Feature article from the archives... 

For the world’s leader in cell phone technology, roadmapping offers more than a cosmetic gloss on traditional product planning. It also provides a method for managing people, partners, and expectations among key stakeholder groups scattered around the world. In just a matter of months, roadmaps of varying depth, breadth, and length have become essential management tools for one of Nokia’s newer acquisitions – formerly Eizel Technologies of Pittsburgh.

How do you get from Helsinki to Pittsburgh? About eight months ago Nokia – the Finnish cell phone giant – followed its own roadmap, which led the company to acquire Eizel Technologies, a small startup in Pittsburgh developing a very big idea. 

Eizel’s server-based software, which was first released in early 2002, allows enterprise e-mail, attachments, and Web-enabled applications, including Intranet content, to be easily displayed by browsers on any device over any wireless network – laptops, Blackberries, PDAs, even tiny cell phone screens – all without additional software. 

That breakthrough capability fit nicely into the long-term plans of Nokia, which had been an early investor in Eizel and a visionary proponent of secure wireless enterprise products. But it also reflected the parent company’s commitment to the use of product roadmapping as a planning, communications, and expectation management tool, according to the company’s Pittsburgh-based manager of Engineering Operations, Ken Drake. 

Serious mapping

“At Nokia, we take our product roadmaps very, very seriously. Every month, the company’s senior managers get together to review their product roadmaps,” he said. “For instance, the model numbers of all the different phones we make designate market different segments they’re going after. We have a whole scheme, and it fits into our overall roadmap. 

“We had been using product roadmapping at Eizel ourselves, but we refined it after our acquisition. So I’m going to go to Helsinki next month to better understand how we optimize product roadmapping,” Drake said. Even so, the fundamentals are already clear.

“Roadmapping is our plan. It’s a living document. It says ‘this is where we want to take our product and why.’ What market penetration do we want to hit? What customers do we want to address by these releases? And how do these potential product life cycle releases fit into other product life cycles? When we look at our roadmaps, this is our product’s future and how we define it,” he said. 

Beyond planning

Another key function of Nokia’s roadmaps is avoiding collisions. Because of the company’s rapidly growing mix of product lines and development groups, the likelihood of different company teams unwittingly developing incompatible standards is always present. Roadmaps help the company’s technology gurus head off those sorts of clashes. They can also accelerate development by identifying similar efforts that become candidates for consolidation, or at least for providing synergies both can benefit from. 

And what do these roadmaps contain? At Nokia, they come in layers – each successive layer containing more detail than the one just above it. At the topmost level, the roadmap is primarily graphic, including product features, timelines, market segments, and competitors, frequently using Gantt charts to lay out developments over a period as long as three years. 

Below that, is a more detailed PowerPoint document, typically including a spreadsheet, that elaborates on the time points, market segments, competitors and features set out in the top layer. Drill down further, and you find a map that is actually a text document, describing potential features, specific competitors, and emerging technologies, which can include enabling developments as well as threatening alternatives. 

Discriminating audiences

They also differ in the audiences to whom they’re directed. “The top level is very graphical for the very, very senior managers. But we don’t just use it to handle senior management expectations, we also use it to manage sales and customer expectations,” Drake noted. “Customers will not see the roadmaps unless they’re very, very, very important customers or possibly OEM type partners. Even our sales people only see a six-month view into it. So although my product roadmaps show the next three years, when we meet with our sales team we only show them the next six months of our product roadmap. They’ll understand at a very high level what’s coming, but they’ll know that they’re only supposed to only sell what’s currently on our price list.” 

It’s a somewhat different story with investors and financial analysts. “We might show analysts a very high level map. But we view our product roadmaps as internal planning documents. We’re not looking for much outside feedback at this point in development . That’s not to say that we don’t show it to them. But it might be at a very high level. They’re not going to see that Word document or even the PowerPoint slides. It might be the high level graphical representation that says this is where we’re going to potentially be taking this product.”

Partners get a peek, too, but even that is carefully calibrated. “We don’t hide it from any of the engineers because we believe it’s an open-view document to our inside team. But teams outside are not going to see the product roadmap unless the product manager gives it to them,” Drake said. “I was just talking with IBM over in France and showed them the high-level product roadmap because they’re a European distributor of ours. And they got all excited. I told them this is our plan right now. As the ties we have with them get closer, the more information we’ll give.” 

Map talk

At Nokia, it’s the Product Manager who is assigned to create the roadmap. But it’s not a task the manager works alone. “We make available systems engineers, technical evangelists, product marketers, and business intelligence analysis, so they can really understand the competition, the marketplace, and features,” Drake said. “Those product managers really own those products and develop the product roadmaps. They are on the road at least one week a month, talking to the sales force and talking to customers. So they’re always coming back and looking at the future plans.” 

But map revisions are not handled lightly. “We have very stringent change control policies for when we’re in a release,” he noted. “Right now, our team has a release that’s due out in April. So the engineers are off working on those features. And if, for some reason, the product managers come back and say we have a new feature that needs to be in this release, we have control procedures in place. It scares the engineers when they keep on seeing the thing evolving. Because they’re saying ‘oh, my goodness, that’s going to be in the next release?’ And when I put my engineering manager hat on, I have to say: it could be. But let’s wait until where we get a requirements document from them, and then we can start worrying about that.

Not long ago, a Nokia team from Helsinki paid a visit to Drake’s Pittsburgh office. Their mission: to seek Drake’s help in creating a new product that used a number of features his group was already working on for a different application. “I was in there talking with their product managers saying, ‘okay, let me see your product roadmap, let me see how I could potentially integrate those features into our product roadmap.’ We were looking at where there were synergies and then saying ‘this is where I’m going to have a deficit in resources, or features we don’t even have. So we’re going to have to do some analysis to make sure we can move that product into our roadmap. We’re going to have product roadmaps for all the different products we’re creating, to see how they intertwine.” 

Usually a new product requires a new roadmap. But not always. “I’m playing a little game with this other group inside of Nokia,” Drake explained. “What they’re looking for is really just features of our current product, only accelerated. We already have them on our product roadmap for delivery in Q4 to Q1 of next year. By our doing this project for them, 90 percent of it is just acceleration. So I’m still not sure if I’m even going to need create another roadmap.” 

But it may not matter. Regardless of whether the product is conceived as a breakthrough, an improvement, or simply a cosmetic update, nothing at Nokia, finds its way to market without a roadmap. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Longini is the Product Strategy Network's Managing Editor for Inside Product Strategy™. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it