Roadmap creation and prioritization - holistic and inclusive product roadmaps.

Tanvi Shah at UXDX Community: How to Balance Focus, Inclusivity, and Brand Magic. Video: https://youtu.be/hWDR-oXydp8

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and how to use this toolbox

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, so happy to be here and to be part of this journey of being able to build good software for all companies. I wanted to do a quick introduction of myself before we move forward, and where I come from. I am a product manager. I've been a product manager for the last 10 years. I was an engineer before that, I actually have a Master's in electrical engineering, worked as an engineer for two years at NetApp. I wrote really low-level C code, firmware level code, and then I basically moved from NetApp to eBay as a product manager.

[00:00:38] I also worked at a number of startups in between, and then I've worked at Zillow, and then also recently I am at Upwork. I have focused mainly on B2C companies for the longest period of time, so I'm very well versed with product roadmaps that impact consumers. In my free time I also dance. I am an Indian classical dancer and I'm learning two different types of dance forms. I also read a lot of books, and I also have a six-year-old son who keeps me really busy. So that's a little bit about me.

[00:01:14] Moving on, I want to give a few things for all of you to remember as we go through this. One, whatever I'm sharing is a toolbox. You use it as you see fit and you tweak it as you see necessary. You don't need to use everything that I give at the same time. It's not the hard truth, you can change it according to your needs whenever you're thinking about roadmaps.

[00:01:42] Also, we are always very focused on this one small thing that we are building, but I want you all to zoom out, think about the big picture. Why are we building roadmaps? What is the company benefiting? Who are the consumers, how is it benefiting? It's really important to keep this big picture in mind as we continue to build better roadmaps. And my suggestion is, based on what I say today, you can go explore other roadmaps in the industry, talk to a few people about their roadmaps, how do they do these roadmaps. You will learn other techniques that you can add to this toolbox as you keep going.

Roadmaps start with a good product strategy

[00:02:25] All right, with that I want to quickly talk about how product roadmaps come into play. Product roadmaps always start with a good product strategy. Strategy is generally set at the company level, at a team level, or an org level, and then it trickles down. This strategy is important for you to be able to ladder up your roadmaps.

[00:02:51] Let's look at a quick good product strategy in the market that we have. So I wanted to talk about Zillow. I worked at Zillow. Zillow is a company in the US that allows people to buy homes, so they are a digital billboard of houses for sale, and also the ability to rent homes. Their strategy is really interesting and I wanted to quickly take a few minutes to talk about their strategy and then how roadmaps ladder up to these strategies, and we'll go deeper into it today.

[00:03:27] So Zillow started off as a digital billboard company. Earlier there were only billboards or Yellow Pages where people had to look up which properties were for sale, and what Zillow did is they made it all digital. They brought all of these property listings onto a digital platform. That's how it started off. Then they realized that as people go through the process of buying a home, they are wondering what is the amount that they need to pay or bid for. In the US, generally we bid on homes. There are multiple people who are bidding on the home, and when we are bidding we have to give an amount that works well for the seller.

[00:04:13] And that's where something called a Zestimate came up. Zillow came up with the idea of the Zestimate, which basically is the estimated price of your house based on a number of factors. They have an in-house algorithm that creates the Zestimate, and a lot of companies actually have their own algorithms. Competitors of Zillow have their own algorithms that are used. Zestimate is a very important number that all buyers and sellers use on their platforms, when they're selling and buying homes. So that was another product strategy from Zillow.

[00:04:48] After that they realized that okay, there is this whole for-sale market of homes, but what about rentals? Rentals is another market that we want to expand into. And so they started listing rental homes on the platform, so people can rent from Zillow. You can also rent your house using Zillow, if you decide to rent your house out and buy another house, then you can also do that through Zillow. So they've opened that ecosystem up. And lastly they now have a partnership with Opendoor, which allows them to buy and sell homes using Opendoor.

[00:05:30] At the end of the day, if you look at the product strategy here, it started off with something as simple as, I want to list all the homes that are available for sale, but then it has become an end-to-end strategy where they've decided to be part of the whole ecosystem of buying a home, selling a home, finding a home, renting a home out. And that's a really good product strategy. It's necessary to remember the strategy at whichever company you are at, because all roadmaps lead into a strategy.

The building blocks of a roadmap, and the missing pieces

[00:06:05] With that, let's talk about roadmaps now. What are the basic pieces of a roadmap? There are a few pieces that I'm going to talk about, but today's focus is about inclusive roadmaps, and inclusive roadmaps come up when we think about what are the missing pieces of the roadmap, and that's what we'll focus on today.

