Product Roadmapping: A Practical Guide To Prioritizing Opportunities, Aligning Teams, And Delivering Value To Customers And Stakeholders

E-Book Overview

A good product roadmap is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and continuously update. In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes delivering on company strategy. This practical guide teaches you how create an effective product roadmap, and demonstrates how to use the roadmap to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you'll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful. Whether you're a product manager, product owner, business analyst, program manager, project manager, scrum master, lead developer, designer, development manager, entrepreneur, business owner, this book will show you how to: Articulate an inspiring vision and goals for their product Prioritize ruthlessly and scientifically Protect against pursuing seemingly good ideas without evaluation and prioritization Ensure alignment with stakeholders Inspire loyalty and over-delivery from their team Get your sales team working with you instead of against you Bring a user- and buyer-centric approach to planning and decision-making Anticipate opportunities and stay ahead of the game Publish a comprehensive roadmap without over-committing

E-Book Content

Praise for Product Roadmaps Relaunched It’s about time someone brought product roadmapping out of the dark ages of waterfall development and made it into the strategic communications tool it should be. McCarthy and team have cracked the code. —Steve Blank, author of The Startup Owner’s Manual The theme-driven roadmap is the only way to operate today. By focusing on value rather than features or dates, this book makes product roadmaps useful again. —David Cancel, CEO, Drift Product roadmaps matter. You can’t build a great company unless you have a great strat‐ egy and a product roadmap is a way of clearly articulating that strategy. This book makes it clear how to develop the core components of a roadmap, the problem set, the value prop‐ ositions, and areas of focus for the customer. —Jeffrey Bussgang, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Product roadmaps bridge the gap between Agile tactics and company strategy. This book is required reading for anyone on my team and I’d recommend it for all software product leaders. —Samuel Clemens, VP of Product Management, InsightSquared When you follow this book’s brilliant advice, a smartly designed roadmap will put your customers directly in the focus of your product strategy. You’ll shift from the standard approach of “Look at us and what we can do” to “We understand what you’re dealing with and we can help you.” Roadmaps will be your company’s competitive strategic advantage. —Jared Spool, CEO/Founding Principal of UIE Roadmaps are one of the most critical tools we use as product leaders to drive our strat‐ egy, but also one of the more challenging to get right. This book brings together a breadth of experience to provide practical advice and war stories to take you to the next level. —Vanessa Ferranto, Director of Product, The Grommet This is a fantastic book with so much useful information on every page. Plus, Chapter 7 on prioritization: if it was shorter I would have it tattooed on my arm. i —Tim Frick, CEO, Mightybytes, author of Designing for Sustainability This book clearly articulates what a roadmap should, and more importantly should not, be in order to make the connection between product vision and what problems need to be solved to in order to achieve it. It’s a must read for product people, but it shouldn’t stop there. Anyone who is in a product driven org should be reading this as well so that the entire team can align around this important tool. —Ryan Frere, VP Product at Flywire This is the first book I can wholeheartedly recommend to my students on the subjec