How do you avoid risks when planning a product roadmap?

It's crucial to establish the scope, create hypotheses and assumptions, and communicate your product objectives to your team. Frequently, resources invest time in developing new products or features without understanding the ultimate purpose or customer needs they address. Therefore, it's advisable to transparently convey your scope and intended outcomes. When defining the scope, one can adopt the design thinking approach, consisting of five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This process involves a sequence of converging and diverging activities one after another.

When defining scope, the best way to avoid risks is to analyse the possible short falls of your plan. I recommend assessing feasibility risks (what might stand in the way of building), usability risks (how are customers used to using solutions), viability risks (how much are customers willing to pay), ethical risks (how can the product cause societal harm) and value risks (what can customers not get in value). All these define how likely is your scope to fit what they want and need.

Initial roadmap scope definition based on real-world need or UX/CX data sets the tone for the overall roadmap execution. Having that clear and transparent understanding of 'why' we are doing something along with the available 'worker-bee' stakeholders is a critical first step.

Conducting a thorough market research to understand customer needs, market trends, and competition is crucial while defining the scope and assumption. This helps in making informed decisions and reduces the risk of building a product that doesn't meet market demands.

In the realm of strategic product planning, the foundational imperative is the clear delineation of scope and the rigorous delineation of assumptions. This initial orchestration is akin to setting the boundaries and foundational hypotheses that underpin the entire product development journey. Scope entails the demarcation of parameters that encompass the target market, customer segments, nuanced user requisites, value proposition, and pivotal features. Assumptions, conversely, encompass the bedrock beliefs and hypotheses that substantiate the product's viability, encompassing factors such as the problem-solution congruence, market demand, competitive differentiation, and revenue model projections.

Be sure that your specific product development methodology and execution strategy for your roadmap meet your organization's/company's goals and objectives. I can speak from experience, that when a plan is built on misguided deliverables and false assumptions, the end result is not pleasant and creates a false impression that the PM team is operating at high risk and low reward. Prioritizing the key stakeholders' inputs, and where added value will be gained, will serve you well in successfully executing your roadmap strategy.

See to it that no items that does not fit within the boundaries of the Product Strategy makes it beyond an initial review. Then, do not be afraid to ask for input from other stakeholders on how much/little a chosen item would bring to the table from their perspective. Do not forget to ask for input from within your own organization. Weigh your own thoughts and the gotten input against the estimated cost and/or workload. Depending on the Product and how you gather this data, you could even use a decision-making formula or process to make your life easier. You will end up with a list of pretty high certainty items to plot out on your roadmap. A simplified example of course but turning gathered input into real world decisions is crucial.

Prioritisation when considering risks starts from understanding what is a P0 and P1 both in terms of scope, as well as value required for conversion, and how you stand versus competition. One useful exercise is running a pre-mortem: what might kill the chances of success. That pre-mortem will highlight priorities in what risks to address.

In my journey with a tech startup, prioritization proved paramount. We faced a crucial decision: which features to include in our product? Value: User research revealed a pressing need for integration with popular software. This promised benefits for customers and growth for us. Feasibility: Despite technical challenges, it was within our grasp, both technically and financially. Urgency: Market demand was rising rapidly. Delaying meant losing ground. Prioritizing integration was a clear choice. The result? Increased user acquisition, competitive advantage, and satisfied customers.

Prioritising the roadmap is an excellent way to bring both Business Stakeholders and Development teams together to review Epics in the backlog and prioritise them. In my product portfolio we use WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) aka Magic Scoring to assess which items bring the most value for the least amount of effort. The business and product manager speaks to value while the developers speak to efforts. This gets the whole team together and ensures we do the right things at the right time

Roadmaps should adjust to the type of product or feature. Is it a project? Run it like a project management, with gantt charts. Is it zero to one? Run it like a discovery or design sprint. Is it 1 to N growth? Run it like scrum with continuous discovery. Roadmaps that are flexible are prepared to deal with risks according to the stage of the product.

Flexible roadmaps for me mean incremental planning where your epics are planned and prioritised at a given cycle, say 90 days. In the 90 day planning the full development team need to identify all features which would enable the delivery or MVP of the epic. Once all Epics and Features are defined you can assign the team and the effort estimates. As the team progress in the 90 days the team may adjust which features make sense and which do not however having well defined epics and features allows the team to know what to build next and can plan dynamically. It not only helps build incremental value but the whole team own the roadmap and this builds a great environment for success!

To help achieve this flexibility, methods like Agile or Scrum can be very useful. These methods were developed to keep the process flexible and provide the ability to change it.

Roadmaps should be strategic and at the same time tactical because many a times projects get delayed because of too much time spend into roadmaps.So capturing details is good but it should mainly help in a directional way with flexibility to adapt in the stages

A flexible roadmap is beneficial when anticipated, yet necessary, scope changes are encountered. Many times the stakeholders come across a key core metric that needs modifying or changing to generate the overall project's efficiency. When managed properly, this slight rerouting of the roadmap is not a detrimental issue to the overall teams' progress, and can prove to be a lifesaver in the end.

Successful communication is all about managing expectations and simplifying understanding. You need to define who and what each person needs to hear to make them effective at dealing with your Roadmap decisions. Are they a stakeholder impacted by a priority? Are they part of the GTM team? Are they management or leadership? All these members required adjusted communication to guarantee an effective delivery of the Roadmap.

Dealing with risks is unavoidable in NPD. The main issue is making sure you are systematically de-risking your most important assumptions or hypotheses that could cause your product or service roadmap to fail. A roadmap is tool to enable this communication. Different roadmaps (e.g., vision, strategic, outcome, and/or delivery roadmaps) and resolution of roadmaps are required per stakeholder group you have to communicate with i.e., external customers, internal executives, business funcation managers and wider product development team.

The transparent and collaborative sharing of the roadmap is key to maintaining measurable metrics while moving the project forward effectively. Certainly, we all strive to maintain our teams under a similar mindset and common understanding of the tasks at hand, however, if certain development aspects are left siloed, or not included in the weekly collaborations, then we are not managing all the stakeholders effectively and this can easily lead to riffs within the team and to external parties. Include all the relevant voices in the funnel, and share the various feedback aspects from all involved.

Maintaining open and transparent communication with stakeholders, including team members, executives, and customers is a key. This allows everyone to keep on similar page and match the wavelength. This also helps them to get regular progress reports and any prior notifications of a potential risks.

Understanding that the roadmap is the overall plan for the entire team is critical in maintaining a collective push forward through the DMAIC journey. Transparency between the internal teams and/or stakeholders is mandatory and should be considered a 'positive' trait of the team. This communication spreads across the entire participant spectrum from the most novice to the senior-level executive.

The best Roadmaps are not set in stone. They're learning processes. They help guide your understanding of a problem space, and adapt to the new data points. Revising your Roadmap should also be adapted to the stage of a product. If zero to one, revise it more frequently (once a month) as you're learning quickly. 1 to N revise it quarterly, to let the shipped features sink in. Mature product, have a semestral view and a strategic document that outlines your direction.

A static roadmap will not only drive down your team's efficiencies in completing projects on time and with positive results but will also introduce complacencies from within your team, ultimately leading to a loss of focus, desire, and effective close-out.

The best Product Managers are transparent about their worst decisions, and can easily say why they failed, what they learned, and how they reacted. A mistake is repeating the same error twice. Success is also dangerous, as it says your approach will work the same way next time, and it might not. You need to have a balanced view when shipping and reflecting on your Roadmap.

Dealing with technological risks in the early stages is absolutely crucial. It starts with a proactive approach to identify and tackle potential tech challenges upfront. The next step is to allocate time for rigorous research and experimentation to reduce uncertainties and mitigate risks. By taking these steps early in the game, we can pave the way for a more efficient and successful product roadmap execution.

Key learning: If you want to kill your creativity, focus on avoiding risks. The more time you spend avoiding risks, the more opportunities you miss. Creating digital products requires boldness, not fear. Risk-averse is the perfect way of creating mediocre products. A better approach is to start small, name assumptions, prioritize them, and test the critical ones. When you gather evidence justifying more investments, advance; when not, drop the idea. It's not about minimizing risks; it's about maximizing opportunities. Play safe, and collect ordinary results. Take risks, and benefit from extraordinary outcomes.

Risks are potential events that, if they occur, can impact the product roadmap. Risks can range from small issues to significant problems. The first step in risk management is to identify all the potential risks that might occur. Brainstorming, previous projects, and seeking advice from experts are examples of tools that can help create this list. Once the list is complete, it must be categorized according to the probability of occurrence and the impact if it does occur. Lastly, a risk plan and risk mitigation strategy must be developed. This includes determining how to treat each risk, how to prevent it from happening, and what steps to take if it does occur. The risk plan is crucial for the product roadmap.

The term risk does not only have a negative meaning, it could also have a positive meaning. Every project is a risk, because every project has some uncertain aspects like complexity, dependencies, and it is implemented by humans. To effectively manage risks, collect the uncertainties that could impact your objectives. Early-stage preparation is crucial for a successful outcome.

Some key risks to consider as stated by Marty Cagan: 1. Value risk: Whether customers will buy or choose your product 2. Usability risk: Whether users will figure out how to use it 3. Feasibility risk: Can the dev team build it 4. Business risk: Will it help/impact other parts of the business