Story Roadmaps—Product Vision That Paints a Picture
A product roadmap tells the story of what you’re going to do with your product. It is a manifestation of the vision of what you’re trying to do and why. It is also the framework within which the detailed things you do to bring your product to life happen.
As an artifact that is used for many purposes—most of which rely on communication—the product roadmap needs to be an effective tool for communication. One way to clarify communication with stakeholders is to tell the (user) stories of what the product will enable users to do. For those stakeholders, you need to provide the context in which those stories are relevant.
Vin D’Amico’s article on Executive Brief presents a framework for hierarchically organizing these stories. This is basically the same concept as the "objective chain"—a key element of the business objectives model developed by Seilevel.
Kristofer Layon has a good article at A List Apart about product management for the web, in which he talks about the importance of user stories as well, including useful and practical advice for any product manager building a roadmap—not just for web products and services.
There are a couple of reasons why it is important that, however you structure your product roadmap, you are not sharing a schedule of when each feature will be released.
First, in order to be market driven, tell your teams what users need, not how to do their jobs. Let them—in particular, a user experience designer—determine what the correct interactions and features are to enable your target users to solve the problems your product is designed to solve.
Second, stakeholders are not experts in user experience or software development, and they should be carefully informed that they should not be specifying features. Even when the stakeholders happen to have been experts, you can ask the question (well, inside your head, anyway) “who’s doing your job while you’re busy doing this one?”
While you can’t actually ask the question that way (more than once), you can point out that, as a team including the stakeholders, your success depends on having relationships based on trust. The implementation team trusts the stakeholders to form the right vision, the product manager to figure out how the product contributes to achieving that vision, and the implementation team to create the product that makes the expected contributions.
Keeping the language of the roadmap at the capability level—and through the telling of stories—helps the team to be effective and reinforces the aspects of trust and delegation that contribute to success.
