How to Link Product Strategy to Roadmap

Welcome to the 🔒Strategic Product Execution series, helping product leaders efficiently plan and convert strategy into action and outcomes: one post at a time.

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So you’ve got your product strategy articulated and aligned, great work! I knew I could count on you.

However your stakeholders are asking you what this means in execution and what to expect in deliverables. What do you do?

In our post on the Key Elements of Product Strategy, we identified that Product Strategy is the combination of Context, Choices, and Competencies:

The Key Elements of Product Strategy

• CONTEXT — the compelling story of the significant challenges the company faces, its overarching vision and mission, and its alignment with the broader goals and metrics of the company.

• CHOICES — the deliberate decisions regarding the specific market, customer segments, unique differentiators and business activities it chooses to invest in, and the non-negotiable foundational principles that guide the product development process.

• COMPETENCIES — the inherent capacity, strengths, skills that a company possesses, encompassing both tangible and intangible assets, required to achieve its goals.

The next step now is to clearly lay out the steps you will take to achieve the outcomes and objectives articulated in the strategy. To do this, we need to set some Strategic Themes. Let’s take a look at some case studies of these themes to get some inspiration, before diving into how we can make our own.

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Roadmaps Defined

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

Unfortunately many stakeholders expect a list of deliverables with due dates attached, aiming to gain commitment and certainty of results. In Product, we usually shy away from this as priorities change all the time, and new developments contain uncertainty that is hard to estimate and foresee during planning.

From my previous post on Roadmaps, I see there are three main reasons why we have a roadmap. These are:

1. To set a Strategic artefact or statement of intent.

2. To depict our short vs long term goals.

3. To describe the desired set of steps to achieve both short and long-term goals.

To articulate the desired set of steps, I advocate using Strategic Themes, which span multiple opportunities that drive your business objectives in your strategy.

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Strategic Themes Defined