Escaping the Roadmap Trap • Hacker News Board

Re: Escaping the Roadmap Trap

#21

Post by alexpetralia » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

polote wrote: post #5

I'm really wondering in which world the product managers are living in. What is the goal of a roadmap ? This article doesn't even touch a point on it. The goal is : In any company there are people who want to have an answer to the question "what comes next on your product?". Those people can be any of: CSM to prepare a presentation for customers, bored customer who want to talk to CSM, Sales people who want to impres…

This is directionally right but practically wrong.

You will be a disliked product manager if you continually tell people what they want to hear, but never deliver on it.

Rather, tell (read: persuade) people what they need to hear. Your job as a product manager is to negotiate and reconcile high-level plans and low-level execution.

Re: Escaping the Roadmap Trap

#22

Post by hitekker » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

penguinsonmars wrote: post #19

kareemm wrote: post #4

This article proposes several alternatives to feature driven roadmaps. But it ignores the main reason that roadmaps exist: as communication documents to the rest of the organization. This is what I used roadmaps for as a PM for a decade, but it was driven home after talking to hundreds of PMs after founding my fourth company[1] and coaching PMs and product/dev teams to level up for another decade[2]. The real roadmap…

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Kareem! Author of the article here. Your point on roadmap communication probably deserves another article in itself. “The real roadmap trap in my experience is that the org takes a roadmap as a promise of when specific things will be delivered.” That sentence brings home a point that I didn’t clarify well in the article. Let me try to expand my view on the underlying problems faced by…

IMHO, accounting for politics is a vital, basic part of planning.

How people quietly perceive your planning, how your planning feeds into their hidden plans, how people could use your planning against you.

It's a delicate, dangerous territory that most shy away from exploring. Which, I think, makes a clear map about that territory all the more valuable.

Re: Escaping the Roadmap Trap

#23

Post by rokkk » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

A lot of resources on product management are mixing what some commentators are pointing here: roadmap can mean:

1. Communication tool to tell others in the organization (or even outside) what you're planning to build.

2. A framework for your product and/or engineering team that helps you prioritize the work.

This article obviously focuses on the latter. One of the most common mistakes however is that PMs try to use a single deliverable for both.

Yes, there are interesting tools trying to address this but my advice is to study different frameworks to help you think about what your main challenges are - then stand up the process in a spreadsheet as you'll need a lot of flexibility to get to something that works in your specific case. Only then look for dedicated products and choose the one that works best for the process you ended up with.

Re: Escaping the Roadmap Trap

#24

Post by trastentrasten » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

tpetry wrote: post #8

Interestingly there is no product on the markt to collect feature ideas and classify them. Kanban boards etc. Are nice, but if you store many ideas you will completely lose focus. Ideas, which may or may not be implemented one day have so many dimensions: time required to build it, dependencies which must be built first, usefullness in several aspects, module the software needs to be implemented in and interacts with…

Check out featmap.com, it's a user story mapping tool.