[00:06:30] Now with this, let's talk about the three different steps that we have for roadmaps. Oh, I did want to show, there are a lot of companies that have their own public roadmaps, and these roadmaps are showcased here. GitHub is a company that has a public roadmap, and you can go and look at these roadmaps. Not all of these roadmaps will make sense, but it helps us understand how they think about the roadmaps, what are the different kinds of business lines that they're thinking about. In this case it's billing, enterprise, identity. So these are the most important pieces for such a company, and in that space. So if you're a startup that's thinking about building a roadmap and needs some inspiration, definitely look at these roadmaps. I just Googled for public roadmaps and this is what showed up.

[00:07:23] All right, what are the building blocks of a product roadmap? There are three building blocks of a product roadmap. The first one is, who are the customers? We have to always identify who are the customers, and there are a number of ways to do it, we'll talk about a few things there. The second one, once you've understood who the customers are, we get into the second piece of, what problems do they have, what kind of issues do they have? And then the last one is, we've identified the problems, now we have to determine the solutions to solve their problems. Those are the three basic steps of any roadmap.

[00:08:01] But what is missing from these roadmaps? These are the steps, is it just as simple as doing this? It's not. There are three more additional pieces that are necessary at every step here, which is prioritization, thinking about existing solutions and not reinventing the wheel, and last is brainstorming without any limitations.

[00:08:27] I wanted to focus on these three pieces because oftentimes I've noticed that inclusive roadmaps forget that you have to still prioritize, for a specific audience, for a specific problem, for a specific solution. But how do you prioritize is always a question, and I'll give you some tools on how to think about prioritization.

[00:08:49] Similarly, we have to also think about exploring existing solutions. If you're at a startup and you're trying to do product-market fit, you really have to understand which other companies are doing something similar, how do I stand out? You have to understand, from a user's lens, what are the things that are already existing and being used by people. The last one is, when we brainstorm solutions, a lot of times limitations come into our brainstorm. We think about technical limitations and other pieces, but how do we brainstorm without any limitations? There are tools for doing that and we should use this.

Prioritizing customers

[00:09:29] Okay, let's go into prioritization then. Let's take an example of how to prioritize customers, which customers are important, and we'll take the example of Zillow. For Zillow, who are the biggest customers? I talked a little bit about it, but the biggest customers are people who are renting homes, and people who are buying homes or selling homes. So we have two basic customer types here. Now, how do we prioritize between these customers? It's a very important question, how do you think about prioritization?

[00:10:02] There are multiple ways to prioritize customers. I follow a mnemonic of, what are the important parameters we care about for these customers? It could be two parameters, it could be three parameters. Generally the parameters that we use for prioritization are, how big is the user size, how much of an impact is it if we solve their problems, how big are their problems, do we see that there are a lot of problems? So those initial parameters are important. There could be other parameters too, like, if I think about going for these users, will they pay me money to actually build solutions for them? That could be another parameter. Parameters change for the industry you are in, and you will have to do a lot of research to understand which parameters you care about. Talk to leadership, talk to the company strategy folks, to understand which parameters are important.

[00:11:01] Now let's take the example of Zillow. If Zillow decided to do something right now, or when they started off, which users would they go after? We use two major pieces here: we will use user problems, and we will use user size. The right hand side is bigger user size and the left hand side is smaller user size, where the problems on the y axis are, they have a lot of problems, whereas they have less problems.

[00:11:33] When I was looking at this space, what I realized is, in the US specifically, the population, because Zillow is only based in the US, the biggest user problem that you'll see for people who are buying a house, this population size is much higher, 230 million users who are trying to buy a house, and people who are renting is smaller, 45.2 million. So that's why, when you see their product strategy, they focused first on the renters, sorry, on the people who are trying to buy homes, because that's a big population size and they have a lot of problems. The renters seem to be a smaller size and their problems are relatively smaller and lesser.

[00:12:18] So that's why the product strategy, and the company strategy, started off with thinking about first the people who are buying or selling homes, and then people who are renting homes. This is something you can use. You can use a two by two matrix, you can use a table format to do this, but prioritization is key in a lot of these things. Similarly, when you think about prioritizing problems, this will also come into play. Again, you can use a two by two if necessary, and we'll talk about that. So people who are buying homes or selling homes are the ones that are the primary focus for Zillow, so their strategies will start with that and then move to rentals.

Prioritizing problems: eliminating what is already solved

[00:13:02] How do we prioritize problems? This is the second piece of prioritization. Now, prioritization of problems has a two part process. One part is, how do we explore existing solutions and eliminate those, and the second piece is actual prioritization. Now, I talked about eliminating existing solutions. How do we think about eliminating existing solutions? Let's quickly run through a little bit of a user journey for Zillow, people who are trying to buy a home, and then we'll think about what problems do they face, and then what kind of solutions currently exist, and how we can eliminate those from prioritization.

