Situation

The company had ambitious goals, and wanted to produce a platform roadmap that reflected this. It would be the complementary piece of the puzzle to the ambitious growth plans in the various other departments.

Approach

With a large team of 12 product managers, it proved to be very complex to produce a great roadmap. The previous planning process didn’t manage to wrangle this amount of information, and establish a clean and crisp prioritisation and alignment with leadership. We tackled both aspects, getting business feedback in a timely and effective way and prioritising accordingly, through the following steps:

• Crystallising the overall roadmap of this large team into a shape that can be communicated took large efforts of abstraction and bucketing. Particular attention was paid to the audience’s financial vocabulary to avoid any loss in translation. The result was a business roadmap that could be read by anyone in the company.
• We established a regular process of review and feedback with a carefully selected and limited number of partners on the business and leadership teams. Controlling this process methodically yielded valuable and actionable feedback that helped the product team make steady progress towards complex business goals.
• The feedback was then used to create the prioritised roadmap that served both as a great tool for the Product and Engineering teams, as well as a basis for creating client-facing roadmaps, collateral materials and board packs.

Setting up a series of steps to achieve a rinse-and-repeat feedback process helped to get a grip on a very large, unwieldy and complex business roadmap. We were rewarded with watershed moments and steady progress.