 Hi all and thanks for joining today. My name is Peter Mullen. I'm going to be going over how to build strategic roadmaps Just as a quick intro. I'm a product manager at Envoy and I've been working in the product management space for eight plus years Previously I was also doing some consulting a Little bit about me. I was originally from New York came out to the Bay Area to go to Sanford for engineering I then worked at some energy companies and some management consulting for a number of years before going to tech Started off as the first employee at Waypoint where I built an enterprise data management SaaS business With reporting and analytics capabilities for commercial real estate owners Our customers there were banks private equity shops pension funds and we grew to 40 plus people I helped raise through series a and financing and We worked with billions of square feet of real estate as part of our Company there and then I moved on to co-found SIP lines an online Marketplace for wineries to sell directly to consumers during the pandemic Launched that business with two Stanford co-founders who are still running it and I exited that to actually go Back into B2B to help work in a larger problem space when I found a great opportunity at Envoy And at Envoy, we're helping people around the world return to work safely and have a better workplace experience Envoy's done a great job of evolving from a visitor management product into a true workplace platform that helps employees Safely registered to come into work book rooms and desks and get deliveries managed amongst many other things that are in a really exciting Roadmap that we have going on to be the true workplace platform And so back to our topic today just on how to build strategic roadmaps with that. I'll jump in so I just wanted to share some of my learnings that I built up over these eight years and Going over, you know, so the steps needed to build a roadmap based on on that So the first step that I always find is the most helpful is to start with a product vision So we'll get into the details of that After you have that product vision you'll want to set SMART goals of how you'll actually go and achieve that and Then from those goals, you will decide what initiatives which product initiatives will you work on that? We'll have metrics that will move those goals in a positive direction So then want to measure results to hold yourself accountable and iterate as necessary and keep learning and adapting and improving So the first step there establishing a product vision Is really key to a solid strategic roadmap So the right product vision ensures that you're solving the right problems for the right set of customers or users If you then align everything that you're doing on your roadmap and development efforts to this vision You're going to ensure that everything you do Is is in line with that and you'll be much more clear about what you want to say Yes to what you want to say no to and how to stay focused on the goals So how do you establish and build out a product vision? Well first off you have to start with Making sure you have a solid company mission or vision that you can tie into An important thing to understand about your product vision is that the majority of the time it'll be different from your company vision Company visions are often too broad to be product visions and are more meant to be customer facing marketing messaging While product visions are meant to be more internally Internal messages that align your team This isn't always something you have control over the mission statement For most pms out there if you're at a later stage company this is likely really well defined if you're at a brand new startup you might actually still be formulating this and This is usually owned though by the founders of the company or the executive team But depending on the stage you might actually be able to help contribute to this mission statement From this mission statement You'll then want to take the next step of actually crafting a product vision that will help the company achieving its mission statement So this vision is usually something maybe owned by the chief product officer VP product head of product at later stage companies But if you're earlier stage and maybe the only PM at the company then you might be responsible for doing this Again, this is something you'll likely have to craft with the founders at early stage companies Who will want to have a lot of say on the actual product vision as well? Again, you may not have control over this and this may not exist yet So and you might not be at that level to define it But if it's not if it doesn't exist yet The first step is really to try to push to get this defined one way or another Otherwise you could risk working on something that's not valuable Overall to the company's overall vision and mission Stemming from this overall product vision as a PM You actually then want to craft your a vision for your individual product Scope of work area of ownership And so whatever you decide to craft for this vision is going to actually help achieve the overall product vision for the company And this might just be for one product within a product line a module within a product a set of components But by connecting to the overall product vision You can ensure that your goals and your roadmap are aligned with achieving not only the product vision But the company's mission and vision Again, this hierarchy is dependent on your company work structure and ownership model And so you may really have to work hard to first push to get higher up definitions That you can that so you can be truly most effective So to look at the next step here, which is, you know, some things to consider when drafting your vision. So number one, be customer focused. That's a number one in product management across the board. Always make sure that it's resonating with customers and it's actually going to be solving real problems. Focus on where you want your product to be, even if it's a stretch. So a vision statement should definitely be broader Have a longer time horizon, something that will last maybe three to five years and be differentiated from the competition. And so very important to be ambitious with when you're setting your vision. And the other last tip there is just to be able to make sure you're aligned with a larger organization. We already talked about aligning it to the company mission statement, but it's very important that others are bought into the product vision as well because it's ultimately going to be used as a tool to lead and motivate and inspire your company and team to work every day and come to come to work every day with their best self so super important. To be aligned there. So once you have these, this product vision, the next step is to set what we call smart goals to really help make sure you're going to take the right steps to achieving that vision. So ask yourself, what concrete targets can you hit that will help you achieve your vision. Goals are super important because they give you focus help you decide what goals you want to achieve. So decide between different priorities, you might be thinking of doing they help you measure progress and they help the team stay motivated. So there are many good goal frameworks out there. If you just do a quick Google search you'll find many different approaches and you should find the one that best fits you in