Roadmaps: Share Them With Your Customers!

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery. I'm here as usual with Christian. Christian, how are you doing today? Alex, I'm doing very well, even though it's quite late and it's a pleasure to see you as well. Yeah, today we're starting with a late night recording. That's a little bit our theme. Honestly, it's with the world getting a little bit back to normality and COVID facing out thanks to vaccines and I don't know, that's how we got there. But it's getting tough because I feel like everyone has like more of a personal life again. So it's like really, we need to really focus on scheduling these sessions. And that's why today here in Berlin, we're looking at like, it's almost 11pm. But there's nothing better than a nice product chat in the evening. Yeah, before you go to sleep, talking about product, that's the dream of every product manager, I guess. Actually for me, it's the later I think about work, the harder it is for me to sleep. I keep having these thoughts of maybe I should work on X, Y, Z. Especially the conversations with you start like a little bit like my brain that starts working on what I should do and what I have to do. But yeah, per definition, that's the job or the job of never tired, always active brain that keeps me awake. Anyway, Christian, there is like a topic that we wanted to discuss for a while. We never managed to talk about it like privately. So even better to do it directly on a recorded session, which is the topic of transparency. Let's call it transparency of product roadmaps, company roadmaps to their users and like publicly sharing a roadmap. So I know that's something where you've also been thinking about a lot. What are your thoughts? Yeah, transparency is totally overrated. No, we talked a lot about making the roadmap transparent to your stakeholders, but there's also the other side. And I just, I mean, recently is maybe wrong, but you see this more and more popping off in the FinTech area, especially in the crypto area, that new projects, new startups, new companies are publicly sharing what they are planning to build in the future. And I found it just super interesting. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you about it to brainstorm the pros and cons and also what it needs to build and share a roadmap with the customers. Yeah, happy to hear your thoughts on how to get started. I'm actually thinking like there is a term and I'm just like, as usual, extremely bad at remembering exactly what the term specific is. Is it something like open data startup or open startup? It's like similar thing where startups start from day one, sharing all their costs, revenues, et cetera, to the whole world. When we talk about transparency, right? But this usually goes hand in hand with the roadmap as well. Yeah. Because I'm thinking the first thing that comes to my mind is that a couple of years ago, I was working on a project, financial space, and we were talking about creating something in the space of sustainable finance, a lot of transparency of where the money of a specific bank goes to. And obviously this whole theme and you raised that open startup was something that I looked into. And I found a couple of startups that really laid everything open. And it was like beyond just like data and the KPIs and the customer and their performance numbers, but it was also like around the roadmap. And I happened to come across this website that beyond just like having a traditional product roadmap, they really had a very interactive site, some form of a tree where to visualize, okay, what are the things that they are working on? What are the dependencies? What are the things that they can build after they launched a specific feature? Where are those things standing? Why are they on hold? Why are they in progress? How did they prioritize that? And generally speaking as a user, it feels like something that can be extremely valuable for me. Also in terms of decision-making, should I use this product? Because especially when you're a startup, sometimes you don't have the massive feature set that maybe a big competitor or a big company is. And it might be quite relevant also for a user who might have a specific needs to see, okay, what's on their roadmap? What are they actually planning on building? And is there maybe even a way where I can influence this, where I can upvote, downvote, where I can comment or share my feedback or share my feature requests. So definitely like purely looking at the user perspective, I think it can be a really nice benefit. And I don't know why a company shouldn't do it, to be honest. I remember the first time I saw a company roadmap that I really liked, by the way, was from Monzo, the FinTech company from the UK. They were very active on Twitter and shared their company roadmap on Twitter with a list of things and with check marks and things that were open. And I was like, wow, what a nice product team that is sharing what they are planning to build. And as you said, to me, it's super important as a customer to see what's coming up. But also if you remember back then when we talked about identifying customer problems, how important it is also to share with the world what you're planning and getting feedback. So if you have people who say, Hey, I don't want to see that feature on place one. We definitely need that or something else. So you get immediate feedback on how to reprioritize eventually and making sure that you hit what the customers need. And that's something where I see a big benefit of sharing a roadmap and also making sure that you stay in touch and connected to your customers. But what I found still very hard is making sure that you are developing a roadmap that is understandable. Fair enough. What do you see as something important to make it understandable to, I would