 Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you from different time zones making some time to attend this webinar organized by Product School. First of all, I would like to thank Product School for this amazing opportunity to interact with a lot of product talents around the globe to share some information or knowledge that I have in product management. And today I'm going to be focusing on how to create road maps or a guide to creating road maps. And I'm Apuva, I work as Lead Technical Product Manager at Nike. And today I'll be focusing on this topic and I'm very happy to be doing this. And please feel free to ask questions or maybe like clarify if you have any questions on this session in the chat or or and even if you would like to see a follow up on the topic, I'm happy to help. And today's topic I will try to of course cover as much as I can on product road map. What are the core principles and road map? I will try to cover as much as I can, but I need your help in order to ensure that everything is covered and and if there are some open topics or if you need to have a follow up, please do let me know. All right, so okay, so what is a product road map? According to my product more roadmap is a speaking document of what the product vision strategy is goal is and it is basically attached to the organizational objectives and goals that they want to achieve and your product could be part of a big portfolio of products by organization or maybe a part of it. It could depend on what kind of product you're working, what is the scale and volume of the product, but it's really important for you to understand what is your product vision, where do you want to go in larger scheme of things and how do you want to make that happen? And to start with there are all this like a like a product roadmap pyramid because the pyramid that I'm showing you should be as a part of the roadmap documentation it should be in in some in some of the other that is like really not stuff that you want to achieve in your product. It does it cannot be true for you to achieve in like in one month or two months this is really really far fetched that you want to see your product evolve into something amazing that that you think and and it's also attached to the organizational goal so that is the product vision and you really really need to think what it is and believe in that and and pass on that energy or synergies to rest of the organization as well. So I think that's something you really need to take time and work with the leadership team with with your different stakeholders with pretty group you really need to understand that and bring that out of that and what a strategy you have like a vision that five years down the line you want to be here as a product or maybe one year or three year doesn't matter but you really need like actionable like an execution plan on how you want to do that and this execution plan will really only define what are all the successful steps to make this go a milestone towards that vision that you have set so this is the strategy part and this does this basically gives you a clear idea of how you want to go how you want to start with this in the product and the next step I call is a goal and and goal is usually like very time bound and you know what you really want to achieve with a specific metric for example you could say that I want to increase my I want to increase the customer engagement from a percentage to b percentage within three months time so you really really fix specific metric and you say within three months time you want to make this happen and show that result and this goal needs to be like one of your goal and and you need to know as a part of that what are all the steps that can that can achieve that and that's like the high level goal that you want to have in your product and you can have like customer engagement retention many different teams that you can follow in the goals based on what very crucial to fix what you want to do in your product and the next level item is initiative and initiative is basically like a broad team of I would say like tasks or features even that unite into one and they become an initiative and this does not mean that this whole initiative is owned by just the product team or or or engineering team but it's it's something that could be shared across different across different parts of the organization which means that there can be different business unit different group who can help you in making this initiative successful so it might not be like a only a product engineering team to make this successful but it could be a joint effort by multiple different groups like sales marketing and many others legally when you don't know so it depends on what your initiative is and and you really need to understand like all of these features who needs to do what and how does it come together so that is the initiative level plan and feature I think everybody here would know about feature and and and usually when you're working in product or even if you're outside product knowing that there is a product in your organization the one word that you know is feature and it is a very interesting word because like a lot of times functions features everything is feature initiative becomes feature goal becomes feature so it's really like externally when you look all of those themes are translated into feature but it's really important to understand what a feature is feature is actually just a piece of that product either like a part of that functionality or something like a third party application that that basically makes your product successful so you you really need to like sometimes clarify in your organization what what a feature means so it's very specific piece of working function on your application and and that means it can add value to your users of customers in a in a direct or indirect way and I and I it really needs to have a direct value drop and that's very valuable to know in feature because if you don't have any value drop in a feature then it's not featured at all so you really need to know what what is a feature and how do you define that and time frames part time frame is so important and I think everyone who's working outside product engineering will find that super useful because they need to know when this will be done when it will be complete when can I use this so this is something very very valuable for I would say not just for product engineering but for the rest of the group including leadership and and any other stakeholder and business units and and and one of the things that the roadmap should contain is time frames and why because you need to show the time frames in which you are you are executing all of these initiative features and and how that goal attached to that is delivered so this is very valuable for everyone so this is basically a high level understanding of what a roadmap is so the next one I'm going to jump onto is like why do we need road maps so basically from in so the roadmap is like a super effective way to communicate