Skip to main content

Constructing the Product Roadmap

When I started out in the team, I was tasked out with coming out with a plan so that we can demonstrate the product with real data.

The idea was to demonstrate it to our prospect with their own data and win them over. However, when I started working, I found out that what we lacked was not a plan but a vision.

I quickly put together a one day workshop with our team and our product owner. When we started talking, we talked about several things and figured out that we needed a plan of various proportions.

We needed a plan that could help us one the following:
  • Provide a focus for the long term with near term focus on just one thing
  • Help us talk to prospects on what we are going to do
  • Help us decide on when we would need to focus shift on which function - Engineering , sales etc

We also did a quick “Product in a box” exercise so that all of us in a team can practice and imbibe the elevator pitch. We needed this since we had to do this pitch at several levels - Internal as well as to prospects.

This is how the “Product in a box” looks like.


This is how the product roadmap looks like.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Counterfiet goods and the fledgeling e-commerce market places

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Organizational growth and turn over

Organisations need to grow. However, they should not grow for the sake of growth. That would be a virus. Orgs should not grow to survive as well. Orgs should grow with a purpose.
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...
Post a Comment
Read more