Staying on the Right Road

I happened upon this post on 37 Signals arguing against product roadmaps:

While I don’t agree with the notion that we don’t need product roadmaps, it does point out some careful slippery slopes you must be careful of when approaching roadmaps:

• Selling things that aren’t in the product yet.  It is tempting to sell things that the product doesn’t do yet, especially once you set a delivery date.  The reason you can’t do this is simple:  Just because you say it will be there does not mean that you will meet the customer’s requirements.  The customer you are sales-pitching may envision an Alerts tab to do a whole litany of functionality that you yourself never thought of.  You might meet their exact expectations, of course, but without gathering detailed requirements, you won’t know until later.  You are setting yourself up to disappoint the client.  Offering that you have something like their requirement in your roadmap, and you’d like their input is a possible compromise- now you’re including the customer in your community, and that has value, in addition to learning new customer needs.  You still run the risk that their requirements will be totally askew of all your other customers’ requirements, and then what do you do?
• You cannot plop things into your roadmap without defining some meaning to them.  “Message tab” is easy to put on the map, but unless you list at least at a high level what that means and what the specific deliverables are, you’re just doing point number one to yourself.  You have to get some scope around the stated goal before you can aim at completing it by a given date- it’s that simple.

Roadmapping is an excellent idea; the value of it is to allow you to develop a well-thought out, living plan to add value to the product that will help you grow it towards targeted, specific markets.  Without it, you’ll run into “what’s hot today” syndrome, that is, adding the most recently hot features to your product rather than sticking to the strategy- and you really must have a strategy.  Like all tools, a roadmap can be used for good or ill- be careful how you choose to use it.

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