different parts of the organization as I already mentioned so everybody wants to know when something is done and your product could be serving either one or more customers to one user group to multiple user group and there might be different each of the organization have different way of organizing the stakeholder group sometimes there could be specific business units and user groups attached to that that you'll be serving to and all of them will have different needs and different capabilities that they want to see on the product and and they would like to know when something is completed so product roadmap should ideally communicate very clearly your product vision strategy and goal that you want to achieve and this document should have all of that very clearly with a clear timing timeline time frames and also communicate some sort of a commitment to these groups because they are interested to know what does this roadmap look like and what will I get in that time frame or time period from this product and what is the value add and how can I prepare for that from my side because there is always an activity post live that a lot of business units have to spend their effort on to make this product successful because I call it like an end to end life product lifecycle where it does not end in the moment you ship the real value drop happens when somebody starts consuming it and that's the real value of that product so you really need to understand end to end what is that product lifecycle and if you're mapping this roadmap you need to understand when does the product ship and when does it have a value drop so that you can help different business units so yeah so this is the part of why you why do we need roadmaps and the next interesting question is who is responsible for product roadmap of course we need to have one person who's accountable for the product roadmap and I assume in every organization that's going to be product manager and he or she is basically responsible for the end to end delivery of the product roadmap and also owning the items that are in the product roadmap which means that they know what they are showing on the roadmap and they are accountable in terms of delivering that and I usually feel that roadmap in some times or in some cases I've created an isolation which means that you create something along with just with yourself and you sometimes communicate it to your engineering teams and other business units or maybe you do an initial interaction and then you you come up with something but then the ideal scenario is I call it like an inclusive roadmap creation what is an inclusive roadmap creation you need to have your stakeholders engineering I mean I would say engineering team is also part of your stakeholder team but all the stakeholders as a part of the roadmap activity and you need to understand what is like the what are their short term goals and what are they trying to achieve in the next quarter or the year and based on that what is like your product vision and goal does it align to that and can we do something to make them successful in their areas of work and then take that into our roadmap so I call this as an inclusive roadmap planning you need to really sit with all these stakeholders and understand what do you really want to achieve and you really need to map it out in your roadmap and this also means to involve like cross functional teams in your area so if you are like a product part of the larger business unit and they have different product running across the same portfolio you need to collaborate with all these product managers to understand how what will be the dependency and another thing is mapping stakeholders and one thing that you will see in product management is there is never a permanent stakeholder ship you will always have new stakeholders in you will always have like new business opportunities through which there will be additional stakeholders so there will always be changing needs and you need to really know your stakeholders well and you need to know what is their stake because that will really help out you to understand how which things can can basically be prioritized of course priority is a different topic but you really need to know what is like immediate opportunities versus future opportunities and these stakeholders can help you understand that and other thing that you also need to take into account is the third party integrations because sometimes your product can depend on external products or technologies that are supporting your product and you need to really understand how the product operates and in every initiative that you want to plan out you need to also think that third party integration in the perspective how that will have an impact and and you need to also include them and the part of the road mapping process to understand how will that action item look like and support teams yes in every product there will be a support channel if you are a B2C or a B2P depending on the volume of business that your volume of business that your product is handling you will have certain amount or weightage of product feedback coming in which you use like a product feedback and and you basically put it back into the roadmap so this is the moment when you create your roadmap you also need to involve support teams and understand what are all the constant issues or problems or requests that are coming from users and basically use that back in into the into the product roadmap so that is a very valuable feedback loop and usually you get best ideas from there and organization policies so there are a lot of changes happening and it could be legal financial that comes through as a strategy from organization and you need to take all of those into account it could be any sort of compliance governance that you need to take into account that you need to have in your roadmap so you really need to think through end to end and create an inclusive roadmap how is this consumed by other teams so this is a very valuable information to understand so you have a roadmap ready you know what you want to do you have built it out but you really need to know like how is this being consumed before even this creation is complete and why I say that is because depending on the kind of organization you work you will have different business units consuming your roadmap for example if you work in in a star space organization you will work very closely with sales and marketing and and also leadership and if you work in a V2C company you will have if you work in V2C product you will work a lot with support in customer success team you will have also like marketing and finance very closely attached to it because it's a large online business so there can be changing needs in the market in terms of financial pricing and so and so and if you're working in in a product that is very focused on services and and basically you need to have a different group which is responsible so it totally depends on what product you work you will identify who are on the business units who are