Member-only story
Too Much Product Roadmap May Kill You — Here’s a Better Strategy
Don’t be a feature factory. Get empowered instead
“I promise you that at least half of the ideas on your roadmap are not going to deliver what you hope. (By the way, the really good teams assume that at least three quarters of the ideas won’t perform like they hope.)” — Marty Cagan, Inspired (2nd Edition), p.19
Marty Cagan’s critique of traditional software product roadmaps is counterintuitive for many. In order to make sense of it, we need to understand Cagan’s philosophy of product management. Cagan’s approach addresses a big question facing the software industry: the feature factory problem.
Cagan highlights the differences between how tech’s most innovative companies operate vs. the operating model that leads many companies to become feature factories (churning out features without knowing if they work for customers). Let’s try to understand the essence of this difference and what is involved in making the change.
From Feature Factory to Empowered Product Team
“You can release all the features you want, but if it doesn’t solve the underlying business problem, you haven’t really solved anything.” — Marty Cagan, Inspired (2nd ed.), p.137
Deciding what to build is the riskiest part of software. We get carried away with our ideas and overlook how risky they are. Roadmaps amplify this risk. We try to say upfront what we’re going to do before we know if the ideas will work.
We know we’re meant to be harnessing regular user feedback to get the best out of Agile, and yet the need to plan drives us to say what we’ll build with minimal feedback. We tell ourselves that’s OK in various ways:
- Excuse 1: The ideas came from users in the first place (unfortunately, users also have bad ideas or express them badly).
- Excuse 2: We’ll get the feedback later (by which time we’ve spent the effort and moved on to something else).
- Excuse 3: We follow methodology X (but are we really using it in a way that helps us achieve…
