Product Roadmaps @ LandTech

17 Feb 2022, by Calum Shepherd

I wanted to share some thoughts on how our product management team has approached one of the most divisive topics in the product community - 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 problem were we looking to solve?

Over the past year, we made significant changes to our roadmap format, many of which were introduced at once. While there were positives, feedback on both the original and updated formats was, at times, conflicting.

To better understand these challenges, we started at the beginning. We ran a survey to gather opinions on what people liked and disliked about the current roadmap format.

What did we learn?

The survey revealed that people found the roadmap unclear. Specifically, we hadn’t struck the right balance between communicating:

• What we were working on
• When people might expect to see these changes
• Consistency in the level of detail provided

How did we action the changes?

We assumed that changing too much at once could create confusion. When solving multiple problems simultaneously, there’s always a risk of introducing new ones. To avoid this, we decided to work incrementally, starting with the existing format.

Our process

1. Surveyed the business to gather likes and dislikes about the current roadmap.
2. Held a session with senior management to understand their needs.
3. Proposed and got approval for recommended changes.
4. Collaborated with product managers to refine the updates.
5. Communicated updates to the company and provided guidance on the new roadmap.

Roadmap qualities

We introduced several key changes to make the roadmap clearer and more actionable:

• Organised by “Now / Next / Later” to show when work will begin.
• Clearer titles focused on the value to customers.
• Alignment with objectives for better consistency with company goals.
• Consistent descriptions across all items.
• Statuses provided for each item (e.g., new idea, candidate, discovery, delivery, shipped).
• Indicative release windows (e.g., Q4 or March 2022) included on each card.
• Consistent granularity between items to improve readability.
• Links to opportunity assessments for evaluating the value of ideas.

Example internal roadmap

What about a public roadmap?

For now, our product roadmap remains internal, as the detailed information isn’t particularly useful for our customers.

However, we’re working on an alternative public roadmap format for our community. This version will focus on gathering feedback to ensure we’re solving the right problems for our customers. Since the use case differs, so does the format.

Example public roadmap

• Organized by “Now Available / In Progress / Considering”
  • “Considering” is further divided into “Thinking About Doing” and “Need More Feedback.”
• Simplified information on each card, with sketches of ideas for “Now Available” and “In Progress.”

What’s next?

The focus now shifts to listening to feedback and making further improvements. We’re also preparing to roll out the public product roadmap to our community in the near term—an exciting step forward!

C