impacted by that and that's very crucial to understand you really need to map out who are your stakeholders and they can be part of any of these groups they could be part of support team and engineering team is for default and leadership sales marketing legal finance and you need and and how do they consume it so for example a customer service team they need to be aware of when a critical feature will be done for example if you take an e-commerce company and they find out that in check out things don't add up and in the right way or offer does not apply correctly a customer will come with a mindset to get the 50% off and if the 50% off is not applying while the sale is on then that's a problem it gets supported and this is something the customer service needs to know by what time it will be fixed or when it will be done so that they can manage the customer expectation otherwise they will basically lose all of the business for that particular time frame so it's very important for for constant communication to this this channel and engineering team so engineering team for example is is also a consumer of your roadmap and of course they're also contributing and a major contributor and why they how do they consume it so when when they look at the road map they really start picturing okay what is like this product and and they start drawing some sort of like high level technical framework in their head when they look at it and and one of the things that they really want to understand when they look at the roadmap is why do I need to do this why do I get why do I need need this particular feature to be done what is the value and when they know that when they know that this value is going to be for a for short term or long term that we see that there is a great value because we can on board new set of customers or new user groups then they will really think in the perspective of like what is the solution that they're offering and is that scalable and also ensuring that it can be something that can be used across different user groups so they will really try to understand why do we do this and and your roadmap need to communicate that and for leadership and they look at this roadmap for them they are really expecting on a strategic level okay what is this going to help us achieve as a business as a as a business strategy so in in organization you have like a very big strategy that that basically kind of splits across different business units and when the leadership is looking at the roadmap for them when they look at it they really need to understand what is the business value and your roadmap need to communicate that and for them it should be an easy takeaway okay this is the the business value drop and we are going to get at the end of Q1 or Q2 and they will basically look back into their strategy or organizational vision on what they wanted to achieve and for sales for example what does sales look for sales really is interested to know the features or the functions that will get achieved in a particular timeline and sometimes this can be a deal breaker for them if that doesn't get completed so for them it's really really important to understand what is going to be ready within the given time frame and they would also give that impact analysis back to product teams and they would say that by doing this feature before or after this will have this this effect or that effect so the roadmap creation process should already consist of sales if you're working very closely with them on on any sort of SaaS solutions or anything but basically the sales organization has a great impact in some of the deals prospective customers that they have in pipeline so these things will get affected if and also customer retention because some customers might be waiting for a particular feature for a very long time and sometimes if that is not completed their disappointments can basically double and and they would basically not be retainable so it's very important for sales to really understand how to really map the feature with the product group and another example is marketing this is also very crucial because if you're working in a product that's like focusing on on common like a B2C product you need to really have like a go to market strategy for everything you launch and marketing is very valuable for that and they know how to properly communicate the value of a change and I think that is something either for an internal change there's a change management team or for an external product there is like a marketing team who helps out but this is super valuable to take into account when you create product programs so that you can indicate at which moment in your product rollout you need to take help from marketing to get that ready so that at the time of the launch they are also ready from their perspective to help you launch this product in the market in the right way and legal so a product I would say legal and finance is more like a reactive approach it's not something that they are part of the road mapping process but as a product manager you need to think already if there are any legal or financial implications of any changes that you make in product so you need to like ensure you're circling back with these groups to ensure there is no potential risk on your product so the rest of the groups are basically proactively involving with you but these two are more like for the product manager to take a lead and ensure that there is legal finance kind of like compliance governance any sort of security that you need to have in place in your product you need to discuss with these groups and the next thing I'm going to cover is on the on the types of roadmap and the types of roadmap is very crucial to understand what they are so the internal or the internal and external roadmap so one of the things that I've usually seen is you need to in some organizations or for some products you need to have an internal roadmap which is very specific to product and engineering team and there is an external roadmap which will communicate like your value drops in different moment what is like the go-to market that you need to have how can you combine with different business units to make that happen kind of a complete release plan that you need to make and that's something that would collaborate multiple business units and that's something crucial to understand from a product standpoint from in in a product manager position whether something that's needed for your product and if it's needed you need to prepare two versions of your product roadmap which will basically focus on internal stakeholders versus external stakeholders and the next one is the strategic roadmap so strategic roadmap is basically deals with very very high level details and market state so you really like try to understand okay this is your product how does it fit into terms of like kind of a market fit and you come up with some real vague ideas or a long shot or a moonshot that you want to take and you basically make like a strategic roadmap and you also ensure that