your organization and or industry. That said my experience the smart framework is something that can be applied on its own or in conjunction with other goal setting methodologies. So what does smart stand for it's an acronym smart has a few things one, the goals that are smart goals are specific, they're measurable, they're attainable, they're relevant, and they're time bound. To be specific, you know, don't be vague. You really want to make sure that you have definitions for each part of your goal. So if you have a, you know, a sentence saying I want to increase 10% of my, you know, I want to increase my conversion by 10%. Be very specific about conversion of what what defines conversion, why 10% specifically, and a lot of other questions like are there specific groups you want to include or exclude in that. So there's really a lot that goes into being very specific about your goal. With being measurable you want to make sure you use hard metrics or numbers. So with these hard metrics and numbers, like the 10% goal, just as very clear if you hit it or not. attainable means it's challenging, but it's still possible to achieve you don't want to have you want to shoot for the moon but you want to still motivate the team by having it be somewhat achievable. So try to do a bottom up analysis to see what a good number might be connect to higher order goals is how relevant it is we've been chatting about that throughout. And have an end date in mind. So smart goals have a cut off and if you don't hit it after that date. You can say if you made it or not. And another quick tip is, you know, just definitely set these smart goals annually, quarterly, even for individual sprints projects and even meetings should have goals associated with them. So just being goal oriented and outcome oriented is very important. So how do you set these goals. One way is to use framework like okay ours, which stands for objectives and key results. It's a collaborative goal setting framework used by companies like Intel Netflix, Envoy, many others. It'll help you define the what and the how. So the what being the objective and the key result being the how you're going to get there. So you'll have about three of these the company level and three to five results. Just to make sure you stay really focused three to five results for each objective. And when setting these okay ours you'll similarly want to set company level goals, followed by team level. Okay ours that drive those company goals. And lastly individual goals that you can contribute to your team. And these are going to be typically done annually or quarterly. So they're also going to be very there in theory also smart by our earlier definition. So now that we've outlined a clear vision, have a clear set of goals. Now we can take the next step of actually setting our product strategy and the initiatives to help achieve these goals. So initiatives are going to be these bodies of product worker scope that will help you hit your goals. So you want to start with coming up with these top initiatives so you know one thing we like to do is kind of think kind of in the pie in the sky when you think. Okay, I have a vision that I'm trying to achieve and have these goals. What, like if I had no shackles or anything what would I actually what initiatives would help me most clearly get to that achieve that goal. So come up with those and help define for each initiative. Answer the question what is this and what are the outcomes or goals that this will help achieve. And so with this this can usually be done in the form of a one pager where you include the problem, the opportunity. Who this is for the success metrics of the initiative possible solutions risks assumptions open questions. These initiatives should also be smart. And so you'll want to define that not just for one but for the many initiatives that you think could help you with your goal. So now that you have these initiatives. First of all you'll want to make sure you can break down each initiative into a high level scope, which could be a list of features it could be a list of user stories each with their own value. And so, you know this first initiative we might say as high value. And it's going to be a high effort initiative to get completed but we want to break it down what is this actually entail. So you might have a one feature that is a, you'll want to break it down into these features where you can say what the priority is so this might be broken into you know three different features. One of them is high value feature one the second features medium value the third features low value, and maybe the first two or medium effort, the last is low effort so you'll want to based on this kind of come up with. The priority of each of these and we use the nomenclature P zero P one P two P zero means a must do. So in order to achieve the goals of this initiative we must do this feature should do, meaning it really should be in there. Users will really really want it, but in theory we could be successful without it. And this is kind of might be delight features, it might be features that if you have time, you can get to it, but that would really help as well potentially. They could be risky as well or time consuming. And so, with this the P zero is P ones and P twos you kind of get a sense of the scope. And with each initiative defined in this way, you're going to then be able to, you're going to be able to start to prioritize the initiatives against each other and determine the most helpful towards hitting your goals and vision. So, now looking at these initiatives you have these four initiatives. We've broken them down into the various features, we prioritize the features the team now gets a sense of how much what the work looks like. And then you can start to estimate, you know, you came up with estimates as well of what's high, you know, what is the impact and effort. This is something that you'll want to do with engineering as well to T shirt size these initiatives to get a sense of how much work they are. And with this you might find, you know that first initiative we said is high value, but it's high effort but high value. So it's maybe our number one initiative. We might have another initiative that's high value medium effort ranked number two. And maybe, you know, this is something that's still high value but a little bit less than the initiative one. You might see that initiative four is actually more valuable than initiative three. And initiative three is perhaps low value. So you might rank that at the bottom. In terms of how you actually prioritize these that was a simple effort versus impact, like high medium low but there's really a lot of different ways to go about this so when you're prioritizing. First of all obviously are these aligned to your vision and goals. Think about the ROI return on investment. So how much do you get back, how much do you put in. And then you have the price framework, which is a very nifty prior to prioritization framework, the value versus effort framework, the Kano framework, or just good old story mapping, which I think is particularly helpful for building And so when you look at these initiatives. You know you can plot them on an impact versus effort matrix as you can see on the right here. With different quadrants so something anything that's high impact, low effort is definitely something worth doing if it's high effort high impact, it might be worth doing tie effort low impact, you don't want to do it. And then if it's low impact, low effort. This is maybe you can apply this framework to initiatives or features or anything and there's a ton of good tools that can help you do this in a more automated fashion, which I'll get to later. So now that you've prioritized your list of initiatives and your list of features within the initiative you can start to build a timeline, again with engineering vetting. And how long each initiative will take based on your P zeros you can forecast when you'll be able to launch an MVP which is a minimum viable product. And maybe instead you want to forecast when you can get a minimum lovable product and MLP out the door. So this helps you just get a sense with other stakeholders when we can deliver different features and initiatives and get a sense of if they'll help achieve your goals. And then you repeat this exercise across all your initiatives. And so by looking at all these initiatives and combining that team resourcing you can put it all together to allow you to see how many initiatives you can concurrently do versus serially so maybe you can you have enough engineers enough teams that you could do initiative one two and four all at the same time. And then initiative three you can start to do once initiative to wraps up. So if you had a goal and okay are to accomplish something by the end of q2, you know initiative to will definitely contribute to that. Maybe the MVP is released of initiative one by then so maybe it will also have an impact, but maybe initiative for won't. You can start to understand which of these initiatives going to attribute contribute to which goals that you're setting. So this schedule should be converted by engineering shouldn't be on an island as a product manager. You should be aligned with them and also you should not share this exact format externally. Unless you know there's certain circumstances but generally, you know how to present road maps externally as a whole other topic we could have a separate discussion on to cover but generally speaking you want to keep this kind of format of roadmap internal. This can change. And you don't want to miss represent to customers timelines. So now that you have your strategic roadmap that we just built to Ray. You can set a vision. You've now set a vision you set goals and what initiatives inclusive features will take to get there. But how will you hold yourself in the team accountable. Well, it's just by measuring results. As far as measuring results goes there's a lot that goes into it. You'll want to make sure that your product has the right instrumentation built in so you can actually measure KPIs want to focus on your North Star metric. You want to measure against the right customer or user segment, because not all users or customers should maybe count towards your results. You can look at all different types of metrics like acquisition activation retention referral and revenue. As many more, you can drive transparency by building dashboards that everyone can access identify areas of improvement and review results with the broader team. So there's just a lot of different best practices that you should be leveraging when you're actually measuring results towards your against your goals. And lastly iterate. So your roadmap is not static. It evolves over time and should be assessed on a monthly cadence. So even if you're doing quarterly or annual planning. It's still important, just as a PM to be reflecting on this, in my opinion at least monthly. And for brand new startups, you may actually want to assess your roadmap almost up to weekly. So if you're doing that fast and that early on you want to make, you know, the decisions you make at the beginning of the company's history or some of the most important decisions you have to make, you have to quickly adapt. So part of iterating means just making sure that you're taking time for fast follows beyond an MVP. So you'll want to make sure you budget appropriately some time for this in any unexpected changes that you'll want to adapt to based on user feedback. Again, the customer throughout all this this process should be giving feedback, or you should be researching and using this qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers on your vision. And as well as your initiatives and the features within those initiatives, you should always be validating with customers, both the problems and solutions at every stage. And also make sure you budget time to improve as necessary because once you go live with the feature. There's always going to be some things you can do to improve from there. So really how to iterate releasing features early and often it's important get your product in front of customers so you can iterate rather than just never releasing review results from product analytics that you might have based on your instrumentation take action. Get customer feedback get on the phone call get on phone calls with them leverage your customer success team sales team whatever it takes to know what they're saying about it. It's a data program that's always really helpful. There's a lot of work that goes into them but a lot of value you can get out of them, analyze customer feedback and identify areas of improvement. And after you release, dedicate that scheduled time to fast follows. And lastly follow through so when we say to iterate you know really just go for it. Make sure you actually do it. Lastly, some practical tips and takeaways to leave you with so some tips for success about strategic roadmaps number one get started. Take at least an hour a week to bootstrap your roadmap and even more time couple hours a week just till you get something you feel good about it's going to take weeks, if not a month or two if you're brand new to building a roadmap. Focus on your customers talk to them get feedback. Don't let perfectly be the enemy of good get something in draft form get people's feedback and just keep iterating. Start at the top everything you should do to support your company mission. Reflect reflect regularly so spend time monthly updating the roadmap and beat the drum so align internally every month. Validate with customers anytime you can make sure everyone's aware keep everyone in sync it's really important for the whole company and team to be motivated by this roadmap and for the success of the company and document everything. So it helps to use a road mapping tool there's a lot of software packages out there that really help with all of this and that are really helpful to product managers. And some key takeaways. Lastly to leave you with so wrapping up, you should prioritize outcomes over output. It's really important to be focused on your goals and achieving them versus just building features. Are you actually moving the needle on your goals. Are you actually moving towards your vision. It's a company organization and features with your vision. So don't work on things that won't ladder up to help achieving that vision and measure results and iterate on your approach. Don't stay stagnant, stay fast, stay lean, stay agile and keep moving. Thank you so much for your time. I know we covered a lot. So please let me know if there are any topics you'd like me to dig in to deeper in a future session and let me know if you have any questions I can answer. Hope you guys all have a great rest of your day. Thank you.