Find an itch that’s worth scratching. Creating a product that addresses a problem or provides a tangible benefit for its customers and users is a big achievement. We can build a product that customers and engineering, sales, or the leadership team love. For example, we don’t want to build a Doctor Compare tool based on just the data our organization has. It must be based on what people want to see when they compare and select a doctor for their own medical conditions or demographic criteria.
We group initiatives into some high-level product themes to tell the story behind our plan. These product themes connect our plan to real customer benefit. They give the organization key concepts to rally around without getting buried in the weeds. Themes also help serve as guardrails for planning work ahead.
When you compare a new product to the competition and determine what makes it special, it can be tempting to provide all the competitors’ features but be better and offer more. In the government, a similar scenario is when we try to develop all kinds of features to support a legislation policy. Unfortunately, this can lead to an overly complex product that takes a lot of time and money to develop, has a vague value proposition, provides poor user experience, and is expensive to maintain. The trick is not to blindly add features, but rather focus on the desired outcomes for the users, leading to exploring which features you can even remove, thereby simplifying and decluttering our products.
As you already know by now, we like simplicity. We don’t blur the line between a product roadmap and a product backlog. We employ the product roadmap to describe our product’s overall journey and the backlog, derived from the product roadmap, to capture the details.