there are some execution plan towards that so this is very high level and it is also like a visionary it outlines your vision of the product so this is something that you can work with your leadership team and usually leadership team does have a strategic roadmap and this kind of disseminates to multiple product units or business units and products to achieve that so this is being maintained by leadership team and some of the other way along with the business course and a portfolio roadmap is something that basically is like I would say like an complete business portfolio has like all the products or tools attached to it and how is that managed and end to end how is it meeting their business course and this is also very valuable in some organizational structure the portfolio of products managed by a lead or a product director and they ensure that the high level strategy of that portfolio is disseminated to multiple product managers and they basically take that into account and ensure there is a cross functional collaboration to execute and complete that delivery so this product portfolio roadmap is super valuable when somebody has like a complete business portfolio dependency and it's disseminated across different products or capabilities so this is very useful in that way and epic roadmap is basically like epic or initiative is a kind of same so epic roadmap is like a group of features or stories basically that can be contributing to one single goal and that needs to be done and this is something super useful in case of like for engineering team where a product manager creates an epic roadmap and ensures they understand okay this is like a timeline that you want to follow so mostly typically I would say product managers are working in this format so they really go into this level and feature roadmap is in the case where you're really like focusing on some of the crucial features so sometimes you would see like the product managers are combining feature and epic roadmap and making it into one roadmap and indicate what are all the epics and features that they're expecting a certain quarter or a year that for their product so that that's the kind of roadmap but it can be also like a separate type of roadmap by itself and the release roadmap is like I would call it like something that you want to do in a particular time frame which can be longer than what you think for really achieving that product goal so it could be like a nine month timeline before you can achieve that so release roadmap is really to ensure that you have all of that things taken into account so it will have like epic features any sort of process changes from different business units and and go to marketing go to market strategy for marketing maybe some sort of sales campaigns that that needs to happen or marketing campaigns that need to happen that release will consist of everything that happens end to end for that product launch to be successful so it's it's really like an end to end roadmap that covers everything across multiple business units so these are the types of roadmap that are that are usually used by a product manager or product leadership and how to build a roadmap and now that you have all the context of what why and how how is that being consumed and so so one of the things really actionable so I'm going into real actions of what you need to do if you have a paper if you take it if you take the paper and if you write down okay now you have a product and product vision and strategy now and you also know your stakeholders versus users versus customers because all of these three things can sometimes be different as well and you also need to define a short term goal and long term goal which basically is like the goals that we talked about and breaking the goals down into actual initiatives which means actionable initiative so you know that this is your goal but there can be several initiatives to make that successful so you really need to break that down into several initiatives so if you are really trying to form a roadmap this is like a typical steps of how you want to do it and then once this is done you can also see based on what you have broken down for your product to be successful let's say you have a new product and you want to make it like so it's not possible that you can go in one in in one month you can be live with something unless you have like a capacity to do that but then for that to be happening you need to know like the set of initiatives that will go into it so you really need to understand okay what is like what are all the initiatives for the short term that will make it successful and you can either plan it in sort of increments or you can plan it in sort of a release format which means you know by end of this timeline this goal will be achieved with these initiatives or features in line and at the end of this this is the value drop or you can even say the first value drop is at this second value drop is at that so the users will already have a pilot and they can keep having more better experience at every increment so it depends on how you how you plan it and create epics containing actionable items so initiatives as I told you it can again be larger scheme of things you need to have epics basically another level of detail going into and having like a group of features or group of stories attached to it and of course you need to also create features so all of these work has to be done by product managers so not just until five so you need to create epics you need to create features you need to take the help of the stakeholders engineering team whosoever you need but you need to create epics and features in somewhere with the tools that you're offered in your organization and with that in place you can now start to visualize the three to five years and one year expanded timeline and I would say looks something broadly like this this is not like a very accurate picture I have something as an example that I can show you but basically you can have a sort of expanded view on how the roadmap looks like and you also need to take into other channel requests so what do I mean by other channel requests there are multiple business units and stakeholders that we already saw who are dependent on your product so they'll have different channels in which they will require they will request new feature or functions that you have not taken into account in your initial road mapping process so this will keep coming in you need to have all of that ideas logged in somewhere and you need to show them how that is making through into your roadmap or at least you need to let them know it's not possible to do because you have enough in your plate and you don't have the the capacity to do it and it is something then as a as a whole team you will have to sit and you have to really bring strong on what what are the pros and cons of doing it and not doing it so I think that's something you will definitely do as a product manager you will constantly keep bringing in and use some sort of priority matrix different priority