The following blog post summarizes the fifth chapter of the Product Roadmaps Relaunched book by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors. Published on November 28, 2017. The fifth chapter is reviewed and summarized using my best judgment of the most essential information.
It is easy to fall into the trap of focusing your roadmap on solutions or features. But, as previously explained in this book, you’re better off focusing on customer needs or themes. This is because focusing on customer needs provides you with two things. Firstly, the confidence that you truly understand your customer and their needs. Secondly, your product will deliver value to your customers. Therefore, as tempting as it is to begin, leave your roadmap at a high level; list what problem you should solve instead of how you will solve it. Lastly, it is also important to address customer needs because solutions or feature feasibility may change with time (capacity of your team, changes in technology, or budget,…). In contrast, the customers’ needs very rarely will change.
You must ensure that your product roadmap communicates the customer needs being addressed and how those will provide value to your customers. Therefore, when building your roadmap, it is essential to reconsider all the problems or needs your customers are facing and decide which of these offer the optimal balance and solution to the problem while still providing enough value to your customers. This ensures that everything you build will be helpful and valuable to your customers.
Themes and Subthemes
Since themes and subthemes were already reviewed in chapter ___, we won’t go in-depth about them. But read the summary of chapter ___, if you haven’t already or need a refresher.
In short, themes and subthemes allow us to group important problems, issues, features or requirements that your product must address. For example, a theme could be improving checkout. Subthemes could include: adding a one-click checkout, adding PayPal, and adding an option to save credit card information. Then, from these themes and subthemes, features can be derived from them.
Uncovering Themes and Subthemes
Unless experienced in doing so, it can be challenging to translate problems, issues, features or requirements into themes and subthemes. Therefore, user journey and experience maps can help uncover themes and subthemes. And opportunity-solution trees can help organize the themes and subthemes discovered.
Uncovering System Needs Too
It is important to mention that your roadmap should not solely focus on customer needs but should also outline your product’s system or infrastructural needs. Even though these may not always directly benefit or provide value to your customer, it is essential to include them on your roadmap. Because the system’s needs are equally as important as the customer’s. Suppose your system is not working as efficiently as it needs to be; it can and will hurt your customers’ experience with your product.
User Journey Maps and Experience Maps
It is helpful to plot the user journey and experience using user journey and experience maps to better identify and connect with customer needs. And to see the customers’ experience from their eyes.
A user journey map is a graphic outlining each step the user will take to solve their problem; it is similar but not synonymous with process flows. It usually takes a linear format, showing one consecutive step after the other. Your user journey map can also delineate a grouping of steps toward a goal in the user’s journey with the product.
An experience map, on the other hand, is slightly more involved. It is typically used to understand the interactivity across customer types or phases of a single customer’s journey. It is also typically shown linearly with groupings delineating different journey stages. Actions taken at each step are described deeper to better relate to the customer.
Even if you (or someone else within your organization) have previously created one of these maps, you should consider revisiting and revising them promptly to ensure they are still accurate and up to date. You can also cross-reference these maps when adjusting customer or internal feature requests to understand better where they fit in the user journey and if it is the best solution to the problem encountered.
Opportunity-Solution Trees
Similarly, opportunity-solution trees can gather all the ideas and needs generated from user journey and experience mapping and organize them into one clear and concise graphic.
The idea behind an opportunity-solution tree is that the top of the tree begins with an objective or an outcome (such as increasing revenue or reducing churn). The following layer of branches in the tree contains themes or opportunities, followed by solutions or features related to that theme. The last layer of branches contains experiments that can be conducted on those features to better understand which feature is the best solution.