The problem with feature roadmaps
If you have worked in technology for any length of time you will definitely have heard the complaint “why is our roadmap always wrong?”
Feature roadmaps are not a ‘plan’, despite often being mistaken as such. They are a snapshot of what the business thinks it needs at a specific point in time. They are at the mercy of a large number of hard to quantity variables and assumptions, many of which are likely to change before your work is complete - be it the number of resources you have at your disposal, the technology environment around your planned features, the market context or most importantly, what your customers actually need. It’s no wonder that feature roadmaps rarely if ever end up getting delivered exactly as they were originally written. This creates a big problem, especially for B2B businesses. If your customers are seeing your roadmap constantly change and features failing to arrive at the time they were promised, they will quickly lose confidence in you and your product.
There is also another big problem with feature roadmaps - product and development teams really dislike using them. And if the people tasked with delivering are not 100% onboard at the beginning of the process your chances of failure skyrocket. Teams like being empowered to solve problems, not being presented with an ambitious wish-list of features. As a leadership team, if you can pivot away from specifying a list of features and instead focus on defining the right problems that need solving, with the right KPIs that will measure them, you will find that you are more easily able to drive the kind of outcomes that lead to business success.
Feature roadmaps are often the most visible product documents in a business, but they do a really bad job at communicating the product ‘vision’. The danger of not communicating the long term strategy for your product is that your team will be unclear about the real end goal of their work. This makes it difficult for them to contribute in a way that delivers real value to your business and its customers.
Because of all of these problems, roadmaps are much more effective when they are focused on outcomes instead of features.
The outcome-driven roadmap
Each deliverable on an outcome-focused roadmap should contain two key elements:
A brief description of the problem you are trying to solve
The measurement that describes what happens when that problem is solved
For example, if your business wants to focus on customer retention you might be tasked with increasing engagement with certain key product features. An outcome driven roadmap entry for this might look like this:
Objective: Increase new customer utilisation of feature X, as a way of more quickly demonstrating the product’s value
Measurement: The number of new customers using feature X will increase to 65%
Some missing product features such as ‘Search’ may seem so obvious that you might be tempted to just add them to your roadmap, as there is little doubt that adding this feature improves things for your users. However, instead of just listing a search feature try to think about the actual problem you are trying to solve and the measurement that represents success. Your outcome-driven roadmap entry might look something like this:
Objective: Make it easier for users to find what they are looking for
Measurement: 20% increase in content views
Solution: search function
One important feature of outcome-driven roadmaps is decreasing granularity over time. For the upcoming quarter it is very likely that you have already identified what features are best positioned to solve the problems you are looking to address. Having features identified and listed for the near-term is important, just make sure to still include the outcomes you are looking to generate and the associated measurements. When looking at periods 6 months or more away, the granularity in terms of solution detail should decrease and take the form of themes and high-level business KPIs.
Conclusion
Feature roadmaps are still being used but are becoming less commonplace as businesses increasingly adopt more reliable and effective ways to plan. They are focusing on outcomes and less on features, and making sure that their teams are set up to incorporate new learnings into their work as quickly and effectively as possible. Outcome-driven roadmaps are a key tool in maintaining this optionality around delivery whilst at the same time focusing teams on the things that really matter.
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