Product roadmaps @ LandTech

17 Feb 2022, by Calum Shepherd

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;

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;

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