MBA893 Do You Need a Product Road Map?

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that makes you a better entrepreneur with every episode. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA and webinar Ninja. And in today's episode you will learn do you need a product roadmap? A lot of startups start with a product roadmap and then iterate and add to the product roadmap as they go along. But is this really necessary? And is it really necessary for every business, a product roadmap is basically an outline or a timeline of what the product will look like or be every step of the way. And often in a roadmap will go on for 12, 18, even 24 months sometime. Sometimes these product roadmaps are public, so the company actually shows on their website their product roadmap and show customers what they're gonna be working on in the next 18 months or so. And some are private, some are just for the company so they know what they're shooting for in the next 18 to 24 months. So in today's episode we're gonna talk about if this is really necessary. Do you need to make it public? How do you create a product roadmap? Do you need some sort of fancy tools or software? And if it's really applicable to every single business? I've built products and services and businesses without a product roadmap and with and I'll share my experiences with both sides. And it's not black and white. Sometimes it's really useful. Sometimes it may not be so useful, depending on what you're building. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So do you need a product roadmap? Like I said before, I've built businesses without one and with one, and there's a huge difference. Product roadmaps can be incredibly helpful no matter what business you have, even if you have a service business. And I'll give you some prime examples. But first, I want to give you the general benefits of a product roadmap. Then I'll get into what are some benefits or uses of a product roadmap, depending on the business or product you have, or even service. And then lastly, I'm going to teach you how to create one. It's not that complicated. It can be super simple. So let's start with the general benefits of a product roadmap. The first thing is that it doesn't take long to create one. And I'll show you in a bit how to. So the actual effort of creating one is not that much, meaning that the benefit really outweighs the effort of creating one, no matter what kind of business you have. Number two, it's just great to know your plan, know where you're going. It's a good chance for you to also dump all your ideas, everything you want to do with this business or this product, with this service, from the most simplest ideas to, you know, the most advanced features or, you know, iterations of your product. This gives you a chance just to be creative and just, you know, let loose and say everything you want out of this business or product. And then it's kind of a time where you just don't say no to anything. You just say yes and you accept all ideas. Once you have all these ideas, then you're going to be able to organize them into a actual plan, a roadmap, a timeline. And what this does, it really helps you understand your product better, what's important, what's not so important. And as I'll show you, when you create your own map, you're going to write a huge statement at the top. You're going to have a couple of statements, but. But the first thing they're gonna say is, what does your customer need? And that's what your roadmap is all about. What do they actually need to do what you're promising, whether you have a physical product, a software, a course, or even a service. If you're a photographer and you do wedding photography and your promises is that I'm gonna take photos that you'll actually go back and look at and remember your wedding instead of forgetting about it completely and never looking back on those photos, then that's really what your promise is. That's really what you need to deliver. Everything else is just, you know, kind of extra. And your product roadmap will help you sift that out. Number two, it allows you to know what to do when you don't hit your deadlines. This is so important. No matter what you're creating. When you have a plan, it says like, March, I'm going to complete this. You know, April, I'm going to complete this. May, I'm going to complete this. If by the end of April, you don't complete what you're supposed to complete, you don't just forget about that stuff. You have to push it down to May. So. So your roadmap has to be flexible and it keeps track of what's going on. And also it allows you to analyze yourself. Am I putting too much on each iteration? On my team, myself, on the product itself. Now, like I said, some people put their product roadmap on their website. They make it public. You don't have to do this. I have to reiterate this. You don't have to do this. You can just keep this within your team so everybody's on the same page. But if you do, it kind of shows people where you're heading with your product, what your vision is. And generally people know that this is a plan, it's not a promise. This is what you hope to do in the next 18 to 24 months. Some people think it's as good marketing. It shows a reason to stick around with your product or service because great things are coming. It also illustrates the vision of the business, like I said. But this is not a must have, and I highly don't recommend you doing it if you don't feel comfortable doing this. You want to keep your cards close to the chest, that's fine. You want to just keep it within your team so they know what's going on, that's good too. Most of the benefits of a roadmap are for you and your development of that product or that service. A product roadmap is also great to give you the big picture of what you're trying to build, what kind of