4/7/22, 07:11 2021-08-16 - Your Product Roadmap: Feature Wish List or a Journey to Achieving Your Long-Term Vision

2021-08-16 - Your Product

Roadmap: Feature Wish List or a
Journey to Achieving Your
Long-Term Vision?
Before the talk gets started:
• How this discussion will go:
◦ 20 - 30 minutes short presentation on today's topic.
◦ Remainder of the time will be spent discussing your questions.
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▪ Vincent Ortiz will collect the questions and pick the ones we'll answer
today.

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4/7/22, 07:11 2021-08-16 - Your Product Roadmap: Feature Wish List or a Journey to Achieving Your Long-Term Vision

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he's presenting on the screen.
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We will post the recording for this session within a day.

Notes for today's discussion:

A Product Roadmap is a technique for planning functionality beyond the current
release.
Teams use them to prioritize and allocate work in the future.
Management uses them to communicate what's planned for the future.
Sometimes they are shared with key customers.
There are two common approaches to populating the roadmap with future product
capabilities.
• The "Wish List" approach
• The "Vision Journey" approach

The "Wish List" approach is the most common.

It consists of a schedule of upcoming product features.
Features are added because someone wishes them into existence.

https://centercentre.notion.site/2021-08-16-Your-Product-Roadmap-Feature-Wish-List-or-a-Journey-to-Achieving-Your-Long-Term-Vision-df89e77050cb4ba9b… 2/6
4/7/22, 07:11 2021-08-16 - Your Product Roadmap: Feature Wish List or a Journey to Achieving Your Long-Term Vision

There are 4 common ways features get into a wish list roadmap.
• The Executive Epiphany
A senior stakeholder comes up with a "great idea" and nobody can say no.
• The Industry Conference
A senior stakeholder hears industry buzz about the next important thing.
• Competitive Parity
There's a perception the organization is (or will be) losing sales because
they need to reach competitive parity.
• Customer Request
A customer has promised a big sale in return for a new product capability.
Wish List roadmaps have difficult flaws for teams.
Features rarely are related to each other.
The context switching from one feature to the next is expensive.
The addition of features leads to experience rot.
Experience Rot: As features increase, so does complexity. When
complexity increases, the experience degrades.
The UX and development teams often can't learn what the real customer need
for a feature is.
There may not be one.
It's difficult to create a compelling story of why customers should adopt a new
release.
Marketing has to take unrelated features and craft a unified story that
makes them seem related.
Features may or may not be useful to people.
Because most of the features are suggested from stakeholders with vast role
power, it's hard to say "No."
Product suffers from being bloated by features that are infrequently used.

https://centercentre.notion.site/2021-08-16-Your-Product-Roadmap-Feature-Wish-List-or-a-Journey-to-Achieving-Your-Long-Term-Vision-df89e77050cb4ba9b… 3/6
4/7/22, 07:11 2021-08-16 - Your Product Roadmap: Feature Wish List or a Journey to Achieving Your Long-Term Vision

The "Vision Journey" approach builds off of an experience vision.

Each release is a step closer to the vision.
Features all build upon the last round of features.
The product feels like it is being enhanced with reason.
Because experience visions are best built from extensive research, the
roadmap is also built from extensive user research.
The features built match problems users truly have.
Complexity is reduced as the team is constantly monitoring the overall
experience.
Features are built to match a future experience vision that isn't complex
itself.
Teams can say "no" to ideas that aren't on the path to the vision.
An experience vision is a story version of a distant UX outcomes.
A UX outcome answers the question If we do a great job on this product, how
will we improve someone's life?
The experience vision takes the answer and tells a compelling story.
The outcomes come from a deep, shared understanding of the users'
current experiences.
The experience vision is vetted and bought into by the senior leadership.

When working with experience visions, the team wants to focus on the Problems
to solve.
Problems to solve are the obstacles that prevent today's users from achieving
the UX outcomes.
It's a mindset shift to go from focusing on features to problems to solve.
Research is needed to get the items on the roadmap.
This is the same research that the team based the experience vision on.
It shifts the research from during the project, to when the capability is being
considered.
The advantage to that early research is that it gives the UX team a headstart.

https://centercentre.notion.site/2021-08-16-Your-Product-Roadmap-Feature-Wish-List-or-a-Journey-to-Achieving-Your-Long-Term-Vision-df89e77050cb4ba9b… 4/6
4/7/22, 07:11 2021-08-16 - Your Product Roadmap: Feature Wish List or a Journey to Achieving Your Long-Term Vision

Features in a "Vision Journey" roadmap are building on each other.

The team can keep growing and using the research.
"Vision Journey" roadmaps are more strategic than "Wish List" roadmaps.
They represent a long-term plan to a much better user experience.
This drives the delivery of better-designed products and services.

Upcoming Talk UX Strategy discussions:

How to Measure Anything UX
Monday, August 23, 2021 at 2pm ET (18.00 GMT)
Gut Feeling vs UX Research: A Case for Both
Monday, August 30, 2021 at 2pm ET (18.00 GMT)
Recruiting UX Research Participants: The Hard Work to Make It
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