How do Startups establish a Product Roadmap?

Startups just need to get $h*! out there, right?

That kind of works in the first few months and whilst you can still count the team size on the fingers of one hand. However, as the team grows it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a shared vision and ensure you are all pulling in the same direction. It is also necessary to communicate with external stakeholders like investors and customers to convince them that you have a viable product vision and delivery plan.

Established companies tackle this problem with large teams using tools like visions, strategies, enterprise architectures and product roadmaps. Does this work for startups who need to work fast, be agile, and are short of time, funds and other resources?

The answer is YES, as long as you take a pragmatic approach tailored to a startup environment. To those of you who are still sceptical and are shouting ‘MVP’ (minimum viable product, a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development ) and ‘Fail fast, Fail often’, these are not conflicting concepts and I would add to the list ‘Think long term, Act short term’ i.e. make long term plans and goals, but take small steps to get there.

Outlined below are some steps to help you get started. Note that what is being proposed is not a detailed project delivery plan with hard deadlines and it will not survive the first contact with reality. It is a roadmap that will evolve and adapt as you progress.

If you are worrying about which fancy tool set to use for your roadmap, then don’t! Choose your favourite personal productivity tool, a spreadsheet, Trello, or a whiteboard, anything that will allow you to change and move things around easily and work collaboratively. You can make it graphical and look pretty later.

How?

1. Establish the Product Vision

Establish the vision for your product, this could be a sentence, a paragraph or a white paper but the key point is to gain consensus. It may be harder than you think.

2. Breakdown the Product Vision into the services that will deliver it and determine how they will evolve

Consider the product from the customers point of view, who are your customers (there may be different types), what services are you offering them, what benefit do they gain from your service. It is unlikely that your end vision services can be delivered in one go, so break them down to feature level and maybe group into sub services so you can show the service evolution.

3. Assemble the Product Roadmap

Now determine in what order you will deliver your services, subservices and functions using the concept of minimum viable product and taking into account any technical or business constraints (hint: this may not be in the same order as the parts of your product that most interest you). Allocate the service/feature building blocks to a timeline broken into monthly or quarterly buckets depending on the length of the project (remember this isn’t a detailed project plan so be brave and expect it to change).

Congratulations! You now have a high level Product Roadmap