SUNDAY REWIND: Creating good roadmaps – 6 practical steps for product leaders

December 26, 2021

2 min read

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Louron Pratt

Louron is an editor at Mind the Product. He has had a background in writing and editing while previously working as a journalist for several business publications. He spent the first few years of his career working in content marketing and audio production. You can find him on Twitter as @LouronPratt22.

Matt Walton

Matt is a digital product leader who likes to improve the world by making useful things. He’s one of the founding team and Chief Product Officer for FutureLearn a social learning network offers short online courses from over 100 leading universities and other education providers with a vision to give everyone, everywhere access to education so that they can improve their lives, their work and the world. He’s passionate about lean and agile product development and how disruptive technology can be used to make the world a better place. In the past, he’s led the development of innovative websites, apps and digital products for the likes of the BBC, Harper Collins and BSkyB. He’s also a music and film fan, radio and technology geek, passionate cook and photographer, interested in history, behavioural economics and sustainability and only ever wears brown shoes.

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Roadmaps are such an important aspect of every product managers’ career. Although there are a plethora of resources to aid us in learning more about this process, it can be difficult for product managers to define and execute roadmaps effectively. To help, we look back to when Product leader, Matt Walton, shared 6 practical steps to creating good roadmaps in this Sunday Rewind episode…

As a product leader, the biggest impact you have on product roadmaps is how you organise your teams and define their missions, Matt believes. You need to work closely with others in the leadership team to arrive at ways of organising and defining missions that work not only for product people but the rest of the business too. “Focus on the purpose, strategy, and vision when looking to create good product roadmaps,” Matt says.

The “agile onion” and the layers that you as a product leader should be in

Additionally, Matt says that as a product leader, you must ensure that your team understand their context within the business. “It’s your job as a product leader to interpret the company’s strategy into something useful for product people and to make sure they understand it,” he says.

Wherever you are in your business cycle, remember that your role in product roadmapping is to ensure that:

Your team owns their roadmaps
There is a clear strategic context to inform their work and that the missions and success measures of the teams are clear
The processes, frameworks and cadence for roadmapping are all consistent, understood by your team and bought into effect across the organisation
There are processes in place to encourage communication and collaboration across teams
Your team is inspired, supported, and challenged appropriately
You cultivate and maintain a “product-friendly” culture

Read Creating Good Roadmaps: 6 Practical Steps for Product Leaders in full and have a read of other episodes in our Sunday Rewind series.