How to Align Teams Behind a Product Roadmap

by Stephen Ostrowski
May 12, 2020

In the development cycle, a sound product roadmap helps steer a team from point A to B. 

But don’t fret over the occasional detour.

“I’m a big fan of failing fast. Changing your roadmap or reprioritization is not a bad thing. It’s a sign of learning,” Claire Vo, chief product officer at optimization service Optimizely, said. 

But how can product managers keep everyone on track?

Like Vo, Lydia Han, senior product manager at credit card startup Brex, emphasizes the importance of transparency to bring about buy-in from teammates. By clearly outlining end goals, colleagues can understand the driving forces behind a project that’s taking flight. 

 

brex
brex

“As a PM, you’ll need to share the roadmap with teams that are impacted by it and be able to articulate why certain projects were prioritized over others,” Han said. 

And once a project is in motion, open, candid and inquisitive exchange is a helpful course correct, said Nico Rattazzi, head of product at rental platform Zumper

For these three product leaders, asking the right questions, defining team goals and adopting a flexible mindset pay off in dividends at all stages of the process. 

Claire Vo
Chief Product Officer • Optimizely

When developing a product roadmap, what steps do you take to ensure there's alignment across teams from the get-go?

My job as a product leader is to ensure alignment by articulating a clear product strategy, which acts as a guiding light for the members of the product team. This strategy outlines what we are focusing on, why we are focusing on it and how we are measuring success. If our strategy is clear, PMs should know if they are working on the right things. Each PM has full ownership of their area. They can, and do, set their own roadmaps and priorities. We manage global alignment and prioritization through staffing and trust each other to raise conflicts, dependencies and trade-offs. 

Changing your roadmap or reprioritization is not a bad thing.”

How do you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle?

We maintain alignment through transparency. We have a single source of truth for everything in design, development and delivery, which is our “Wall of Work.” When we’re in the office, this wall is a physical space that represents all of our major work in-flight. Now, with everyone working from home, we have a virtual Wall of Work in JIRA. We review the Wall every Monday, giving the team time to inspect, adjust and promote the work they are doing. Externally, to our product and engineering teams, we have a public-facing roadmap that we update monthly so customers and our go-to-market teams know what is upcoming. 

 

As project needs change, how do you re-prioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?

I’m a big fan of failing fast. Changing your roadmap or reprioritization is not a bad thing. It’s a sign of learning. I would rather a project change mid-flight than launch something no one wants just because “we put it on the roadmap.”

It is up to the individual PM to prioritize, or re-prioritize, as appropriate. All we ask is that the PM communicate early and often, and provide the thought process behind the change. We share this information with customers or other people in the company. With full transparency, we’ve been able to build a lot of trust within our company and customer base, so there are rarely concerns when we decide to build something different than we originally planned.

Nico Rattazzi
Head of Product • Zumper

When developing a product roadmap, what steps do you take to ensure there's alignment across teams from the get-go? 

We achieve alignment by ensuring stakeholders get visibility and sign off on the strategy of the roadmap. Before we get to a roadmap, we ensure the OKRs are well-defined. Each product area defines a set of OKRs, which is rooted in an ambitious objective directly to our company objectives. Then, we come up with key results, which should be specific and measurable targets to achieve our objectives. We make sure all stakeholders approve of these OKRs. 

Then, we determine a set of themes. Themes allow us to define areas or approaches, which we plan to investigate or utilize to hit our OKRs. We review these themes with our stakeholders so they understand how the product, design and engineering teams plan to approach these problems. From there, specific initiatives are defined and sequenced into a roadmap. By the time the roadmap is defined and reviewed, there should be a high level of alignment, as the stakeholders are brought through the journey of how the roadmap was approached.

We achieve alignment by ensuring stakeholders get visibility and sign off on the strategy of the roadmap.”

How do you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle? 

Once development begins, we try to make sure each of our roadmap initiatives is run as an experiment to ensure we’re learning the impact of our efforts and validating that our themes are the right lens to provide impact to our OKRs. All team members know the OKRs, themes and initiatives and are part of the brainstorming and research to help generate ideas for initiatives. If everyone is aligned with the goals and is part of the process, alignment becomes strong throughout the team. 

For example, when our consumer product team first defined a theme, they got the product, design, engineering and other cross-department stakeholders in a room to ask them to brainstorm initiatives that would provide value. Their theme was the following: how might we best help renters search for apartments? Members of the team were then able to submit ideas on Post-Its for the group to see. After pitching initiatives, everyone gets to discuss and then vote on the initiatives for the group. This allows everyone to be heard, increases buy-in amongst the team and provides alignment with the roadmap initiatives so that development is clear and focused throughout the cycle.

 

As project needs change, how do you re-prioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?

Our products and initiatives all begin as small minimum viable experiments that allow us to ensure our development efforts are validated with data and product-market fit. We ensure projects are small and well-defined in order to prove or disprove a hypothesis. When an experiment succeeds or fails, the team gets together to discuss what caused it. What did we learn? What can we improve? This discussion sometimes results in changing the roadmap or altering the themes. If this occurs, the team is notified when a theme is discarded or a new theme is introduced. The team then understands why the pivot is being made. For new themes, we go through another brainstorming process so the team is aligned on why we’re taking this angle and contributes to the initial planning process.

 

Lydia Han
senior product manager

When developing a product roadmap, what steps do you take to ensure there's alignment across teams from the get-go?

A product team’s roadmap should either contribute to a top-level company goal for the quarter or it should be a strategic bet that the team believes will set the company up for success for the year. As a PM, you'll need to share the roadmap with teams that are impacted by it and be able to articulate why certain projects were prioritized over others. I typically evaluate projects using the RICE method — what is the reach, impact, confidence and effort for the project? — since it helps others see how all the projects rank against each other.

 

How do you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle? 

After a roadmap is finalized, the next phase is defining the requirements and scope of a project. Every product requirement document should clearly define what the problem is, any context about the problem area and the proposed solution. As a PM, it is your job to understand all the moving pieces across the company — other projects that are in-flight — and how much resourcing you have to deliver value to customers in a timely fashion. 

There is a fine balance between the minimal viable product experience and the ideal solution. If you wait until the ideal solution is in place, then you probably shipped too late. In order to help others understand how you defined the version 1 of the product, it is important to lay out the ideal version. Then, show others how the team will get from version 1 to the ideal version, what value you’re delivering to customers with version 1, and what you think you can learn from shipping version 1.

As a PM, you'll need to share the roadmap with teams that are impacted by it.”

As project needs change, how do you re-prioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?

Being flexible is a core part of being a great PM. A project can change for a number of reasons: a new problem arises, and it takes priority over a current project that you are working on; existing hypotheses going into a project were incorrect, and by conducting user research or testing an early version with customers, you realize you need to iterate on the product specifications; resourcing changed in your team and you need to adapt. The most important part of a reprioritization is sharing with key stakeholders of a project the context of why the change is happening. As a PM, it is your job to bring others along the journey and ensure they understand how decisions are being made.

 

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