How One Article Changed the Way we Create our Product Roadmap

Turning Constraints into Opportunities

Where We Are Today

We’re in a really exciting, scary, and intense part of the products lifecycle. 😅

Our biggest challenge as we continue to grow over the coming months is how we all stay aligned and all have a voice 🗣 into where we take the product.

We are currently making big decisions without all the team being behind what we are working on. More importantly not everyone understands why we are working on them and what value they will bring, which will soon lead to a lot of frustration. 🤔

They’re either gut feelings that a part of the product needs to be improved or a reaction to a piece of feedback from an important customer. All valid routes, but we can’t operate like this going forward. 🙌

What feels like a priority today almost certainly won’t be the next week so managing work like this is impossible.

We’re also not in the market for a fail fast and fail often mentality at the moment. 🤕

We need to make sure whatever gets put into the product funnel we get right and understand exactly how many resources it will take.

Each epic piece of work is a massive investment. 1 month design + 2 engineers for a month if not more = A nice a lump of cash from the investment we are raising!

So, as much as the product team are guiding the product well so far (yes, well done Nick, thanks Nick 👀), it’s becoming very clear that, as a small team, we need to leverage the knowledge 🤓 and insight from each member of the team to build out a roadmap that we all believe in and can get behind.

How Can We Do This?

We need to move fast 🏃 But also incredibly carefully  

90 days is the length of one quarter. That’s how far you can reasonably think and plan ahead when you’re in the stage we are at.

I could easily put together a 6 month roadmap and 3 months in we could find ourselves working on work that just isn't a priority anymore 😫 Things change fast.

So as a * team each quarter we need to ask ourselves one question.

What would be stupid for us not to do in the next 90 days?

✋ Before I explain how it all works…

This is not about all the cool things we think we might want to do. The bar is, someone has to be able to articulate why the company would be dumb not to invest in a particular idea or feature in the next 3 months.

You’re also not trying to impress anyone. 💃 This shouldn’t be a competition for how many ideas people can think up. The person pitching for an idea has to truly believe it is vital for the company right now.

Sounds great Nick but how does this work?

We will run a 1 hour session with each team.

In the run up to the sessions, people will have the chance to get their idea(s) down, one idea per slide. 📋

You will then pitch the idea to your team in the session and discuss.

Description

How would it Value the User? What does Success look like? Why do we need to do it in the next 90 days?

Feature name

Just so we’re clear…

You will not be judged for not providing any ideas.

You will be, however, if you submit every idea under the sun without giving some thought into where the company is currently and how we can add value to the user.

No idea is too big or too small

After the team sessions, it’s important for us to work out a rough estimation of how long each feature will take to build. 🛠 I will do this with the help of Mike and the engineering team.

How do we work this out I hear you say…

The first step would be to work out how much engineering resource we have in total and we would do this in pounds. 💷 The key here is to be as realistic as possible.

How it works is we put a value on an engineers time.

So, the cost of one engineer for a month = £50 Then the cost of one engineer for 3 months = £150 The total cost of 4 engineers for 3 months = £600

Please note: Michael may be more expensive 😉

With our £600 engineering resource value in mind we can start putting prices on each feature.

To give an example

A particular feature that would take 1 engineer 2 weeks would have a price of £25.

If we wanted to add this to our 90 day roadmap, the price would come out of our £600 budget.

The next and final step is to run a prioritisation session where a small team will get together for a longer period of time (around 3 hours)

The Prioritisation Team Mark, Mike, Nick, Darragh, Jordan

Before we start it’s important that we discuss what stage the business is at and the current business objectives and goals to get everyone on the same page.

For example If our overall goal with the product was to increase engagement, this would have a massive impact on what features would get prioritised.

If 5 people were involved in the prioritisation session, we would split the £600 budget between us in the form of £20 post it notes.

Then comes the hard (and fun) part. The prioritisation team review the slides and begin “buying” the features they think are most valuable by applying their £20 post it notes.

After a lot of discussion and the moving around of post it notes, in the end we will get to a point where only a small number of features approximating our capacity are left standing. Most of the features won’t actually make it.

Brutal I know, but this is why we are going through this process. 😳

Then…

Wait for it…😬

Our 90 day roadmap is born…

We will then produce a blog post off the back of the session to explain what has been prioritised and why we are all aligned as a team. This will also act as a great post for sales and marketing to do their thing with.

Vizibl Roadmap Q4 2016

Example Post 🚀

Timings

We want to start this 90 days on the 26th September

The team sessions will happen the week starting 5th September and the final prioritisation session will be on the 9th. This will give design a 2 week buffer before the 90 days start so we can get going.

This process will happen every quarter and start from scratch.

This is a new process so I’d welcome thoughts and feedback.

Any questions? … 🏃🍻