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Product Management

Product roadmaps @ LandTech

I wanted share some thoughts on how our product management team have approached the product communities most divisive topic - product roadmaps.

What was the aim?

Improve our current product roadmap so everyone across the business can understand what problems we intend to solve for users, in what order, and have some indication of when a customer might see these changes

What were the areas for improvement?

We made some significant changes to our roadmap format during the last year, and most of these were made in one go. Many of these were positive. But, both formats saw feedback that was, at times, conflicting.

We began at the beginning. We ran a survey to understand what people liked and disliked about the current format.

What did we learn? People appeared to find the current roadmap unclear. We hadn’t struck the balance around what we were working on, vs. when people might expect to see these things, and consistency in the level of information.

How did we coordinate things?

It was assumed that changing too much in one go would be confusing for everyone involved. Sometimes when you fix three problems, you end up causing three other problems - so we wanted to work from what we had.

We followed a little plan to make sure we could do that.

  1. Surveyed everyone across the business to understand likes / dislikes
  2. Session with senior management on their needs
  3. Made and had approved recommended changes
  4. Consulted and collaborated with product managers on the changes
  5. Updated the company, and produced guidance

How does our product roadmap look today?

Some of the main changes include;

  • Organised using now / next / later so people know when things will begin
  • Updated titles to be clear on the value to customers
  • Aligned to objectives
  • Added consistent descriptions
  • Statuses provided (new idea, candidate, discovery, delivery, shipped etc)
  • Indicative release window (eg. Q4, or March 2022) on the card
  • Consistent level of granularity between items
  • Linked to opportunity assessments (an assessment of the value of the idea)

And, here is a visual of the format;

13PrMX.md.png

What about public product roadmaps?

We’re keeping our product roadmap internal only, as all this information isn’t useful for our customers.

However, we have a draft of an alternative product roadmap for our community to consume. It’s going to be used to gather feedback around things which we need more information about, helping to ensure we deliver the right thing for customers. So, for that reason the format differs.

  • Organised using now available / in progress / considering (split into thinking about doing, and need more feedback on)
  • Reduced information on each card, with now available / in progress including a sketch of the idea

Here is a visual of the format;

13P4Pn.md.png

What next?

It’s going to be all about listening now and actioning feedback. We’re also looking at rolling out the public product roadmap to our community in the near term - which is pretty exciting!

C

Reading ideas for 2021

I tend to write up notes from books, or just highlight them as I go. I read when I can, but make no conscious effort to read regularly. It’s worked for me in the past, but when things get busy the learning suffers.

So, this year I’m going to have a commitment to read a book a month every month. It doesn’t seem like much, but it should get me into a good cadence again to help me think differently and continue to learn new things.

What’s on the list?

And, that’s so far.

I’ll dig out some more in the coming months once I begin working through these. Ideas always welcome, ideally in the software architecture space!

Listen, understand and nudge

Joining a service when the team have been through discovery, alpha and beta phases together can be challenging.

It’s a team that’ll have bonded through some tough times, and come together to solve problems with their users.

There are no fires to put out, so what do you do in the first 30 days?

Listen

I took the first two weeks to listen as much as possible, with as many people as possible.

It’s amazing what you can learn when you care about what the other person has to say.

Ask questions, and listen - product, people, process, technology and finance are good places to start.

Immerse yourself.

Understand

Listening helps you understand, which in turn helps you make sense of things.

It’ll be an iterative process in the first few weeks. You’ll think you’ve got it, then you will realise you don’t - and that is OK.

You’ll want to know about the organisation, stakeholders, service proposition, user needs and so much more - it’s a lot to make sense of and understand in such a short space of time.

Beginning to understand things is bringing all this together into a coherent whole.

Don’t rush.

Nudge

It’s time to begin to make small interventions, where you feel those interventions will be valuable. You can work with individuals where there is something specific, helping move things in the right direction - nudging things in the right direction ;)

Collaborate with the team as a whole to tackle bigger things - such as new problems to solve or questions to answer.

Canvas Conference - an emotional rollercoaster

I popped along to a conference for product people in Birmingham last week. Canvas Conference was brimming with great stories from people working in the product space. It included speakers from companies such as Thriva, Microsoft Research, Starling Bank and Monzo this year.

However, I’m not sure I was prepared for one of the presentations - nor were quite a few others whom attended.

Emotionally, it was a bit of a rollercoaster.

Haiyan Zhang is an Innovation Director at Microsoft Research. Haiyan works with people to identify where technology could improve or enrich their daily lives, where medical conditions put them at a disadvantage.

Haiyan talked about quite a few things, including a new platform for participants, and the need for making solutions financially viable further down the line.

Parkinsons is a disease affecting 10 million people worldwide, and leads to a loss of motor control. There is no cure.

I know first hand the effects that this disease has on a human being. It’s been close to me since I was a young boy. It has the ability to strip back all the things you cherish.

So, it was getting into Project Emma that was the most striking for me. It’s ambition was to help Emma, a women diagnosed with early on-set Parkinsons, write and draw again - giving her back a little of what had been taken away.

Haiyan and her team spent vital time sitting with Emma to better understand the importance drawing plays in her life, and more widely how Parkinsons has affected her daily life. Haiyan and her team worked day and night for months to better understand the problem and explore a solution to help Emma.

Remarkable, right?

It’s helped remind me that we all have a role to play. I guess most of us shape solutions for the majority of people, however people and their needs are heterogeneous - with all the complexity that brings.

We have a responsibility to those who have different levels of ability, or who need support to see the benefits that the things we build bring to people.

It’s why research, analytics and how we build things are so important to do right by our users - whoever they are.

C

Visualising IA with MindNode

It’s time to break the blogging drought with a hands on post.

When producing an information architecture for a recent website our team decided use mind mapping techniques, as opposed to opting for a more conventional site-tree.

“Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable” - IA Institute

We decided to use software to help us achieve this. It would have been ideal for us to use a physical space to collaborate. However, one wasn’t available - so we thought this the next best solution.

MindNode2 is a nice little application available from the Mac App Store. It became a our primary method to visualise our early thoughts both within the team, with stakeholders and with users.

You can add nodes as and when new information or topics become available through user research, search demand, conversations with stakeholders and insights from subject matter experts.

Diagram Tips

  • Line Colours - separate different topics, or to highlight different audiences
  • Line Weightings - suggest the volume or the complexity of the information
  • Arrows - highlight related nodes, or vital cross-linking
  • Node Types - suggest the type of content (e.g. video, image etc)
  • Notes - explain where it came from e.g. user research

You can then create a couple of additional main nodes to act as a legend.

It’s all vague enough that people won’t mistake it for a final piece of work. It’s also flexible enough that if you move things around all the nodes will dynamically move and resize.

You can read more about information architecture on Web Designer Depot

So, have a go and let me know how you get on.