assume non-product people, right? Because for me or you, it's probably easier to read a product roadmap or to read feature requests than for example, the average user with zero technical background. You're actually hitting it. It's terminology. And I think it's so important to make sure that you do not stuck in your bubble and use like this abbreviations or legal terms or compliant terms to tell people what you're building, how you deliver value. Usually on our roadmaps, we have things that are not necessarily only connected to the user. If you have to refactor services, build bigger backend features to be able to scale, you can share that. But if you're like a B2C product, do your customers really want to see that? No, they don't. They want to see what's coming up for them. And that's something where I think it's very important to ask yourself, Hey, what kind of value do we want to deliver and how do we phrase that in the roadmap? And actually, if you're doing it really well, you are already reflecting that in your backlog too, by connecting the tech stories to a user story or an epic that clearly highlights the customer value. But what about things? So as we've been talking about roadmaps, I also thought about different stages of companies that I worked at in the past. And I think sometimes you are in phases where you focus a lot on stability, where focus a lot on refactoring and so on, which I think are things that you don't want to necessarily put so much focus on a roadmap. Because as you say, it doesn't sound too exciting. It's not adding direct value to the user. If I'm cleaning up my code base, at the same time, if you remove it, it might look like you're not delivering anything. And that's a little bit like also the thing of if you start being transparent, I mean, it's actually also very transparent how you deliver, how well you manage to launch features, how much value you've created over a year. There are companies that probably look back at their roadmap or look transparently at their roadmap and be like, okay, this is all the value that we're generating over the year. If that's the case, probably such an initiative could even be a good hint from the management or to the management to rethink what they're doing and how they're working. But I feel like that's also sometimes the fear or the feeling that some companies have of, should I share it? Not to mention that there's another point, but we can probably come to that. I'm curious to hear your reaction on speeds and amount of features that someone can build. Yeah. First of all, if the only thing you are building for the next couple of months is refactoring and stability, then we should ask ourselves what's going wrong. But we've all seen it. It happens, but it's not healthy. So I mean, we should be honest. And if you are at the stage where you cannot share anything, I would recommend not sharing it, frankly speaking. However, but the question I'm asking myself is also how big the threshold is. Is there a buffer? We all know that what you're writing down on the roadmap is never 100% matching the day or the rough timeline that you're writing down there. And for sure, if you promise something by the end of Q1 and it is mid of Q2, I think your customers will be fine with it too. As long as you stay connected to them and giving them regular updates by saying, okay, we are about to launch the feature in four weeks, even though it's the end of Q1 or Q2, whatever you promised. So I think that's possible, but you have to stay in touch with the customers. So I think once you have opened this can of Pandora with being transparent and sharing things, you have to stick to it. But yeah, I'm also happy to hear how you would approach it. Yeah, I think I would almost approach it like a bit from, if we look at like user-centric development for me, opening the roadmap, sharing the roadmap publicly, it's also a really good way to get a sense and to get some feedback of what do people want? What do people upvote? What is like the feedback on a feature? Maybe it shouldn't be the case, but maybe there's some things that are actually more important than others. And I think that's, so it's a really nice first reality check, I would almost say, if you make it transparent beyond the whole aspect of like advertisement and making sure people know, what are you going to release? What is upcoming? There are so many products or tools that I use where I'm like in the beta program just out of curiosity to see what is coming next because I want to know that. And those are companies that don't have public roadmaps. So that's how I try to get like this proximity to the company. Great example is obviously I'm curious to know what's coming next. I'm curious, what are the features that are going to launch? Will I need them? How will they affect me? How will it affect the way of working? They've started working on branching, I think at the beginning of the year as a big Git fan, when it comes also to like how you store designs, but that's a longer story and then podcast episodes. That was great news for me because I was always looking for a plugin and alternatives. And I tested different things out of like, how can I have a workflow that's similar to Git? By knowing from their beta that they are launching branching, I knew that I don't have to look for alternatives. And for me, like these things are extremely helpful. At the same time, and now I'm just like thinking out loud, it's also not something that every user looks at, right? The average consumer doesn't do that either. So it's generally something where you have heavy users, early adopters, and so on. But these are the people that you need. Yeah. And you can create this community, right? Like you can get early feedback, you can involve them, you can collect feedback. I think there's a little bit like the part