[00:13:48] So a user journey for a person who's trying to buy a house. I want a new house, I want to start searching for homes, I want to figure out what kind of homes I care about, I want to be able to compare these homes, and then ultimately bid on this house and buy. Now in this user journey, these are the needs of the user. What are the problems they face in this user journey is the next step.

[00:14:15] And that would basically be, hey, I want a new house, how much cash do I have, how much money do I have? And now, where do I start searching for these houses, what should I look at, which neighborhood should I look at, what kind of homes do I care about? Do I care about single family homes? In the US it's common to have a single family home which has its own backyard, or an apartment style home, or condos as they call them, which shares a wall, you might have other facilities. And then, how do I compare these homes? Now I've looked at 10 different homes, how do I compare them? How much should I bid on this house? I don't know how much to bid. How much should I actually pay for this house? So these are all the things that show up as problems in this user journey.

[00:15:02] The next step is to actually eliminate pieces that are already solved for, that we don't have to worry about. So, how much cash do I have? It's a banking thing. You can look at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, any of these places to figure out how much cash you have. They also have a lot of tools, and mortgage, and trying to understand how much you should use in terms of debt versus the amount of money that you have to pay to actually buy the house.

[00:15:25] Where can I search is also something that is kind of solved for, where we have Google that does a lot of searching for you. Zillow also helps with searching on its own, but you also refer to your family and friends on where should I search for homes, and which neighborhoods do I care about. So that is the piece that we cover.

[00:15:50] The pieces on which neighborhoods is still unclear. You will talk to a lot of family and friends but you still don't have a viewpoint, and how do you solve for that is an issue. At least in the US it's harder, there are a lot of other criteria that we care about, like schools that we care about, the kind of safety in neighborhoods that we have, is it family friendly or not depending on if you have kids or not, what kind of attractions you need, do you want to live in a place that is closer to downtown or not.

[00:16:22] And then there's also the piece of how do you want to compare these homes. I don't think there is a great tool out there to help us compare homes. And then ultimately, how much do you want to bid on a house, where Zillow actually has the Zestimate that helps you bid, but is that truly what you need, is it fully solved?

[00:16:40] What I'm trying to showcase here is that the places where there are icons on top of these problems, like how much cash do I have, where can I search, or how much to bid, are partially solved problems. These problems you can think about deprioritizing when you think about building the roadmap, because it's already solved for. But if there is a greater need to solve this problem, you should definitely go forward, hold on to it and try to solve it. But what I'm realizing here, when I did this exercise, is that there are things here which are not solved for, like how do I compare homes, which neighborhoods do I care about, how do I do that? Those pieces are not completely solved for, and those will be a little bit of my priority.

Prioritizing the unsolved problems by user and business impact

[00:17:25] The next step here is to take the problems that are not solved for and to actually prioritize them. So we will prioritize these problems now, and again we are going to figure out which parameters do we care about and how do we solve for these parameters.

[00:17:42] So I have laid out two parameters. User impact: if I solve for these problems, how much of an impact does it have on this user, is it high, low, medium? And if I solve for this problem, can I actually make money out of it as a company, what is the business impact? And business impact could be revenue, it could be engagement, it could be whatever metric that the company cares about. In this case we can think about revenue directly. We can also have other business impact numbers, but I've kept it very high level: business impact high, low; user impact high, low.

[00:18:23] The three problems that we care about, and I have graded them on these three pieces: how do I compare homes, how much should I bid, and which neighborhood should I care about. How do I compare homes: currently in the US there is no easy way to compare homes, because everybody's criteria is different. I remember people doing spreadsheets and adding all your parameters and being like, okay this works, this does not work, but then where do I compromise is a question. And so comparison of homes is pretty much a very manual process, users do it themselves.

[00:18:59] In this case, even the real estate agents that we work with, they also help, but it's still not a very good side-by-side comparison. So comparison is an important one, and given that all the other problems have been solved for, this is becoming more crucial. Again, this is just an example, this could be totally different from what Zillow is trying to do, or any other company is trying to do, this is just for the sake of this talk.

[00:19:29] The second piece is how much to bid. Now, Zillow has partially solved this, they have something called a Zestimate that helps you to figure out what you should bid. But what about the cash flow that you have, do you think that's good enough? How much money do you have, how much should you put down, how much should you offer? Those pieces are still very unclear, and financial situations are so individualized. People end up going and using a financial planner, but then it's not part of the journey that I showed you. Talking to the financial expert is something that people don't think of, and some people don't want to spend that money. So how do they actually do it themselves? There are not many tools out there, and there is an issue still there on, like, how much liquidity should I have or not.

