How you set a product's strategic direction and turn it into a sequenced roadmap

Walk the interviewer through how you build a strategy for a product you own, and how you turn that strategy into a roadmap. ```hint Choices before schedules Decide what the strategy has to settle before any item reaches the roadmap, and how you would know later whether those choices were right. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I describe a general process, or apply it to a specific product, such as one of this company's products or one I have worked on? - Is the product new, or established with existing users, commitments and technical debt? - What horizon should the roadmap cover, and who is its main audience: the engineering team, executives, or customers and sales? - Am I setting direction for one product area that must fit a broader company strategy, or for the whole product? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The inputs the strategy is built from and how they are gathered: company goals, users, market, competitors and the company's own advantages - The choices the strategy makes explicit: who the product serves and does not serve, where it competes, and how success is measured - How the strategy becomes a roadmap: turning bets into themes or outcomes, prioritizing and sequencing them, and handling dependencies and capacity - How the roadmap is communicated to different audiences, and how much certainty it shows at each horizon - How the strategy and roadmap are reviewed and changed as evidence comes in ### Follow-up Questions - A senior executive asks for a feature that does not fit your strategy. How do you respond? - Halfway through the year, a competitor launches something that undercuts your main bet. What changes in your strategy and roadmap, and what stays? - How do you tell whether the strategy is working before the lagging metrics move?