Why Product Roadmaps Matter More Than Releasing Everything At Once
How can you maximize your potential for true business agility?
There is a misconception that software is a static product. You build it, you ship it and then you call it a day… or, maybe a week, or a few months — or, for a lot of businesses, it becomes a project that ends up ballooning out beyond the year, potentially blowing the budget before it ever gets released. With this approach, there is no true customer/market validation, only speculation, even with controlled focus groups, which often respond differently from reality.
Having a product roadmap and releasing features in iterations can be better for the business, in the short and long term. This is because data and an accurate gauge of market responses can help determine if your software development is going down the correct path.
Why Agile is so Popular Among Startups
Agile startups are disrupting almost every industry due to their ability to ship ideas quickly and respond to the change. It is a completely different organizational approach and runs on the mentality of getting true customer feedback as quickly as possible.
In order to attend to this need, the software development process is required to deliver at the same speed.
The issue that many businesses, especially established structures face, is that they cannot properly enforce such a high velocity of idea implementation and turnover. However, driving the business at such a speed can also result in haphazardous software being delivered.
A product roadmap can help solve these two major issues — regardless of organization structures. This is because it gives the business direction without being completely prescriptive. It lets developers understand where the software is expected to go and code accordingly to it.
Product Road Maps Should Be Part of Your Strategy
Your business strategies are the things that are expected to help materialize your vision. Having a fluid product road map is a method that keeps your software development releases focused on the targets.
When you incrementally release a product feature, you gain more perspective and qualitative data based on customers’ responses. It lets you prove your hypothesis against real reactions, rather than speculation. When your business has data, it gives you true insight into the reality of your markets and how your potential competitors are performing.
A product road map is a series of milestone features that make up the completed vision of what the software looks like. However, unlike a completely shipped software, the undeveloped parts can be moved around, added to or discarded based on the responses of previous features.
How Product Roadmaps Can Apply to Any Business
When you release software in a big bang approach, it increases your risk of product failure. There a difference between creating software with the core functionality vs. something that encompasses everything on the agenda.
When you have a core release that is developed, business and software related issues tend to be smaller and much more manageable in size and quantity. As features get released against the product roadmap, the incompleteness of the software is only conceptual.
What customers actually get is a working product with consistent improvements and upgrades against their personal experiences. This can help increase a positive long term relationship with your users. On the business side, your conceptually incompleted software is delivered in parts, with each part being a stand-alone product or supplementary to a proven revenue-generating concept.
Your returns on the investment are incrementally compounding on software robustness, ability to respond to change, the ability to acid test for potential cash cows, and a shorter feedback loop.
Final Thoughts
A big bang approach is often a riskier method than an agile release cycle. When things fail to deliver the expected results, the sunk cost of product development is limited to that particular feature release.
Having a product roadmap and releasing products and features against it pushes your organization and work methodologies closer to an agile approach. The product roadmap acts as a strategic supplement that is able to change in accordance with market demands.
When you release everything at once, it puts your business in a potentially precarious financial situation where failure is not usually a survival option. This is often caused by software that runs overtime or finds itself stuck in a roadblock.
The product roadmap gives you clarity but isn’t as binding as releasing a large piece of software with multiple parts and features to it. Releasing in cycles gives your business and the software less surface area for failure. It also lets you prove which ideas and features will positively impact the metric it aims to achieve.
So be sure to have a product roadmap and de-risk your business by shortening the feedback loop. You can never truly know which idea will take off until you test it in the market.
Co-authored by:
Dave Wesley ~ President, SRG
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Aphinya Dechalert ~ Marketing Communications, SRG
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