[5 minutes reading]
Product Strategy defines what your product should achieve and how that supports the organization, and is brought to life through the product roadmap.
A Product Roadmap is a high-level summary that shows the vision and direction of your product offering over time. It is a key strategic document as well as a plan for executing the product strategy.
Clearly, both are key for a product-focused company, and many books, posts, videos, courses talk about it. Here I will just share with you a few key tips that I learned from my professional experience in the software and automation business. I wish these tips will help you to get a successful business.
Tip 1. Product strategy and roadmap should support market needs. It is sooooo common, especially for small companies, to focus on what they want to do and not what the market wants to use and pay for! This is a very common mistake and might put at risk the survival of the company. Recommendation: Base your decisions on market analysis, conversations with customers, demo prototypes, proofs of concept, or even sales experts' gut feelings, but consider the customer needs, not your desires.
Tip 2. Your customer is your mate. Many companies just see customers as the people or companies that pay for their products, but customers should be seen as colleagues, mates to ensure we build a win-win relationship with them. Otherwise, customers will come and go, because they will see you in the same way, as the supplier of something they just need at that moment. Recommendation: Work with the customers in the definition of your roadmap, not just getting their inputs, but involving them in an evolving adventure to have products that will help them as well as you.
Tip 3. A roadmap might be flexible, but not too much. A Roadmap is a guide for the whole company. It might be used by the sales department to advance future products to the customers, or by the development team to plan resources, or by the finance department to prepare treasury plans. Some companies tend to adapt the roadmap depending on the commercial opportunities and customers. Roadmaps should have some flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, but too many changes produce confusion in the organization. Recommendation: Define a Roadmap. September is an adequate moment, so resources could be allocated for the new year, although any time of the year is good if you do not have one. Once you have that roadmap, evaluate the risks and impact of any change you might want to do before applying it.
Tip 4. Pay attention to the cost of building a product. Many companies consider that a product costs what it is needed to make it in terms of time and resources, but it is not. There are many other costs related to a product that should be considered from the beginning, like integration testing phases, standardization and industrialization, proofs-of-concept (POC) with customers, documentation, rules compliance (like CE, etc), demos, internal training, and something that many times is not considered: Maintenance. Because there might be bugs, improvements, design mistakes that will need time and resources, especially in a new product launch. Recommendation: Plan considering all the phases of a product life cycle, not only on the few first ones.
Tip 5. Give a good product or you will lose the good customer. Quality, quality, quality. This should be a must in any product and many times is not so. The rush to have a product in the market means many times reductions in the validation and industrialization phases. Recommendation: I know it is a trade-off not always easy to solve. The key is to take a strategic decision, planning in advance the time and resources to ensure the product is good enough for the market. Be agile in the execution and reduce functionalities if needed, but not reliability.
As you could understand, product strategy and product roadmap are very serious strategic decisions. Good practices will not always ensure success, but bad practices will definitely make the company fail. So let’s pay full attention to do it well.
I recommend reading this post: What is the key to get a successful product?
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