techniques to ensure that right things get into the roadmap and you also take that into account because you can't have like a perfect roadmap that doesn't get changed at all there will always be some changes and you have to be adaptable to the changing needs so that is something that you want to take into account and you can create like a wish list or idea backlog or whatever where people can throw in ideas and it is your beauty as product manager to continuously review that and I usually do something like this it's called now next later roadmap so when I have no clue about what I have to do and I know of course like the product vision strategy goal but I really don't know like what do we really need like for the product and how would we start like you need to start somewhere right and you have a lot of features lot of functions that you have to deliver but you can only do something with the with the capacity you have so you need to really think through okay what is the value are who are you targeting who's the user group and what does it really need like now like literally in one month so that I would put it in now and then next is like something that I know immediately appending action as a as a result of this you would need this this this this so that particular thing goes in the next and whatever I'm unsure whatever I I don't know like if it will really add value or not based on the circumstance that I'm sitting in now it will only be clear or evident in the near future that those things will be valuable yes it's it's something that's indicated by difference take hold of growth that's super valuable nice to have amazing feature that I saw in the competitors all of this will come through so you need to really like know whether that's something really really valuable or it's something you want to take it for the later so I would say this is some sort of a scheme that I follow to just place okay these are all like features functions epics whatever and what can I do in the short term long term and real long term so this is something like but this is also a roadmap technique used by some of the product teams in in different parts of the globe where you have like a new product and and you don't have like a real long strategy and investment so sometimes this can be super helpful when you're working in a in a damn new idea or productive and that is something that you're trying to pilot or create like a proof of concept this can be super useful and this is an agile roadmap example of course you'll see a lot of masked image to master items but what I have tried to do is if you look there is like a time frame of course that you are that you're seeing on the top so you have different time frames in which you're you're you're organizing this and then you have like different elements like for example these are initiatives and these are product features and functions and these are technology features or functions and business value drop so these are basically like product features functions and initiatives and that will be listed here based on timeline and all of that and then the business value drop is okay at the end of this what is the value drop that that will be delivered and also this is also something super useful I also indicate like the discovery that goes on from product and business side and why because the the team will also know that we are not just working on just this but we are also doing some research on future items in this particular time frame so they they can already know what the future looks like for this product and this is something either they can contribute to a near-term goal or they can also be for real long term so depending on what value drop is planned sometimes I I work together with business or business teams or even I initiate some of the product capability research myself to do that and basically build on discovery for the for the roadmap so this is an example of a agile roadmap version but there are also goal oriented roadmap I've created in my previous roles where I say that if you're working in an e-commerce product you basically say that you have customer retention you have technology innovations and you have different business goals and then you can also put different features and functions epics or related to that goals and how would you achieve and again in that you will indicate the value drop at the end of that particular feature or function what will be the value drop so sometimes technology innovation or the business goal about customer engagement can go together to contribute one business value drop so it's about how you organize you really need to know what your product does what is your business goal what is your business unit needs based on that you need to create the roadmap because what I have created is very specific to my product needs but you really need to understand what your product needs and create according to that so if you're working purely in the initiative level of business goals business goal and then you need to do that and if I am working for example I work in two different products or three different products then I create like a portfolio level roadmap which basically indicates in that portfolio basically how the different products or the product modules represent these goals that are that are needed to be achieved so you really need to understand what you're you're working in and some other tools to consider in the market and I am a big fan of Hexcel and PowerPoint and I think most of you or most of the leadership team will not agree that because there is a more a drive for structured behavior of how we do the road maps and especially in the organizational level there is a drive to use a common tool across different teams so they get a long-term strategy attached to it and they understand how different products are contributing so I would say the tools between two and two to seven are really helpful for organizational point of view and Hexcel and PowerPoint is like the baby of every product manager who can who can create road maps just in those and and make it very visually beautiful in PowerPoint and ensure that's that's done but if you still feel apart from these I think a lot of these product I have used myself in that are available like our product board product plan all of these have real good capabilities as well you can share also with different business units and they can see what is happening even if things more around it automatically generates email to the business unit contacts who are following that so it's it's super valuable but it's also a lot of work so yes so I would say that there are pros and cons of using everything so you need to really understand what is your nature of business what is your nature of product and how will it be useful by using some of these tools you really need to do some research and then basically adopt any of the tools so that was it and I want to thank you again for joining this session and yeah I wish you all very good evening or good afternoon or good morning and have a nice day thank you