AMA: Doppler Principal Product Manager, James Heimbuck on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

Wow that is a great question and a tough spot to be in for sure! I would approach this by starting with the value prop of your product and asking yourself some questions. How are customers getting value from the product? Take Uber for example, their value to customers is a fast, reliable way to get transportation. What actions and behaviors do they need to take to get that value? Building on the Uber example users get that value when they search, book and complete a ride. What is preventing user ...Read More

What is shared on the roadmap is all about who the audience is you are talking or preparing it for review and what incentives they have. Some things I have found success with are: For the executive team the focus should be on a few large items or themes that have clear ties to business outcomes. If the business focus is on new revenue focusing on the high level items that are intended to drive new sales with high level explanation of how (It serves a new buyer persona, it is a new usage based ad ...Read More

I am a BIG proponent of having a version of the roadmap that can be shared externally! There are some tactical things you may need to do to ensure you can share and to make sure it is effective. These are my experience and yours will depend on your specific scenario including company size and industry, product, customer type, geography, etc. Confirm with internal stakeholders like legal and your product leadership that you can share a roadmap externally and if it is only for customers or for pro ...Read More

It sounds like the question may be more about how do we empower our teams to work on outcomes than product roadmaps, a spicy one for sure!I would not worry about each team using a specific template for how to present a roadmap expect when you need to present it to internal stakeholders and then would focus on a few high level things. What problem do you want to solve and what business goal does it impact? Who is the customer this is for? What is the expected impact and timeframe it will be achie ...Read More

Talk to customers, talk to customers and talk to customers!! Any time you have a chance to talk to a customer or a potential customer take it! I find that mixing qualitative discussion and validating with quantitative research that we are not solving a problem for a loud customer or the most recent account review helps ensure you are working on a problem with real reach and that solving it will have real impact for customers. For me the best signal of a customer with a real problem is one who is ...Read More

Great question! It's easy to fall into "i'm sure a user would want to ABC and then they would XYZ . . " and expand the scope of your first iteration. The process I have found that has the most success is a couple of steps that focus the use cases being delivered to those that move the business goals forward. Match a product outcome to a business outcome If you have a business goal of increasing revenue product goals should ladder up to that. So new product line, driving user growth by X% or incr ...Read More