that you need to be careful because you might get a bias towards a certain user group and so on. But that's the way I look at it. Now, the only point that I wanted to throw in earlier is we know companies, we know how they think. A lot of companies are scared that the best competition might copy something. I think that's probably one of the main reasons why management would say we don't want to make it public. Understandable and not understandable at the same time. Why not understandable? If you are in a highly competitive environment, maybe not necessarily in FinTech, maybe there are more niche areas where the better ones win. Let's say Formula One, right? So Ferrari will not publish how they are going to build the engine next year because that would heavily impact all the other engineers eventually from the other teams. So for sure, there is sometimes a reason to hold back innovation or to hold back certain features that you want to build. However, overall, we are living in times where if you have enough money and if you have enough engineers, you can build everything you want in the shortest time. So if the competition wants to beat you, they will beat you and they will find a way. That's why I'm personally quite relaxed. So it's not about thinking in competition. It's about thinking about your customers. And the points that you just mentioned bring us also back to the beginning of the conversation. So what are the downsides? So there are actually no downsides of sharing the business roadmap, the product roadmap. So you can use it actually as almost a business and sales model by saying from day one, Hey, to my active user group, here is the product roadmap. You can influence it, give us feedback, lean customer development, lean startup, user-centric design. We can throw in all the buzzwords that go hand in hand as a positive side effect of publicly communicating the roadmap. So I think it's a good thing. And to all product managers out there, I can highly recommend on not only getting your shit together to make sure that you have a rough roadmap in place, but also start thinking about sharing it with the people. And if you don't want to share it with the whole world, you can maybe start with your best customers. Yeah. Or with beta pool or something. But I just want to get back to this whole competition kind of thing, because I do think, yes, it depends on how far do you look at it. Maybe you have one, two strategic goals that you don't want to publicly share, which can be fair. But I think it always comes down to, just by giving someone the headline, there's usually very few ideas that nobody else has. And I think the thinking behind it and the team who can pull it off and so on, that's pretty much like the competitive advantage that companies have. And it's the same conversation of when I hear founders or first-time entrepreneurs trying to get their first VC round and so on and so forth. And I have massive NDs that no VC will ever sign because they don't care and nobody's going to steal your idea. And I think it's a little bit like everyone's scared and everyone sees their ideas as something special. But I do believe that they're out there. Your competitors have probably thought about them. Maybe they have prioritized them, maybe they haven't, and so on and so forth. I'm not sure if general transparency across all companies could even be an advantage for the whole market to develop faster. The only, and now I have one thing that's probably a downside and one thing where you probably cannot do it. I think this could potentially be an issue for publicly listed companies. I was just about to say that. Or everything that has legal implications or legal and negative implications. Because it might affect valuations, especially when it's, okay, let's put it like this. Strategic goals, direction changes, and so on are probably not the best thing to put on there. Maybe your next merger or acquisition should also not be on there. Exactly. If you're a bank and you have an audit from the SEC or something, I don't think you're going to publish that. But yeah, fair point. At the same time, I'm looking at the Monzo roadmap just here. Opening and closing brackets just for tooling. I see that 90% of the open roadmaps are like a Trello board. So if anyone has concerns of like, how can I make it happen? How can I make this fancy website that Alex talked about at the beginning? Don't. Just use Trello. I think that's the easiest to get it out there and everything follows. But so just Monzo gives you a backlog, stretch goals, 2021 priorities, in progress, and life. So it's not like massive in advance. You can upload it, you can download it. You have a title and you have a short description. Pretty sure if someone reads like free ATM finder, they won't copy you or you don't have to be scared of like your competitors. Exactly. And maybe if someone from Monzo is listening, let us know. We would love to make a deep dive with you. Oh, yeah, actually. That sounds like a great interview. And maybe with that said, also a good outro for our today's episode. Yeah. If you know someone doesn't have to be at some doesn't have to be at Monzo. You can always find us at product-bakery.com. You have all the episodes there. You have a short transcription and a couple of like minutes for every episodes. You can leave your comments directly to interact with people or you can drop us a message or you can also find us on social media. We're always happy to talk to you. Christian, it was great to see you. Yes. But now I'm feeling sleepy. Let's all go to bed. Public roadmaps are exhausting. I'm actually wondering if people listen to this podcast when they go to sleep. Yeah. Or if it's more like on their way to work. Let us know. All right. Okay. Good, Alex. Take care. Bye-bye. And to everyone else, have a good night. Bye-bye. Bye.