Product Leadership Exercise: Planning the Product Organization's Next Three Years

Imagine you lead the product organization. Walk me through how you would put together a product roadmap for the next three years. ```hint Decide what the roadmap is for Before choosing anything to put on it, work out what the company needs to be true in three years and who will use the roadmap to make decisions. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I apply this to a specific company and product, or describe a process that would work for any company? - Does the company already have a strategy and multi-year business targets, or is setting the product strategy part of this task? - Who is the main audience for the roadmap: the executive team and board, the product and engineering teams, or customers and sales? - Are team size and budget over the three years fixed, or part of what the plan should propose? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The inputs gathered before planning, and how each one shapes priorities - How a product vision and strategy become a small set of themes with measurable outcomes over the three years - A prioritization approach that also covers work customers never see, and how much detail the plan holds at each point in the horizon - How teams and stakeholders shape the roadmap, and how it is communicated to different audiences - How the plan is reviewed and changed as evidence arrives ### Follow-up Questions - Six months in, a competitor ships what you planned as your year-two headline feature. What do you change? - The sales team wants a dated list of features to promise customers. How do you respond? - At the end of the first year, how would you judge whether the roadmap is working?