The Executive Brief
I love the smell of a roadmap in the morning. Actually, no. I prefer coffee, but I am a really big proponent of roadmaps. It can be best summed up by this quote:
“Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
Too often product leaders, including CTOs, just want to get started. They think a back of the napkin plan is enough. It’s only when they are standing amid the wreckage of a project gone horribly wrong that they realize how much up-front planning would have benefited them.
In this article I give you my hard-earned advice for getting stakeholders on board with the idea of doing a roadmap. Your future you with thank you for your wisdom and foresight. 🙂
Why Product Leaders Fail to Craft Successful Roadmaps
A lot of Product & Engineering Leaders seem to forget that successful roadmaps are typically crafted to be successful on paper first, before they can become successful in practice.
Meaning, too many Product Leaders like to skip the upfront part of roadmap design and simply assume that their ideas must be good enough to get started. They believe they have good instincts when it comes to generating business value, so therefore it is unnecessary in their view to model out the expected ROI of their roadmap before starting.
These leaders often come back to this question of ROI at the end of the year, when they are asked to prove that their roadmaps did generate business value. But at this stage these leaders usually just resort to telling a lot of fanciful tales about ROI generation.
As a product leader if you can’t convincingly prove you’ve designed a high-ROI roadmap (by modeling it out) before the business invests in it, then why should you be trusted to design the teams, products, processes, plans, dependencies and so forth needed to execute on the roadmap?
This is why many roadmaps fail to create intrinsic business value — because product leaders don’t map out their value generation plan before asking for millions of dollars of investment to go and execute.
So, why might this be the case?
I think there are 5 common reasons that plague most companies that suffer from this lack of upfront ROI modeling during roadmap establishment.
5 Common Reasons Product Leaders Don’t Think About ROI for Roadmaps Upfront
The business doesn’t create an environment where the product leader has enough time to do the upfront thinking. This is the most common reason. Many businesses and therefore product leaders simply don’t make the time to develop roadmap ROI projections. But, can you imagine if a CEO didn’t think upfront about what the company was going to achieve financially next year? This wouldn’t be considered acceptable.
The company culture does not hold Product accountable. This is not all that unusual, believe it or not. If product builds a roadmap and it doesn’t work out, everyone sort of shrugs their shoulders and says “well, we’ll try again next year.” Can you imagine if that happened in Sales? Half the team would be gone next year. Because of this Product is not incentivized to think carefully upfront.
The product leader and team don’t have the skills to do the ROI modeling. This is a pretty pervasive issue as well. To me this is like a Senior Software Engineer saying “sorry, I don’t know how to architect.” It might be true, but it isn’t really a great excuse if we’re being honest with ourselves.
The product leader has an over-exaggerated sense of their teams capability and therefore decides they will figure out the roadmap as they go. While teams might invent new initiatives as they go, teams almost never figure value-generation out as they go unless they get very lucky. Value-generation never falls from the sky. So, this one is truly baffling. OK, sure, love your team by all means, but don’t you want them to be successful in driving the business?
Its too difficult to map products contribution to business value creation because the business is too complex or too dysfunctional. This one I have a lot of empathy for. It’s real and it happens all over the place.
But there’s also another underlying reason.
There’s a secret reason that most companies never talk about or even realize they subscribe to. And it has to do with a “special agreement” that exists between the Business and the Product function in many bad organizations.
Here’s the hidden truth about this special agreement that greatly impacts crafting successful roadmaps:
First, Product indirectly agrees that the Business will get to micro-manage Product. The Business will tell Product which problems to solve AND how to solve them. The business should really only be deciding which problems to solve, but in bad companies micro-managing every nuance of Product is part of this “special agreement.” Product is simply an obedient order-taker and utility function for the rest of the business and its customers to dump on.
However, at the same time the Business agrees to let Product off the hook no matter what happens with the roadmap! Product is free to fail, essentially. They can deliver all the value of the roadmap or none of the value, and it won’t matter. There will be no consequence for the team. In fact, as noted above, the Business often won’t even ask Product to project any kind of value generation in relation to the roadmap at all!
So, that’s the special agreement. And a lot of companies don’t even know they’ve struck this bargain.
The business says either directly or indirectly to Product that “we get to micromanage you.” And Product says back to the business, “OK, sure, but if we mess up then it’s not our fault.”
At the most fundamental level this dynamic is part of what prevents product leaders from crafting successful roadmaps and ultimately delivering business value.
I’ll talk about how to solve for these issues in a future article.
Here are some other articles from Technocratic that you may enjoy as well: