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By Peter Longini
Not every company uses product roadmaps. And even among those who do, as their businesses progress from startup to maturity, both the applications of roadmaps and the processes for developing them, as well as their contents, audiences, elasticity and detail, will vary widely. As a result, a company’s business roadmaps are not only dynamic, they are usually not even single documents. Instead, they can be thought of as a nested set of plans and forecasts whose contents, horizons, and levels of detail complement one another. And those nests grow in size and complexity with the company.
Still, there are prevailing patterns, according to Andrew Hally, the Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Boston-based Unica, a global provider of enterprise marketing management software and services. “There’s always a process,” Hally observed. “It can be an opaque, ill-defined, unrepeatable process. Or it can be a highly-organized, repeatable, six-sigma sort of process. So when you talk about product roadmapping – by which I mean the process of defining future development investments to be made in a product – the right type of process varies as the company evolves. What worked for Unica years ago, when we were a $20 million company with 50 people does not work now that Unica is a $125 million company with 500 people.”
“The ownership of roadmaps changes to some degree as a company grows,” he noted. “Typically one of the transitions that happens in high tech is that the visionary founder has a very hands-on role in defining the product roadmap at a detailed level early on. But that’s difficult to scale indefinitely. So as the company grows, if it’s lucky enough to still have its visionary founder involved, it’s got to become a process he guides, but not one he has to fully perform by himself.
“As the company matures, you end up with an entire product line where you’ve got to have product roadmaps developed by specialists in each product. Otherwise you just can’t keep up with all the work,” he said.
Getting Formal
“The other thing that happens is that the product roadmap process becomes more formalized,” Hally said. When you’re ten people, it’s easy to communicate by just popping over the cube. People can stay on the same page just by virtue of being in the same office and a company can react to the market more quickly. But when you start getting up around 100 people, maybe not everybody’s in that office. It’s harder to maintain the same kind of shared purpose just by collaborating. You start needing to document things. You start needing to write down whatever you’re doing so you can refer back to it.
“That need to invest in formalized communication around roadmaps grows as the organization grows. The need to invest in a connective tissue between Development, Product Management, Sales, Marketing – and ensuring that people are on the same page, can’t happen naturally any more,” Hally said. “Balancing the need for speed with the need to ensure alignment as a company grows is tricky.”
“When a company first starts out, it’s usually a single-product company. It’s very focused. It’s all about one thing. And the decisions that really need to be made are: what features do you build into this one product? But as the company grows, you start getting other products. You have a product line at some point. Then you not only need to make decisions about what’s in this particular product – do I do Feature A or Feature B? – you have a second set of investment decisions to make about: Do I invest in Product 1 or Product 2? And then as you grow, you have more layers of needing to define where the investment should go. So you have a product roadmap and you have a product line roadmap, each with different levels of granularity as the company grows.”
Layers of Mapping
But as you move up the food chain, product roadmaps begin to overlap with company strategic plans: what market is the company in, versus what market are the product lines in? “You can think of roadmapping as a process, akin to product strategy or even product requirements definition; when you start getting down to the granular level of the roadmap for a single product, they start to overlap. But at the very highest end, roadmaps start to overlap with company strategy,” he said.
“The number of layers in-between is related to company size. When you first start out and you’re one product in one market, the roadmap is about what feature to build next. But then when you’re more established, you’ve got a couple layers and a couple product lines. And then when you’re Oracle sized, you’ve got products, product-lines, and business units,” Hally said
The level of detail in a product roadmap generally reflects the audience for whom it was intended, he observed. For conversations between product management and the Development department, the detail is typically very high. It is also fairly high for conversations with industry analysts.
For communicating with Marketing and Sales, it’s typically less granular. “Whatever you tell a sales force, to some degree is going to reach prospects and customers,” he said. “So you’re communicating externally even when you’re communication internally.” And there can be real benefit in securing market validation for a feature that’s been roadmapped, particularly among sales and the industry analysts who frequently talk to lots of buyers.
Unrecognized Revenues
But there is a serious and under-appreciated danger in sharing too much with customers. “If you’re a publicly-traded U.S. company, auditors have become quite vigilant around what’s called revenue recognition in recent years,” Hally said. “There are very specific criteria that need to be met for recognizing revenue. And if you share futures, you can really get into trouble because accounting standards hold that if a customer might have bought your product expecting future functionality, you may not be able to recognize revenue until you deliver it. So if you’re a public company, you have to have pretty tight control over the means and forums for sharing roadmaps with anyone outside of your company.”
But the advantages to a company of having a robust roadmap easily offset the risks. “Alignment and clarity of purpose across the different functional silos is critical,” Hally said. “It’s important that each individual product roadmap give visibility to the other product teams so their products can proceed in synchrony. They’re often reliant upon each other to have good inter-operability. And then there’s synchronization across function. If you look at an enterprise software company, probably only 20 percent of the people are actual developers. So you’ve got to synchronize all the rest of it. And a roadmap or a product plan is an important part of that.”
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