4. “Road maps show people how they can travel from one
place to another“
– dictionary.com
“A company roadmap is a document to capture and
quickly convey its big-picture plans and objectives “
– prodplan.com
4
5. “a document to capture and quickly convey a team’s
big-picture goals, specific objectives and their
imagined path to sucess”
– me
5
7. 7
The first purpose is because the management of a
company wants to make sure that the teams are
working on the highest value items first, relevant to the
company strategy.
The second purpose is because businesses may have
date-based commitments. The roadmap is where they see
and track those commitments.
Source: Adapted from SVPG.com
9. They’re a waste
of time.
I did say that. Sorry.
Here’s a few reasons why.
9
10. 1 - The intended goals / purpose are not stated, or are not clear.
10
Source: Not sure, found it on Pintrest
11. 2 - They are often far too specific
11
Source: Receptive.io
12. 3 - They do not account for “time to value”. Iteration is almost always
needed to realise the full value of a new product/feature.
12
Source: Dave Bignell product fail
13. 4 - Detail on a roadmap can lead teams to auto-pilot. They build what they put down
on paper often months in advance.
13
Source: Aha.com – a company selling Product Management software……….
14. 5 -
Roadmaps are often created in Excel /
PowerPoint and then shared via email. As
soon as anything changes, the distributed
copies are out of date. Keeping
stakeholders up to date can drain a lot of
time this way.
14
15. 15
"Many untested hypotheses, based on assumptions, plotted in
an uncertain future, baring no
resemblance to reality"
- Jared Spool, uie.com
17. 17
Biggie’s top tips for better
roadmaps
1. Your roadmap should show where you intend to take your
product and what problems you will try to solve to get there.
2. Choose the granularity relative to the timeframe and
audience.
3. Avoid specificity. Focus on problems, JTBD or objectives as
descriptors of intent. The future is unknowable
4. Keep the format simple, centralised and accessible; minimise
your effort to produce.
5. Always remember that the roadmap works for you! It is a tool,
it is not your job.
20. New Product Roadmap – as at 19th February 2018
Priority Theme
Channel /
Product
Objective Key Results Current initiatives (and potential next items)
Have a Real
Relationship
with Every
Candidate
Attract all
candidates
SEO
To dramatically improve candidate’s
to discover relevant SEEK job ads via SEO
• 2.6M SERP SEO visits mthly • Company SERP scale
• Indexing pages for Company Reviews
Best search
and match
experience
Discover To increase candidates onsite
with relevant job ads
To increase candidate engagement in
events which are known to drive deeper
loyalty (app installs, jobmail sign up)
• 0.5 interest connections per visit
• 0.13 Loyalty events per visit
• Interest signals (C2C) scale
• SEEK Learning on site optimisations
• Tealium integration
Hobbit To increase the relevant jobs shown to
candidates
• TBC • TBC
Job search TBC • Development of Experimentation Framework
• Refactoring search endpoint
Apps
(iOS & Android)
To increase candidate engagement with
apps
• 13.3m Visits to the app mthly
• 0.05 IOS and 0.1 for android Loyalty events per visit
• 0.5 IOS and 0.45 Android Interest signals per visit
• Push opt-in Optimisation on IOS
• Profile onboarding optimisation
• Sign in optimisations to address loyalty KR
• Android Deep Linking
• Follow company on IOS
Notifications To increase candidate engagement with
SEEK’s proactive communication
• 4.5m Visits from notifications
• 35% of Profiles updated their last role title in 6mths
• New recommendations push notifications
• WRU Optimisation (daily send)
Alexa* To enable candidates to easily browse key
SEEK content on Alexa
• Ongoing monitoring
Juicy
(Data Depth
To significantly increase the amount of
value information we know about
candidates to help them stand out
• Experiment goal: >5% of logged-in candidates exposed will update their • Experiment on SERP to nudge for salary and RTW to test
collection scale
Confidential
Source: SEEK
Notas do Editor
I hated roadmaps.
In a way, I still so, but im getting over it.
So, Nic thought it’d be a good idea for me to do a talk.
Bit of therapy.
My journey started when I joined SEEK and had to start producing RM’s.
Associate, no idea what I was doing, tried and failed loads.
So – I started off on a typical journey of understanding.
Road maps – really old. Like 2000 years old.
More recently, used with the advent of cars.
This one from late 19th century and the earliest time I could find the phrase road map used on something.
Couldn’t find the first business to use it in the sense we recognise it today.
Two slightly different definitions for two slightly different words
I feel as though the truth lies somewhere in between these definitions
So we know what a roadmap is and where I think it came from….
But what isn’t clear to me, is why they’re used so much by so many.
Dug around a few of my favourite thinkers to see what they had to say.
Marty Cagan – doesn’t love roadmaps. But what he does say is they generally all serve two purposes.
They’re popular
They’ve been around for literally a thousand years.
They serve a couple of pretty important purposes…
…but I still hated them.
They sucked, wasted way too much of my time and didn’t seem to add any value to anything.
Not my team, not me.
I made this mess….
So whilst allowing conformation bias confirm what I wanted to be true…..
If these things are reasons roadmaps suck, maybe I could just not do those things, and roadmaps would suck less.
….SO ive put some tips together for anyone else that might be struggling with “the point”of roadmaps.
Less than 2 weeks – ok, put down the colour of the thing youre building.
>4 weeks – sort of ok, but still some wiggle room to change if we learn something new
3 months– getting pretty vague here in terms of time estimates and specifications on what ‘might’ end up in the system. These should be open to change and impacts from near term work.
6 months – fantasy land if you think you know what you’ll be doing in 6 months.
12 months – please…..