challenges with roadmapping and priorities. It notes that roadmaps are artifacts that don't satisfy all stakeholders and audiences. Different groups within an organization want different things. It also discusses balancing priorities between planned features, bugs/improvements, and unplanned work, and considering budgets and resources. The key is understanding audiences, planning for conflicts, and having selling strategies to justify priorities and plans.

1. Your Audience’s Real
Roadmap Questions
(And What to Do About Them)
Rich Mironov
Auckland Product Community
20 February 2018

2. • An ongoing political process, not just
algorithms or artifacts
• Your stakeholders DO NOT WANT the
same things
• You need an allocation model and a
selling strategy
The Roadmapping
Challenge

3. • Our goal: deliver whole products that
meet long-term customer needs and
make money
• Use evidence and judgment to get right
things done
• Rarely satisfies all
stakeholders/audiences
Today’s Roadmap Is Just A Snapshot

4. We Confuse Tools and
Artifacts with Results

5. Audiences to love our
roadmaps and tell us
we’re smart
As Product Managers,
We Want…

6. “Why isn’t my
strategic customer’s
feature included?”
Sales Wants
to Know…

7. “What’s new, interesting, or
makes our customers look like
heroes?”
Marketing Wants
to Know…

8. “Why aren’t we
getting more done?”
“Why aren’t we more
innovative?”
Executives
Want to Know…
“Why aren’t we
getting more done?”

9. “What about our
urgent bugs and
UX/UI
improvements?”
Customer Success
Wants to Know…

10. “Convince us that we’re
building the right things,
which users will love.”
Development
Wants to Know…
“How does prioritization
work? Criteria?”

11. “I’ve made an
expensive long-term
commitment to your
product. Show me a
sensible plan that
won’t embarrass me.”
Customers
Want to Know…

12. • Prioritization is hard
• Roadmap is just an artifact
• Must plan for inevitable
conflicts
• How to structure discussion and
trade-offs ahead of individual
escalations?
Ugly Product Reality

13. • Limited development resources =
household budget
• Too many expenses: rent,
food, repairs, entertainment, petrol,
property taxes, Girl Guide biscuits…
• Kids Execs don’t remember what
we spent committed
to yesterday
Portfolio Planning

14. • Hard to rank-order unlike items
• Next bug versus minor feature
• One-off customization or DevOps work
• Instead, group similar requests
• Which two features will we put into v6.5?
• P0, P1, P2, P3…
• We can fund one audacious, long-term
research effort (teleportation?)
Prioritizing Within Buckets

15. unplanned,
deal-driven
20%
DevOps,
quality,
scalability,
security 20%
eng mgmt,
staffing, R&D
10%
planned
features, UX,
revenue drivers
50%
Typical Commercial Software
Company’s Development Budget

16. • What did we actually spend last
quarter?
• What portion was “unplanned” or sales
interrupts?
• What’s our absolute #1 top priority (by
slice) for this quarter?
Reality-Based Trade-Offs,
Implicit Product Strategy

17. unplanned,
deal-driven
20%
DevOps,
quality,
scalability,
security 20%
eng mgmt,
staffing, R&D
10%
planned
features, UX,
revenue drivers
50%
Slices Have Natural
Constituencies
SALES,
MARKETING,
EXECS
ENG, OPS,
SUPPORT,
CUST SUCCESS
SALES

19. 1. Roadmaps are (just) artifacts
2. Need to understand audiences, plan
for inevitable conflicts, have selling
strategies
3. We fight for our products and
customers, not internal stakeholders
Takeaways

20. Rich Mironov
Mironov Consulting
San Francisco, CA, USA
www.mironov.com
+1-650-315-7394
rich@mironov.com
@richmironov

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Image/Photo Credits