A potential pitfall of traditional road mapping

We all know a roadmap is a document that tells stakeholders what products/features we could be launching at a given time frame, such as we could be doing this in the near term, long term, mid term. The current way of road mapping feels good but is it really accurate. The answer is no.

Here is the reason why.
In agile development, you are continuously ideating, testing and iterating in response to your user’s needs and competition. These things change all the time, it is kinda like controlled chaos in a pinball machine, therefore the traditional method of road mapping often are inaccurate.

Simply put, without clear goals, you don’t have a roadmap. A useful and actionable roadmap comes from a deep understanding of the product and company vision or goals.

Potential pitfall examples in real life.

• Company A vision is to become a top competitor for a retail product line.
• The goal for next year is to increase sales of that product line by 30%
• A potential way to achieve that goal is to increase the average orders value of that product line when buyers check out similar items
• We do that by recommending some potential related purchases at check out.
  

We could come up with different ways to accomplish that goal, but we have to do a lot of testing to see which solution to implement. We won’t know until we have tested them all. This is why picking one potential way to achieve our goals on a traditional road map could be inaccurate.

Putting all of those potential solutions in the roadmap would not help, since you are only likely able to execute 1 or 2 out of many of those potential solutions.

Here comes a better way to road mapping.

OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS = OKR

The proper to carry out OKR is this
“I will X as measured by Y” where X is the objective and Y is the set of key results you want to achieve.

To bring us back to our real life example:
Objective: To become a top competitor for a retail product line.
Key results: Increasing average order value of that product when users check out related items.

We now can see a roadmap that fits into company vision with key results of what we are trying to achieve rather than “This feature will be developed in Q4”. Everyone can see this roadmap and understand the objectives alot more.