Enabling your organisation to contribute to the Product Roadmap
This article is specifically focused on how to ensure that employees from across your organisation can contribute their ideas to your Product roadmap. For more ideas on how to prioritise your roadmap, and how to take user and customer feedback into account, see my other articles and follow me on Twitter: @AConsidineTong
If there is one thing that sums up Product Management for me, it is the concept of enablement. Good Product Leaders enable others - their peers, their bosses, their teams - to make come up with good ideas, make good decisions and execute those decisions. This article is about the first of those three: ensuring that everyone else's good ideas get heard.
So how do you do that in a way that is manageable, sustainable and delivers the right answers?
As mentioned in my prioritisation article, there are a number of standard ways to take in ideas, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages.
1. Dedicated Inbox: people can send you free-form suggestions on email about what they'd like to see in the product
In this scenario, you have an email address to which anyone can send suggestions. The inbox should be shared between any Product People who need to pick up and triage these ideas.
Positives:
- Easy for the submitter, the can fire off ideas quickly as soon as they have them and don’t have to use a tool with which they are unfamiliar.
- Provides an easy metric for reporting on new ideas/innovation: you can easily count the number of ideas received within a timeframe, and if needed, challenge the business to beat this number.
Negatives:
- Too easy for the submitter! You are likely to get half-formed ideas, leading to more validation effort for the Product team.
- No automation
- Potential for ideas to be missed or duplicated depending on how many people are picking them up and your shared-inbox etiquette.
2. Google/Sharepoint/etc forms: people fill in a short form detailing their suggestion
In this scenario, people fill in a short, standardised form using google forms/sharepoint (other providers are available) and this automatically creates a repository of suggestions.
Positives:
- Allows you to capture more structured information
- Can we automated so that ideas auto-populate a score-card
- Widely available and accessible tools that are easy to use
Negatives:
- Submitter might not know all of the answers and therefore abandon the suggestion
- Potential for duplication (unless you give access to the repository – which you may or may not want to)
3. Word Document - a template for people to complete and email/submit to a central repository
A combination of the two ideas above: submitters are asked to complete a text document that asks specific questions (such as: describe the benefit to the user, describe the benefit to the customer, describe the benefit to our business, what is the risk of this not being built etc), and then this document can submitted to an inbox or directly to a central repository.
Positives:
- Ensures you capture as much useful data as possible and that submitter has really considered their suggestion
- Allows partial-answers and gaps in answers therefore less abandonment
- Gives you a template to start to develop into a Product Requirements Document
- Allows for checking of duplication by the Product team
Negatives:
- Time-intensive for both submitter and product team
- No automation
4. Jira/YouTrack integration - give people the ability to raise their suggestions as tickets on an existing platform.
Here, people are invited to submit suggestions using an existing technical ticket platform.
Positives:
- Easy to track incoming tickets if particular code is used
- Technical teams likely to be comfortable with the tool and the approach
- Can provide a template for developing suggestion into ‘real’ tickets
Negatives:
- Commercial teams likely to be less familiar with the tools
- Potential for duplication and confusion
- Question of ticket management vs existing tickets
Personally, I prefer to use a word document and repository that is accessible to a wide range of people, but, as stated above, that is only sustainable until your organisation becomes a certain size and reaches a certain level of complexity. What works best for you is for you to decide, and remember: you can always change it if it doesn’t work, and if you’re struggling we can help.
-ACT