Connors Michael - Product roadmapping: a practical guide to prioritizing opportunities, aligning teams, and delivering value to customers and stakeholders

by C. Todd Lombardo , Bruce McCarthy , Evan Ryan , and Michael Connors

Copyright 2017 C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, Michael Connors. All rights reserved.

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• November 2017: First Edition

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978-1-491-97172-7

[TI]

No roadmap survives contact with reality.

Its a saying that has flourished in product management circles for yearsfor all the wrong reasons.

Roadmaps get a lot of flak. They are often blamed for unrealistic deadlines and death marches. For missing market opportunities, and for building features that are out-of-date before any code is even written.

When I began my career as a product manager, a roadmap was commonly known as a feature-by-feature wish list, outlining releases and delivery dates stretching as far out into the future as the spreadsheet could handle. My own roadmap was a work of artan all-singing, all-dancing dynamic spreadsheet that certainly pleased the bosses...but terrified the developers and let me down every quarter when it had to be tediously updated to match with all the things we werent able to deliver.

I even went so far as to neatly package up this spreadsheet and release it into the wild for others to download. At the time, I thought I was being helpful, but it just fueled the trend for beautiful, but ultimately treacherous, roadmap formats.

And these old artifacts are still everywhere: do a Google image search for Product Roadmap and youll see what I mean.

But an old-school roadmap doesnt fit with modern software development. And a modern roadmap isnt meant to survive contact with reality.

Just as your first prototypes and MVPs are likely to get trashed in feedback sessions with your early customers, your roadmap is meant to change and adapt as you learn more.

Your product roadmap is the prototype for your strategy.

Its your key to vision alignment. Its your ever-adaptable communication aid, the one thing your team can coalesce around and use as a North Star guiding light.

In this book, Bruce, C. Todd, Evan, and Michael finally set the record straight. Roadmaps are a powerful communication tool that benefit not just the product people and their immediate team, but the entire company and how it communicates.

The authors have unburdened the rest of us by digging out the absolute best practices from product-centric companies around the world and lining them up in a way thatll empower you, the product person, to create and maintain a roadmap that will propel you forward instead of hold you back.