5 Steps From Features to Outcome Roadmap

Hey I’m Ant and welcome to my newsletter where you will find practical lessons on building Products, Businesses and being a better Leader

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Most product roadmaps I see aren’t roadmaps at all, they’re plans.

And a lot of this has to do with a lack of product strategy, because your roadmap should be a reflection of your strategy. 

Roadmaps help you visualize your strategy in a sequential manner so you can better communicate and action it.

But whilst similar, they’re still different things.

The problem is, without a strategy you’re likely to resort to prioritization by spreadsheets. Applying RICE formulas, WSJF and other scorecards where you’re really just stack-ranking a bunch of disparate ideas. There’s nothing ‘strategic’ about doing that.

What we then do is take that list and plot it along a timeline - and voilà!

We have a roadmap plan.

So how do you break this cycle? 

That’s exactly what a Product Manager in the Product Mentorship and I went though the other month.

We went from feature list to product roadmap in 2 hours. 

And not just any product roadmap, an outcome orientated one!

And because I don’t want this knowledge to be exclusive to those in the Product Mentorship, I took 380+ product managers through this exact process the other day, live, as part of my monthly webinars AND I thought I’d do a write up here too. 

You can watch the recording on Youtube (I highly recommend watching the Q&A too, there’s some great questions and additional content in there!) 

Step 1: ‘Bring Out Your Dead’

If you already have a clear product strategy, pass go and skip to step 3, otherwise keep reading.

I call this step “Bring out your dead” because I love a good Monty Python reference and that’s how it feels.

The first thing you need to do is gather everything. From all the work, ideas, opportunities, requests, etc. 

Don't worry about format. Confluence pages, Notion docs, Jira backlogs, sticky notes. Just collect it all in one place.

The product manager I was coaching did this in a confluence page.

Example ‘bring out your dead feature list’

Step 2: Extract Narratives

This step is where the magic happens and what most product managers miss when it comes to building a product roadmap.

A great product roadmap doesn’t just outline WHAT you’re doing, it also explains the WHY.

I talk about narratives a lot when it comes to product strategy and that’s because they’re the backbone.

Here’s an example from a coaching session yesterday with a Head of Product at a startup.

They’re building a new product offering and in the outputs of a kick off workshop they had done, the benefits listed were;

1. Increasing engagement (DAU)

2. And reducing churn

And whilst both of those things are technically correct. We wouldn’t argue that there aren’t benefits we’re hoping to see. They weren’t the reason ‘why’ this product was strategic.

The core intent of the new product was to create a new acquisition funnel.

So whilst it solved a problem for their existing customers, the real target are new customers.

If existing customers used the product, got benefit from it, engaged more frequently with the company and became less likely to churn, that’s great but it’s a 2nd or 3rd order effect. Not the primary goal.

I know all that sounds very nuanced and a bit like, “who cares” but anchoring yourself to “new acquisition” vs “reduce churn” are very different things and will likely result in different discovery activities and potentially radically different solutions.

This is why we need to build narratives.

The best way to do so is to go through your ‘bring out your dead’ list and ask: 

"Why is this here? Why can’t it be done sooner (or later)?"

Let it be a running dialog. 

Tip: Having someone scribe as you talk out loud (even if it’s ChatGPT or Claude) is super helpful!

Real example of a Product Manager and I extracting narratives in a miro board

Step 3: Prioritize Narratives

At this point you should just have these clusters of narratives. The next step is to start to prioritize them into a logical sequence - we can’t do all these at once, right?

For this I like to keep it simple with NOW-NEXT-LATER.

Having done this a dozen times now, worry about more granular time horizons, like this quarters, later. It'll only distract you and get you stuck in a rabbit hole of "oh this is too big for a quarter" or “we don’t have capacity for all that”

An additional tip here is to also capture the WHY behind your prioritization decisions. These are additional - and important - narratives!

Step 4: Map the Work

Now you're ready to map all the work you gathered in step 1 to those narratives.

Why wait until now to do that?

Because if you try to do this any sooner like I said at the start, you'll throw some prioritisation framework like RICE or WSJF at it because you don’t have anything to prioritize against. 

And that’s not to say those prioritization methods aren’t valuable, they are, they’re just not a strategy!

By developing narratives first we can start to think more strategically and build a lightweight version of a product strategy.

And you’ll see how in a minute this will allow us to have a much more outcome orientated product roadmap. Because the narratives create cohesion. There’s a reason why features A, B and C are all NOW and not because they got the highest RICE score.

Now it’s starting to look like a roadmap. But let’s make it even better!

Step 5: Add Outcomes

Now that you've mapped the work to your narratives and you've prioritised everything it's time to add outcomes.

To do this look at the work and the narratives and as yourself based on the work and the narrative, ask:

• How would I measure success? 

• What's the outcome we're driving towards here?

• What signals would tell me we’re heading in the right direction?

Of course you can add the outcomes at step 3, but I like to do it in this order because you've got the strategy/outcome thinking first covered in your narratives and this way we keep the momentum and also sense check them against the work first.

Another thing you can do at this step which the Product Manager and I did, was you can check your narratives against your company's strategy/goals.

• Do they align? 

• How does this support the broader business goals?

This alignment is necessary and it’ll help you be more influential when talking to stakeholders as you have a clear line between your roadmap and their goals.

Where we landed at the end of 2 hours. First draft of an Outcome Roadmap!

Conclusion

I hope that helps.

I go through all this in more depth and walk through a real world example in the recording.   

I also cover additional things like;

• Why great product managers prioritize in layers

• How to use this to influence stakeholders

• How AI can help you take this and create a Product Strategy

And answer a bunch of fantastic questions like; 

• Did you work as a Product Trio to do this?

• Should Outcomes be leading or lagging metrics?

• Advice on getting buy-in on Outcome Roadmaps?

• What level of detail should you go into for your roadmap items?

• Any specific way of doing this if you had a user story map?

• And more!

So it’s worth watching. Especially if you got to this point and still have some questions.

Also if you do, feel free to reply to this newsletter with your questions, I’d be happy to answer them!

Thanks as always for reaching! 

Forward this to someone who needs to read this - it’ll help them and it helps this newsletter because a large portion of subscribers come from referrals 🙏

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