Building a product roadmap is all about looking at where you want the product to be.
Your roadmap should include insights from several areas, including discovery sessions, user feedback, and stakeholder input.
Some of your roadmap should include bets. These are things you want to work on to see if they land. They can be risky, ambitious, exciting, and fun. They may be highly successful, inconclusive, or fail miserably.
But it’s difficult to justify spending all of your time on one bet – or to only work on big, risky initiatives.
The key to balancing your roadmap is to have a mixture of bets, some smaller incremental improvements, and some business as usual type requests that need to happen to keep things running.
You can’t please everyone all of the time. But you also can’t expect to endlessly experiment on things that may or may not work out, in isolation of any other progress.
It’s important to focus on outcome over output, but no outcome and no output won’t work out well in the long run.
Photo by Christophe Hautier on Unsplash