[00:20:20] Last piece is which neighborhoods. Pretty much a solved problem, that's why the user impact of solving this is low. But what is happening is that as people are getting priced out in a lot of areas, and given the pandemic, there has been this surge of, what is an upcoming neighborhood, and what is a neighborhood that I care about from a school point, or what is the neighborhood that I just want to buy a house and it's an investment property. Those answers are very, very hard and the tools out there don't really help with it. So that's why I've kept it as a problem, but the user impact of solving this is a little low, given people have very clear criteria and they use that to compare homes. So you can also club some of these problems.

Brainstorming solutions without limitations

[00:21:12] Now, once you have prioritized these problems, the next step is brainstorming solutions, and I highly recommend using some technique to brainstorm without any limitations. There are two that I really like, I'm sure there'll be more that you can use, but these two help to think without limitations.

[00:21:33] One is the opportunity solution tree. This is a really good one to think about, hey, this is the problem, or this is the opportunity, what are the different solutions? And go wild, and then you come back and then narrow down on how do we want to solve this. That's an opportunity solution tree.

[00:21:53] Another one is the design sprint process, where you talk to the experts, you start with some goal in mind, you start sketching, you do a lot of brainstorming, you maybe use the opportunity solution tree here, you do some prototypes, you actually talk to users and then come up with the final thing that you care about. This is also a good way to brainstorm. I'm sure there are other ways, but these help force you to actually go beyond what you're currently thinking.

[00:22:23] The last piece is actually prioritization of solutions. I have not covered this here, but prioritization again is a parameter based approach on how do you think about which solutions to solve for. You think of the parameters and you solve for them.

[00:22:42] If you take away one thing at the end of this presentation, I really want you to think about how do you prioritize. Prioritizing anything that comes through a roadmap is super important, understanding the parameters for prioritization. Second, when you are in the phase of brainstorming, how do you really determine what happens in brainstorming without limitations is important. Don't go with a narrow mindset, because it's definitely going to limit your creativity and it won't be a solution that users care about. So that's pretty much everything that I had. I think I'm on time. Rory, any other questions?

Q&A

[00:23:24] Rory: Brilliant. Well, first of all, thank you very much for sharing that presentation, I really enjoyed it, so I hope everybody out there did as well. And if you have any questions for Tanvi, please write them in on whichever platform that you're watching on, and I'll put those questions through to Tanvi. But I'm going to jump in and start off, because I really liked, there were a couple of two by two matrices in there, but the one around the business and user impact, of trying to figure out where are the most important items that we should start with. One question I had there is, how do we make sure that we're not biasing our opinions here, of going, oh no, users, this is really important to users, but actually it's not that important, but it's my pet project so I'll say how important it is to users?

[00:24:20] Tanvi: That happens so much, so often. A very on point question. I found that relying on two, three different things helps. One is user research, and relying on your user research team, because they have a pulse of, if there's foundational research that's done in the user research teams, they definitely know which problems are more important. Secondly, talking to your customer support team. Those folks are on the lines talking to all the customers, they really know which areas are the worst hit and they will give a viewpoint.

[00:24:54] Tanvi: I also think taking a dip into the reviews, if it's an app or a website, reviews that show up in multiple places, is also a good way to collate feedback and understand what's going on. If none of this exists and you're doing this in a place where it's a startup, I would recommend going out and talking to people, literally talking to a sample set, doing surveys to some of the sample set helps get the understanding of what kind of problems are important versus not. And then there is definitely the layered approach of thinking about the competition, thinking about where the future lies, and really thinking about if users will continue being on this trend. And so that helps understand which users are important, and not being super biased.

[00:25:43] Rory: Excellent. And then I guess the same for the business impact. Who owns typically saying this is more or less important?

[00:25:53] Tanvi: Yeah, business impact is typically a product strategy thing, so a product person talks to the analyst team, they talk to the strategy team and look at the company strategy to understand what is important, what is not. Business impact unfortunately sometimes can be very, hey, I think this is the idea that will definitely work, because that's where I'm headed, or I'm seeing trends in gen AI so this is more important. For new and nascent things it's more of, we have to innovate, we have to try something, and we think there's a business impact because of a future.

[00:26:35] Tanvi: In a few other places, if it's an existing product, there's a lot of data in the product that we can use to determine business impact for solving, and there are predictions that analysts can help with. Even at big companies I've done basic predictions on, if I tweak this tiny CTA what will happen, based on past predictions or even industry data, that allows me to get business impact. So product can triage that by talking to a number of people like the analysts, the strategists, maybe leadership, to get this view, and also having a viewpoint using competitive analysis and future iterations of the technologies.

[00:27:15] Rory: Brilliant. Well, thanks for that. That's actually brought us very close to time, but if anybody does have any questions, please just send them through and we will send them on to Tanvi afterwards and ask her to share more of her insights. But thank you very much.

[00:27:30] Tanvi: Thank you so much, thank you for having me.