Software Roadmap Process

In addition to watching the U.S. Open tennis tournament, I’ve been thinking about our product roadmap process. The previous roadmap process for our SaaS product hasn’t kept up with the pace of product demands due to success in the marketplace. Here are the general ideas for our new process:

• Shared Google Spreadsheet with individual tabs for each department, a tab for the actual roadmap, and a tab for customer ideas from our idea exchange
• Each department keeps a laundry list of what they’d like to see in the product in their respective tab
• The sheets have the following columns:
  - Item
  - Description
  - Sponsor
  - Priority
  - Difficulty
  - Discussed
• Department managers come together once a month to discuss items that haven’t been discussed yet and to lobby for their requests to be moved to the main roadmap
• The product manager makes the final decision, based on input from the key stakeholders

It’s a new process for us and I’m excited to see the results. The most important aspect of product management is to be opinionated about the product vision and fanatical about what does, and what does not make it into the application.