product you're trying to build. You start with something very minimal, viable, you iterate, you improve, you add things. And then towards the end of the roadmap, you realize, wow, that's a very robust product or service. This is great. When you're hiring new teammates or people joining your team, and they want to have a better understanding of what you're trying to do with your business, with your product. A roadmap gives them a clear understanding of where you're going. It also shows them where you've been. So there's some context about the team they're joining and what they're building with you. Now, I want to get into how to create a product roadmap, and then I'm going to go into the specific benefits of a product roadmap for every kind of product or service that you may have. So creating one can be as simple as a piece of paper and a pencil. I know that sounds simple. You're thinking, oh, you're going to tell me some software I can use or some sort of project management software. Maybe we're going to be using some autocad. No, we're not going to use any of that stuff, or you don't have to use any of that stuff. It's actually quite helpful to see visually. So what I would do is probably get a big piece of paper, maybe a piece of A4 paper, and you're going to just dump every single thing this product will do from now until 24 months from now. I know that seems like a long time. So if that seems too much for you to look into the Future, make it 12 months. Make it 18 months. Up to you. If you want to make it simple, just make it 12 months. Just dump everything you want this product to do. So I'm going to give you some examples. So with Webinar Ninja, when we started that business back in 2014, you know, we'd write something as simple as being able to run a webinar with one host and be able to broadcast to hundreds of people. So broadcasting, that's one thing. Chatting with my audience, that's another thing. Now, these seem like simplistic things, but the product has to deliver that. I have to make sure that these basics have to be there. The product needs to offer some sort of landing page so people can register for webinars. The product has to offer some way to collect these names and email addresses so that the host can have them or export them some way, or transfer them over to their mailchimp account. And we would just write them all down and it would be like a list of maybe 200 items. And it starts very simple, then it ends up at the bottom, like, you know, social media integrations and Zapier integrations, and being able to upload your Slides, which is what we're doing right now with 5.0. And it's basically a wish list. But you have to get granular. You have to say, this is what the product has to do. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And this is gonna take some time. You may need a couple of sit downs, a couple of sessions, because you might forget some things and say, oh, I forgot something very basic. I need to add that to the timeline or to the list at this point. So what you're gonna do is just dump it in a list. Once you have this list of items that this product has to do, you can flip the piece of paper or you can grab another piece of paper if you like. And what you're gonna do is that you're going to create a line for every two months of work. So say, for example, we're doing a roadmap for 12 months. So that means we're gonna have to do six lines. Six. So literally I'm gonna put six lines across this actual piece of paper. And in these six lines I'm gonna put in these features, these product features that I want to have my product do on these lines. So you might be saying, oh man, I'm gonna have to fit a lot of stuff on each line. That means you got too much. So you're gonna have to cut some things out and move them to the next 12 months. So what you wanna do is basically create these eight weeks or two months of iterations. Two months are called sprints. Now in the development world, sprints, but I'm talking about big picture planning right now. And you can break down these lines into two weeks if you'd like later on. But right now we want to say every two months this is going to get completed. That means your first iteration of the product should be done in two months. And then the next iteration, then the next iteration, then the next iteration. Now obviously these iterations will get longer and more complicated as your product gets bigger and is out in the world for longer time. But we're just getting started here, so make sure you fill out these lines. Every line represents two months for doing a year. We're going to have six lines, put it on a timeline. So say, so these are the 10 items that I'm going to complete in the next two months. And I would put them in order of importance or sequence. So you know that the month of January and February, these are the things that are going to get done from, you know, March and April. This is what's going to get done. You know the drill, it's pretty simple. And then you could see it visually. And I say use a pencil because later on you're going to want to erase things, add them to the next timeline so you know what's going on. This is the simplest way to create a roadmap. And you could do this no matter what. Your product doesn't have to be software. It could be a course. You may want to add supplemental course. Might be a membership program where you release new courses every month or two, or new guides or new tutorials, or you do live webinars. You need to put that on the timeline. You might have a service, like I said, photography. And one iteration of that is you're going to do wedding photography. You only do weddings and you offer certain packages. But then maybe you want to expand and start doing honeymoons as well. And that's the next iteration. You might want to expand later on and not just be a