Creating an ever evolving roadmap when we learn more
In my first story ‘User Experience is …’ I promised that …
"over the course of a few stories, I’ll try and cover a few of the sciences we draw upon in our art as a creative community to create engaging experiences."
Looking at the different hats, mindsets and tools user experience designers use, it’s when we’re asked to work with teams that affects what tools and techniques we use to provide the clarity needed to start building a solution.
I’ve often worked with Product Owners/Managers from the start of products to understand what problem we are trying to solve. This often results in the need for a roadmap, in order to share and articulate what problem we are solving and what value we are adding.
Creating an ever evolving roadmap when we learn more
During defining a lean canvas, when discovering a problem statement; you’ll no doubt explore hypothesises to test and learn from, how the business might benefit from the products creation and how you’re able to measure those benefits using key signals and metrics for success.
But how at this stage do you fold in user problems and feedback? There’s a few ways to do this:
"Putting it all together, by creating a lean objective-based product roadmap"
Focussing on outcomes not features
Traditional roadmaps may plot features on a timeline, to provide a time scale of when things will be delivered. But there’s no mention of why we need those features or what value they provide. Sound familiar right, yep very waterfall.
So instead of focussing on just the outputs, outcomes are also included. This may include key features, reframed as objectives, but also includes the learning initiatives along the way that are needed to be completed to test hypothesis and better understand our product or the benefit it can deliver.
Measuring the impact of initiatives
Product objectives are the outcomes that show you’re delivering against the product strategy. In order to achieve an objective, you might change the product or experience, these are your initiatives. You can use this to build the story behind your product to communicate it’s vision and the progress you’re making.
You might not always know if initiatives will help achieve the objective, so it’s better to frame them as problem statements. The steps to take complete the initiative become the experiment. The experiments will aim to test your hypotheses, so that certain changes to the product or experience will solve customer problems. This will provide the impact on signals or metrics for success. Which will indicate progress towards your objective and release some business benefit.
As experiments are run and feedback gathered the products ‘pulse, it’s metrics will be impacted. Understanding how the product’s pulse or metrics change, allows you to adjust the roadmap to better achieve the objectives and sense check them and the overall strategy to see if it’s still working.
A lean roadmap acts as a prototype for the product strategy. Constantly being tested, reviewed and feedback added to it, so that it evolves and stays current and effective.
It’s important to start solving problems as soon as possible, and ensure you don’t waste time building things that aren’t useful, by using smaller initiatives that are part of a bigger problems. This limits the cost of delay and starts the product building value. Which is always useful when you’re sharing the story of your product and you continuing to get investment. This also builds trust that you’re on the right track and that the problems are worth pursuing. So iteration and measurement of outcomes are the way to confirm that you’re doing the right thing. A constant dip feed of results and insight will also allow you to only have to course correct slightly, if needed, so that again there’s no surprises.
Initiatives can be setup and then be left to run, while others are then worked on. This allows a constant momentum and being able to move forward on several different fronts, using different members of the team. It’s not all about design and engineering, but gathering useful insights. So some times things will need to be designed and built but not all the time. These could be design, research and testing initiatives in the form of user tests, interviews, surveys, multi variant testing and user research to avoid falling down a rabbit hole and neglecting the overall product strategy and vision. Delivering a strategy and realising a product’s vision is the culmination of delivering multiple objectives together, not just single objectives.
Adding learning initiatives, as well as objectives and strategies to your product roadmap, will allow you to constantly review progress, realise value, reaffirm the vision of the product and add feedback and insights to the product’s objectives.
You’ll be able to discover and recover from problem statements, as well as increase learning and develop clarity and certainty as your product develops further.
After looking at a range of ways we work with stakeholders, product and engineering teams. I can see how useful different facilitation methods are to develop different ways of thinking and enabling different mindsets within the teams we work with. So next up I’m going to look at getting everyone in the same physical (or virtual) space, at the same time and with the right mindset to work together towards a shared outcome, that’s good facilitation!
Originally written as part of the ‘User Experience is …’ series for UX Collective.