As a Product Manager, I was looking for ways to keep track of the activities we were doing and to keep track of decision-making on the product roadmap.

This is when I found this video of a podcast by Product School interviewing Peter Mullen from Envoy. It was the first practical guide that I’d seen that gave a real-world example of how to use strategic roadmaps and put it in one place to implement them. Plus Jibility’s Product Roadmap, available here with an article here.

From this video and some background reading to incorporate other sources, I found a way to document the bit between Product Strategy and deciding what to build next.

You can buy my spreadsheet template here and see the Miro board template here.

Putting the canvas into a spreadsheet with a few updates

Source: https://www.jibility.com/canvas/

The canvas has the following six areas:

1. Challenges: What are the key customer pain points and opportunities we are trying to solve?

2. Objectives: What value are we trying to deliver to our customers? E.G. 50% reduction in time taken for X

3. Capabilities: What capabilities should our product enable in order to meet our objectives?

4. Major Features: What features should our product have to implement our capabilities?

5. Releases (Initiatives): What features will we logically release together to deliver incremental value to the customer? What are our priorities?

6. Product roadmap: When will we deliver our releases to our customers?

However, I wanted to expand on what was here to help me make it into a spreadsheet that had everything in one place.

Starting with the product vision

Paweł Huryn developed the Product Strategy Canvas in 2023 as below, which can develop the product vision.

Source: https://www.productcompass.pm/p/product-strategy-canvas

The product vision also needs to build on the company vision as shown by Peter Mullen in his talk on the Product School podcast.

Between the two, the product vision and company vision are aligned before we begin to look at how to implement the product strategy.

Challenges

This demonstrates how critical UX/user research and market research are to understanding the customer and user needs as well as the overall market. It’s likely that the insights here to answer the question, “What are the key customer pain points and opportunities we are trying to solve?” will come from broad, in-depth UX research that would have pinpointed pain points and opportunities as a starting point for developing the product.

In my book, Make Products That Matter, I outline practical tips and ways to understand customer and user needs throughout the whole product development lifecycle, from idea through to post-launch.

In this section, I found that using personas was useful to bring together the pain points of different customer groups. In addition, user stories could be used or customer journey mapping. The template has questions that can be answered to cover the main pain points for each user group.

If there is a knowledge bank or research repository, the link could go in here to keep everything tied together.

Objectives

Once the challenges that need to be addressed by the product are outlined, the next question to explore is, “What value are we trying to deliver to our customers? E.g. 50% reduction in time taken for X” So, what is the solution? What is the key value(s)? Here, we could look at smaller value propositions or one large value proposition that is likely to add value to the customer. It may be difficult at this point to be specific as 50% reduction in time taken for X, but it’s good to have a target metric to aim toward.

Here, we may use problem statements and How Might We…? questions to ensure that we’re solving the right problem and challenging our assumptions.

Capabilities + Major Features

Here, the key question is “What capabilities should our product enable in order to meet our objectives?” I found here having a customer journey map useful to consider the customer touchpoints and what the product should be doing and when to meet the objectives or outcomes of the product.

Here is a link to some maps you could use to help you.

I found having the capabilities needed linked directly to the major features that were needed. As the next question in the canvas is “What features should our product have to implement our capabilities?” I liked to have both of these together in one tab.

Initiatives

So, “What features will we logically release together to deliver incremental value to the customer? What are our priorities?”

This is where I needed to drill down more into initiatives and found the Envoy podcast really useful. Peter talks about SMART goals, which would have come from the above exercises for creating objectives.

Here is how Peter visualised initiatives.

Here you can see that features come in.

Peter also provided an outline as to how to prioritise features.

The types of frameworks that you can use for prioritisation are:

Kano
RICE
Value vs. effort

The template outlines these in steps to give this structure to your project.

Epics and Stories

Here, my personal addition would be epics with stories to show how initiatives will be implemented.

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes

Product Roadmap

This represents the timeline of what is coming out and when. The question here is, “When will we deliver our releases to our customers?”

There are many times of product roadmaps, the Now, Next and Later can be a good way to show at a high level what’s coming up and what’s being worked on.

The outcome-based product roadmap can almost be used as a feedback loop to bring it back to the objectives for different ideas that have been added to this roadmap.

Source: https://medium.com/swlh/outcome-based-roadmaps-unleash-the-power-of-a-shared-vision-and-purpose-851401c7aa54

Measuring Success

One aspect missing in the canvas which Peter highlights, is measuring success. Peter suggests using the North Start Metric and metrics along the AARRR framework to measure results.

Summary

I found combining both Peter Mullen’s and the Jibility canvas to create a product workflow helped to join the dots between the product strategy and capturing decisions around what was built. The building work then went into a different system such as Jira or Monday.

Product Management Workflow