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The holy trinity of product management

Over the past years, a lot of drive came into a movement towards more product-led companies. Instead of focussing on purely financial goals and current requests from customers or sales leads, software companies started to shift their attention towards product strategy. They derived a lot of organizational decisions surrounding the product team from that strategy.

At the same time, it is startling how many companies have trouble defining a helpful and actionable strategy and developing a product guided by their own formulated paradigms.

The holy trinity

Many teams are working hard on transforming a waterfall process into an agile approach. They work hard on continuously improving their development cycle, spending time in retrospectives, backlog refinements, sprint plannings and a lot of other ceremonies.

Yet this is only improving how to develop a product the right way. The most significant impact you can achieve results from improving what the right product to build is, to begin with. Waterfall or agile product development is a „garbage in, garbage out“ process.

And although I am an agile coach and agile evangelist myself, I genuinely believe that a team with a great strategy and excellent product idea will have more success in a waterfall environment than the best agile team has, working on a mediocre product.

To realize this massive impact, all product teams, startup or corporate, need to have three levels of guiding, which I call the holy trinity of product management: The vision, the strategy and the roadmap.

Three typical themes

In the last 15 years, I have worked with hundreds of startups, product teams and corporates across almost all sectors. Three themes I encountered quite frequently are:

1. No strategy, vision or roadmap at all. This type of management is primarily present in startups and often unwisely credited to a fast-paced startup spirit. As they say, if you don’t know where you want to go, you don’t need to care which route you take.

2. Everything is in the roadmap. While it is helpful to have a plan, a lack of vision and a practical product strategy still leaves the product team with the question: What should be part of the roadmap and what is the most important thing to work on? A roadmap can’t answer this.

3. A vision in the disguise of a strategy. When everything in your strategy is purely focussed on the big picture, your mission and what you want to change for your market, it is not a strategy but a vision. This is helpful, but it is still too abstract and complex to derive a roadmap from.

So product teams and companies struggle to distinguish between vision, strategy and roadmap and often mistake one for the other. And even when all three are present, they are not clearly linked and provide little guiding in day-to-day decisions.

Before diving into practical advice to create your product vision, strategy and roadmap and connect them, let me explain my expectations on this holy trinity of product management.

What is a vision?

When you come up with a product idea or you are new in charge of a digital product, there are essentially three things you need to have in mind all the time:

1. Who is the user, and what problem am I trying to solve?

2. What is the reason my product exists, and how is it different from other competing solutions?

3. How will I know that I actually solve the problem and to which degree?

While this sounds pretty straightforward, many teams and management boards struggle to align around these questions and answer these questions in depth.

I will detail a practical approach to derive and structure a product vision that will guide your team over the following years, like a Northstar in chapter four.

What is a strategy?

When you have a great shared vision in place, you have answered the „why?“ and partly „what?“. However, you still need to answer the big question „how?“. How exactly are you planning to make your vision a reality?

If the vision is your Northstar, then your strategy is your map. It is the single document you should consult for every significant decision and question around your product. And the important thing few product managers get right is that your strategy should answer these questions.

What good is spending weeks or months in discussion, workshops and world cafés to come up with a pretty strategy document if you still need to think and discuss every question arising in your daily work?

But here manifests the reason why so many teams mistake a roadmap for a strategy. A roadmap is a plan, and to a certain degree, it does answer what to build. But it does not link the vision to the plan. It does not answer why the roadmap is the best way to move towards your vision. Certainly it does not provide any answers or guidelines when critical, unexpected questions and situations arise.

In chapter five, I will guide you through creating a working, applicable and guiding strategy and provide both a template and practical advice to make your strategy work.

What is a roadmap?

Now it is finally time to talk about the development roadmap. The document probably all product and development teams have in one form or the other. Basically, it is a step-by-step plan of what things to work on and in which order. Sometimes deadlines and release dates are added to make the roadmap more credible and valuable for customer success teams, sales and management.

When asking teams why a specific item is on the roadmap, I often get answers like:

- Well, it has been there for a while, and probably the requesting team got inpatient.

- This one was added last week by our CEO.

- I actually have no idea what this item is.

- This is super important because a lot of clients seem to have asked for it.

And these answers don’t only come up when talking with developers or designers, but also when asking the responsible product manager.

The roadmap should be the inevitable manifestation of your product vision and your product strategy.

In chapter six, we will look at the basic principles to tie the roadmap to the strategy and how you use it as a communication vehicle with internal stakeholders and customers.

Since a lot of work we do as product managers goes into writing specifications and fleshing out product ideas, this book has a dedicated section on how to write good roadmap items. We will explore this in chapter seven.

Don’t be discouraged

If you feel discouraged because you see yourself and your team or company in many of the mentioned issues - don’t be. First of all, you are in good company and not alone. I have struggled for over a decade to understand product strategy principles and make them work for me, my teams and my clients. And so do others.

So I am happy to share my learnings, my fails and my experience with you in the upcoming chapters and really hope it does make a difference for you, your career and the products you are working on.

Takeaways

- The most significant impact on your product development will be deciding on the right product to build and not the engineering process.

- To create a rockstar product and guide your team along the way, you will need the holy trinity of product management: A product vision, an actionable strategy and an outcome-focused roadmap.

- Vision, strategy and roadmap are built upon another, linked together and function as a cascading framework for product and business decisions.

- If you currently don’t have these three elements, don’t be discouraged. You are not alone, and you will learn everything you need in this book to change that.