13
Building a Product Roadmap
Once you’ve aligned on a mission, vision, and strategy with your team, the next step is to break your strategy down into an actionable roadmap. The roadmap should give people a clear sense of your team’s objectives and key results for a specific period. It should also describe the features that your team will build to achieve those results.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Andy Grove created the objective and key results framework when he was Intel’s CEO in the 1980s. According to Andy, an objective is a qualitative goal that your team wants to achieve, and key results are quantitative measures of progress toward the objective.
OKRs serve three purposes in roadmap planning. First, they allow your team to execute by breaking down your strategy into actionable goals and milestones. Second, they empower teams to work effectively together by aligning on shared OKRs upfront. Finally, management uses OKRs to measure your team’s performance.
Despite these benefits, OKRs are meant to be a guide, not a binding contract. Although it shouldn’t happen often, you should have the flexibility to change your team’s OKRs if you have a solid reason to do so. As Andy describes: 1
If the supervisor manually relies on OKRs to evaluate his subordinate’s performance, or if the subordinate uses it rigidly and forgoes taking advantage of an opportunity because it was not a specific OKR, then both are behaving in a petty and unprofessional fashion.
To illustrate this point, let’s use Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas as an example. In 1492, Queen Isabella of Spain had an objective to increase the country’s wealth. To achieve her objective, she sponsored Columbus, her subordinate, to find a new trade route to Asia. Columbus measured progress through several key results, from acquiring ships to restocking supplies in the Canary Islands before his long journey. Instead of reaching Asia, Columbus discovered the Americas, which brought significant wealth to Spain. If Queen Isabella only evaluated Columbus based on his original OKRs, he would’ve failed.
So use common sense when setting OKRs and measuring your team’s progress.
How Can OKRs Be Used to Structure Your Roadmap?
In the previous chapter, we covered how you can craft a compelling mission, vision, and strategy with your team. A roadmap uses OKRs to outline how your team will execute on your strategy in the next three to twelve months.
Start the roadmap with an overview of your team’s mission, vision, and strategy. Follow that with a list of OKRs and the features that your team will build to achieve each key result in the upcoming quarter.
To understand this structure better, let’s walk through a sample quarterly roadmap for the Instagram growth team:
1. Overview
The opening paragraph of your roadmap should highlight your team’s mission, vision, and strategy before summarizing what your goal metric is for the quarter.
The mission of the Instagram growth team is to help people find meaningful communities based on what matters most to them. Our strategy is to bring new people to Instagram and connect them to accounts and communities that interest them. In Q4 2019, we want to grow the global Instagram community from 1B to 1.05B members (+5%) through the following objectives and key results.
2. Objectives
Objectives are qualitative goals that your team will focus on in the quarter. Objectives come from your strategy, and since good strategy is about focus, your roadmap should ideally have only three objectives per quarter:
Acquisition – Bring new people to Instagram.
Activation – Build a fast, seamless sign-up experience.
Connection – Help new Instagram users form meaningful connections.
3. Key Results
Each objective should have one or more KRs (key results). As you write each KR, briefly describe why the KR matters, who the owners are, and what dependencies it has.
Objective : Activation – Build a fast, seamless sign-up experience.
KR : Improve mobile web sign up rate by 5%.
We want to focus on mobile web this quarter because it is by far our largest acquisition channel (60% of total) yet has the worst sign up rates (30%).
Owners : Pat (product manager), Susan (design), Dave (eng).
Dependencies : Infra team to improve mobile web page latency.
4. Features
Below each KR, describe at a high level the features you plan to build to achieve it. Wherever possible, include a ship date for each feature, even if that date is just a rough month estimate.
Objective : Activation – Build a fast, seamless sign-up experience.
KR : Improve mobile web sign up rate by 5%.
We want to focus on mobile web this quarter because it is by far our largest acquisition channel (60% of total) yet has the worst sign up rates (30%).
Owners : Pat (product manager), Susan (design), Dave (eng).
Dependencies : Infra team to improve mobile web page latency.
Features :
1. Reduce the number of mobile web sign up steps from 5 to 2 (January).
2. Ship username suggestions (March).
How Does Roadmap Prioritization Work?
So how do you actually decide which objectives and features to prioritize in your roadmap? Prioritization is more art than science, but let’s walk through two frameworks that you can use.
Prioritize Objectives
Start by prioritizing objectives, not individual features. It’s useful to think about prioritizing objectives as a Venn diagram with three lenses: customer, business, and vision. The customer lens wants you to address your customer’s most burning problems. The business lens wants you to grow your team and your company’s goal metrics. Finally, the vision lens wants you to get one step closer to making your long-term vision a reality.
Figure 4. Use the customer, vision, and business lenses to prioritize objectives in your roadmap.
Figure 4. Use the customer, vision, and business lenses to prioritize objectives in your roadmap.
Prioritize objectives at the intersection of all three lenses. If that’s not possible, then you should try to balance your objectives across the three lenses. For example, if you only prioritize what customers ask for, you’ll never work on monetization objectives, since customers prefer free products. If you only prioritize growing your goal metric, you may only build short-term hacks and lose sight of your long-term vision.
Prioritize Features Under Each OKR
Finding balance is also important when prioritizing individual features under each objective. Think of prioritizing features as mapping them to two axes on a chart: value and effort.
Figure 5. Find balance between quick wins, experiments, and big bets when prioritizing features in your roadmap.
Figure 5. Find balance between quick wins, experiments, and big bets when prioritizing features in your roadmap.
To determine value, use the three lenses to understand the benefit that your feature will deliver to customers, your company, and your vision. To determine effort, work with your engineers to cost estimate each feature (e.g., low, medium, high). Once you map all the features that your team can build to these two axes, you’ll see three types of features emerge:
In any quarter, I recommend that you find the right balance between one or two big bets and a few quick wins and experiments.
Tips for Building Product Roadmaps
Here are a few more tips for building product roadmaps and setting OKRs:
  1. Start the process early . At least a month before a new quarter begins, start brainstorming OKRs with your team. Once you have an initial list of OKRs, meet with other teams to identify dependencies and start sharing your roadmap with your management chain.
  2. Aim to achieve at least 70% of your OKRs . If your team is consistently hitting all their OKRs, you're not ambitious enough. If your team is missing most of their OKRs, they’ll likely lose motivation. A 70% goal encourages your team to stretch their capabilities without risking too much failure.
  3. Set OKRs based on the team you’re on . If you’re on a platform team, your roadmap will be less flexible as internal teams will depend on your team’s work. As a result, you may set OKRs for shipping individual platform updates. If you’re on a growth team, your OKRs should focus on metrics. For example, you might set a KR to grow sign-up rates by 5%, while keeping the flexibility to change what features you build based on your learnings throughout the quarter.
To set effective OKRs, your team will need to know, at a high level, what products they’ll build in the quarter. They’ll need product requirements to estimate the time it’ll take to ship the product. We’ll cover defining individual products next.