Does your organization treat roadmaps as plans? Or commitments?
I'll give you a few seconds to answer.
If you're like a lot of organizations, you probably said commitments. I regularly joke that some executives have a special file drawer, just for roadmaps they've been handed over the years. And 6 months after they are presented, the roadmap is magically transported to the executive's desk so she can then ask "you did all these things, right?".
I get it, in a perfect world where we can predict everything our customers want and we can predict how long it will take to develop products, a commitment to a roadmap would be lovely. But that's not the world we live in. And when we treat a roadmap like a commitment, there are negative implications to our organizations. Let's walk through them:
Leaders get surprised. When leaders expect a year-long roadmap to be a commitment from a team, those teams typically resist telling leaders when things go off-track. I often see leaders find out late in the game that a feature or project has gone off the rails. And when the bad news does finally filter up, it's often too late to make tradeoff decisions or change course. One of the ways to encourage honest assessments of the status of features or projects is to review the roadmap with a cadence, ask what has changed and what the impacts are. As a leader myself, I'd much rather be disappointed early than surprised late.
Morale and quality both suffer. Part of the intent with early commitments is to keep some pressure on the team to deliver, sure, but we need to recognize in this fast-paced world, customers change their mind, technology changes and frankly, things are often just simply more complex than we originally thought. The result is that scope is added to the original set of work we intended to build. If we don't either flex the date or flex the scope (and therefore adjust the roadmap), the team attempts to work harder and harder leading to high levels of defects and low team morale.
Innovation is stifled. They key to innovating for your customers is understanding their struggles and their needs and responding to them in new and unique ways. Henry Ford said "if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". To truly innovate, you have to try things out, expect some failures, learn from them and then pivot. Committed roadmaps fly in the face of this concept. Of course the team needs a plan on how they intend to proceed, without it, they likely will be much too tactical and not very strategic. But if the team can't adjust that plan based on their learnings, our ability to pivot and delight the customers with innovative products is destroyed.
Productivity declines. Interestingly, when an organizational culture treats roadmaps like commitments, it naturally results in teams spending quite a lot of time estimating that future work in an attempt to understand all of the complexity involved and account for it. If we are able to pivot, all that work in breaking down and estimating things they thought they would do gets thrown out. Encouraging high level estimates that are truly best guesses and not commitments will save time and increase the team's efficiency.
In my experience, admitting to ourselves that we don't have all the answers up front builds a culture of experimentation, learning and innovation. I often see companies who say they want these things, but have a hard time actually moving those needles. Reconsidering how you approach roadmaps can be a great first step.
0 comments