Three frameworks to craft your product roadmap

BCG Growth-Share Matrix

Crafting a vision for your product(s) is one of the harder parts of a Product Manager's job - particularly as you get to the Director / VP level.  This is truly the culmination of your grasp of market dynamics, competitive landscape, customer expectations and your innate capabilities as an organization.  How do you start?  How do you ensure you are balancing your roadmap between KTLO (Keep The Lights On) and Shiny Objects? Is your product portfolio all Cash Cow or does it have some Question Marks and Stars?

In this post, I want to walk through three frameworks for creating your product roadmap / vision.  Depending on where you are in your organization's product lifecycle, one might work better for you vs. another.

1. Horizon Planning: This is a framework from Pragmatic Marketing that helps plan your portfolio around three key areas:

1. Extend & defend your core: Projects in this area are focused on maintaining & fixing your core features and products.  In other words, making sure the base experiences your customers expect of you are delivered flawlessly. 
2. Profitably scale emerging offerings: Projects in this area are focused on optimization.  How do you improve conversion rates? How do you simplify the Ux / Cx to drive more adoption?
3. Develop viable concepts: These are the forward looking products that could be riskier in nature but position your business to tap into new markets / areas.

Why do I like this framework?  Because if you have items in all three areas, at the end of the day, you will end up with a balanced product portfolio.  It will also ensure that you are not spending disproportionate amounts of time and money on future concepts that may or may not scale and at the same time, you are not only focused on your core, a habit that will most likely lead to disruption.

You can find an in-depth view of this framework along with a webinar here.

2. GLE (pronounced glee): I recently came across a video where Gib Biddle talks about how to run a quarterly product strategy meeting.  Gib is the former VP of Product at Netflix and one of the frameworks he uses is a three phased approach.

1. G = Get Big On.  What do you already do that you want to do even more of and how?
2. L = Lead.  Is there a new / emerging category that you want to become the market leader in?
3. E = Expand.  What adjacencies do you want to expand to? 

Gib talked about planning these three in five year chunks which can be awesome for Long Range Planning but you can also use this for your 3 year roadmap.

3. PLIS + Themes: This is a slightly different take on the quarterly roadmap framework we used at Walgreens when I worked there.

1. P = Plan.  Use this category for all of the strategic planning you will do to inform future work.
2. L = Launch.  Use this category for new features / products you will launch.
3. I = Improve.  Use this category for the improvements you will make to existing products.
4. S = Sustain.  Use this category for maintainence items that you do each quarter / year.

This is a bottoms up approach to product planning.  You can start with a list of things you want to do, use the categorization above to ensure your work is appropriately balanced and then try to categorize the items into key themes.  Themes are helpful when presenting your roadmap to senior leadership and are a great exercise when you are moving from a tactical role to a strategic / leadership role.

If there are other frameworks that you use and would recommend, I would love to hear from you.

Happy Planning!