Your Roadmapping Process: Turning Strategy and Inputs Into a Prioritized Plan
Company: Lyft
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Walk the interviewer through how you build a product roadmap.
```hint Start before the backlog
Before naming a prioritization framework, explain where the roadmap's goals come from and what each candidate item will be judged against.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is this for a new product before launch, or a mature product with customers and an existing backlog?
- Who is the main audience: the engineering team, executives, or customers and sales?
- What time horizon do you have in mind: the next quarter, or a year or more?
- Should I walk through a roadmap I actually built, or describe my general process?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- How the roadmap connects to a product vision, a strategy and measurable goals
- The inputs gathered and how they are checked before they shape the plan
- A prioritization method, with capacity, dependencies and non-feature work such as reliability accounted for
- How the roadmap is tailored to different audiences and how dates and commitments are handled
- How often it is revisited and how changes are decided
### Follow-up Questions
- Sales asks for a feature for one large customer next quarter that is not on the roadmap. How do you decide, and what do you tell them?
- Midway through a quarter, the assumption behind your top item proves wrong. What changes, and who hears about it first?
- How do you decide how much capacity goes to reliability and technical debt rather than new features?
Overview: A product management question asking how the candidate builds a product roadmap. It tests tying the roadmap to vision and measurable goals, gathering and validating inputs, prioritizing with capacity and dependencies in mind, tailoring it to different audiences and revisiting it as evidence changes.