Product Roadmaps - Transforming Strategy into Growth
Premise – (1) Strategy by itself only defines the destination and the basic means of travel – there is no growth engine without value added products and services since they provide the means to capture market share and earn superior margins. (2) Given this situation, organizations need a mechanism to provide the substance behind the strategy. (3) The development of Product Roadmaps provides such a mechanism.
Note that I said the development of the roadmap provides this linkage between strategy and product development. This is because the Product Roadmap (the end result of the road mapping process) is nothing more than a graphical tool to visualize a time phased sequence of projects that represent marketing’s best guess on what is needed to expand market share and profitability. Although the roadmap is rather simple, the roadmap development process involves a significant amount of analysis and decision making.
The analysis steps include a thorough understanding of market trends; in-depth knowledge of customer needs and business constraints; analysis of competitive offerings; and assessment of internal development capabilities. This information creates a foundation for the development of new product concepts. These concepts don’t appear from the analysis alone but evolve over time as product and customer experience is coupled with the intuition and innovation of strong product managers and creative technologists.
The decision making kicks in as these new product and service candidates are evaluated and refined – searching for a combination of features that provide unique value to customers at an appropriate price point. This tradeoff of product features versus cost, risk and lead-time results in a condensed project list. Inevitably, there are more concepts for new products, feature enhancements and cost reduction than there are resources to develop these into viable products. As a result, the list of product candidates must be rank ordered based on their potential impact on market share / margin, timing versus market opportunity and resource utilization. Projects near the top of this list and within overall resource constraints are selected for the roadmap and subsequent funding.
Given this sequence, the roadmap becomes the means to an end – the product line plan to implement the business unit strategy – and its primary value is not in the graphical output but in the analysis and decision making embedded in the road mapping process. For additional details, see my white paper at:
