Do This Before Planning a Roadmap

📍 Assess your Product Operations Maturity: https://forms.gle/Jf2WPbygkej4XiqE7 📍 Do you Want An Strategic Audit: https://www.insidetheproduct.com/ Most of the product roadmaps are not connected to a strategy. Teams tend to work in a reactive way, getting bombarded with different requests: from customers, sales, management, maintenance. This tend to be quite demanding and get easily escalated to ensure that the latest request gets added to the roadmap, to be able to close a sales deal, or satisfy investors. Where does this leave your strategic goals, usually in the dust. Most teams are in such a rush that making sure that alignment with strategy happens gets forgotten. Teams are busy, with lots of features and opportunities to chase, that rarely have any relation with each other, leading to an spray and pray strategy: shoot to many targets and hope that you reach your strategic objectives. In Q1, your roadmap for the quarter is probably full, and if your company is like most, probably the first half year is almost booked. If you are not working on your strategic goals now, this probably means that best case you might be able to develop some in first half of the year, and some in the second part. But if you release on the second part of the year, your window to affect the business is pretty much close. This is not counting all the new high priority requests you’ll get over the year that will disrupt your plans.