Link between Product Vision, Strategy, & Roadmap

Over the past decade, I've been leading product development, strategy, and innovation across the startup and corporate ecosystems. I have had the opportunity to envision customer-centric products and create strategies and roadmaps to deliver them into the hands of people, test them, and iterate accordingly. Over the years, I've mentored and trained several product managers, and often they have questions about these three areas: product vision, strategy, and roadmap. This post intends to provide guidance, via a framework I have developed over the past years, and aims at explaining the connection between these three areas. Every day I learn something new, so expect this thinking to continuously evolve. Product vision, strategy, and roadmap are very broad concepts, and this post, even though it is pretty extensive, it only touches the surface of everything that is there to say and learn.

Company & Product Vision

To get us started, I want you to think about your company's vision. Do you know it? Right now, you are reading this article on LinkedIn, and their vision is “To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” Think about that, and think about your company. What is your company's vision? If you don't know it, this is a good question to ask your leadership or the startup founder. This could be a great opportunity to influence your superiors and get a clear answer for you and your entire team.

The vision of your company helps guide the product vision. Consequently, it helps guide the products and features we create.

Product Vision to Strategy (forming stage)

The product vision must be a clear statement that describes the overarching long-term goals and provide a clear view of the future of your product. As product managers, we can help create products for a better world in the future. However, we need strategies and a roadmap that can get our products to market, so we can test and measure what works and what doesn't so that we can help create that better future. To go from vision to strategy, there is a stage I like to call "forming".

In the forming stage, we focus on how we empathize and gather customer insights, define the most important problems to solve, and ideate on what we learned; exactly as we would do during the first steps of the design thinking process.

The forming stage considers both, the data and human elements. We want to collect the right data about the customers to form a point of view. Furthermore, we also want to do research to generate human insights. If we were working on a product that is already on the market, additionally, performing A/B or multivariable testing can provide meaningful information about how customers interact with the product and features. These insights can help us identify the key problems we should solve for the customers.

In the forming stage, we can start moving closer to product strategy. To get there, we want to have a clear understanding of the existing product offerings in the market. This is also an amazing opportunity to bring in collaboration across disciplines by leading brainstorming and ideation sessions to generate divergent ideas, and then identify and converge into product opportunities.

Everyone in your team should have a clear understanding of the vision and the strategy. This is one of the most important elements when working with cross-discipline teams.

Amazon's product vision is to become "Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online". In their forming stage, they must get a deep understanding of the optimal and most delightful customer experience (easy-to-find products, a wide variety, fast and informative customer service) and create a culture of innovation that enables employees to create without fear of failure so that they can test and pivot quickly.

Product Strategy to Roadmap (planning stage)

Product strategy is a high-level plan describing the approach of how it plans to turn the product vision into a reality. Product managers are responsible for either developing the strategies or working with the business teams to create a high-level plan. If the strategy is the high-level plan, the roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, goals, priorities, and plan of action that shows the progress over time. It aligns the organization around the OKRs (objective key results) for the product and how they plan to achieve it. To go from strategy to roadmap, there is a stage I call "planning".

In the planning stage, the key is to align and motivate the teams with the specific objectives and results we are trying to achieve. Motivation and clarification are key to have a successful planning stage. Every team member should understand the vision, strategy, and OKRs. One of the best tools to do this is creating a roadmap.

To bring your product roadmap to life, we need an execution strategy, which is just that, a strategic plan to execute. As you build your execution strategy, it is important, that as the product manager, you ensure the right resources are allocated to the plan. The plan should be coordinated at a cross-functional level and have a clear monitoring plan. Providing comprehensive prioritization eliminates wasteful development and helps deliver customer value in the quickest possible way.

Uber's product strategy is to "Decrease wait times in cities where it is over 10 minutes". In their planning stage, each product team has UX, data, engineering team, and product manager resources, and clear OKRs.

Product Roadmap and Measure Stage

The product roadmap is a strategic visual tool that helps aligns everyone in your team. It provides a clear vision, strategy, and OKRs. Every product roadmap should have a plan. I personally like creating an executable plan across disciplines and with specific goals in order of priorities in a given timeframe.

For a product manager, launching a product or feature to market is one of the most fulfilling experiences. There are several ways to measure your product or features are being successful. This means, evaluating your AB test results, monitoring the plan, revisiting your OKRs, and most of all having a feedback loop to identify as quickly as possible what needs iteration or a pivot.

Strong evaluation and speed are key to be successful at the measuring stage.

The product manager should be very diligent about collecting and sharing the results from your AB tests with the involved teams. It should also run the monitoring plan with great leadership so if something needs to be work on, it gets work on with the necessary speed. As a product manager, you don't need to do all the thinking on your own. Leverage your amazing cross-functional teammates to help you measure and make decisions quickly, but help set this upfront before the launch.

After all the amazing work, having a team's retro is crucial to future plans. We want to learn from every launch and learn quickly from our mistakes. There are many ways to go about retros, and independently of the framework you use, you should ask the following three questions to your team: 1. What did we do well? 2. What do we need to do differently next time? 3. Why we did or didn't accomplish our goals?

Another important aspect to measure is how happy was the team during the journey.

In the measuring stage, for us product managers, besides getting clear feedback from the team, we should continuously improve our skills for building a robust feedback loop.

In this post, I tried to simplify a very complex topic that is new to many. If you are a product manager, I hope it helps you in your understanding of product vision, strategy, and roadmaps.