photographer, but be a media company and team up with a videographer and offer video services where you create a trailer for their special day. You get the point iterations of what your business or product is going to be. Now, you can use software if you like. We use Basecamp as our project management software. We like Basecamp because it's simple, it's easy to use. We love what the company stands for. Jason Fried is one of the those people I follow, listen to, listen to his talks. I really jive with what he has to say. I like his point of view in business and I like why he built Basecamp. So that's a shameless plug of Basecamp. They're not sponsors or anything, but we love using them. And with Basecamp, you can do lists, like to do lists, and you can do that. You can create a list for this month or the next two months, and that could be your roadmap and you just list things. And I like the list view. That's how we do our roadmap. So I know that, like, for example, we released 5.0. So 5.1. What does that look like? And 5.2, 5.3. All these iterations have lists under them. And then we can drag things from one list to another if we don't hit the deadline or maybe we are early and we can push something from 5.2 to 5.1. So if you'd like to use the software, I think Basecamp is a great tool to do this. Trello is also great. They use these cabana cards that you can use for a roadmap Meister Task is another tool if you love software. But I highly recommend going paper and pencil. If you're just getting started and you just want to see a visual representation, you can do both, of course, and that would be even better. You can have that piece of paper hanging on the wall of your office and have it on soft words on the actual software for your whole team to see. Now, I touched how a roadmap would help any kind of business, whether it's service or software. But let me give you a few more examples. When I started one of my earlier businesses, a clothing line, we had a very successful clothing line called Zeno Designs, where we made custom tailored clothing for men. You're like, what? Really? Yeah, really? This, this was a business I had in the early 2000s, and it was really fun. But to be honest with you, I wish I had a product roadmap from the start with that business because it would have gave me more direction. A lot of times when you don't have a plan or roadmap, you just kind of try things and you don't really have a plan. You don't do things sequential, you don't build up to something, you actually just start trying things. You spend money, you see, if that works, that doesn't work, then you have nothing to refer to. And even with a business with a physical product like clothing, a roadmap is great. Because I could say I'm going to start with these models, see how they go. If they do well, then I'm going to try different colors of that shirt, see how those colors go, see the best selling colors, keep those, move on to the next model. Instead, we tried a whole bunch of different shirts of all the different colors. At the same time, it's hard to focus, hard to know what's working, and at the same time, you're spending a lot of revenue for no reason. You can just go step by step. We had no roadmap for our online presence, our online website where people shop for the clothing. We had different iterations of the website, some major redesigns, and a roadmap would have been really helpful just for that. So even if your business is selling physical goods, a roadmap can really help. It may not be as detailed as maybe a software business or software products roadmap, but it'll give you some guidance, it'll give you some plan and allow you to step back and work on your business instead of in your business, which I think is very healthy, especially as a leader of your business. I mentioned courses. I was so glad that we had a roadmap when we started the $100 MBA courses back in 2013. A lot of people don't know this, but we started with only about 70 videos, about eight courses, and now we have over 180 video because we listen to our actual members. What kind of courses do they want? We iterated, we changed, we updated courses, we added new courses based on the needs of our students. And having a roadmap really helped us have that in play. Having a roadmap, even for a consultancy business, or let's say, for example, you're a developer, a freelancer, you can just have a roadmap based on your prices. Hey, I want to charge this much now, but I want to increase my prices to this much eventually. Let's have a roadmap where I increase the prices. What do I offer with these prices? I got to justify these prices. You know, why am I increasing them? Has my portfolio grown? I got to make sure that it is growing along with the actual roadmap. You get the point. Roadmaps allow you to have some clarity. It also allows you to be flexible and know how to pivot and roll with the punches when things don't go as expected, which will happen. Hey, Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?

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One of the reasons why I recommend having a product roadmap is that the action of creating a roadmap is admitting to yourself, coming to the realization that things are not always going to go to plan. By having a plan, you realize that, hey, I'm going to need to adjust it. Things will happen. A important teammate that's working on the product will get sick, will have to take some time off. You'll have some challenges when it comes to funding. You might have some challenges when it comes to the actual market. Meaning to release something quickly or quicklier than expected because your competitor came out with something. You get the point. Having a plan allows you to be flexible, allows you to iterate, change and understand that I will try my best to follow this plan, but the plan is here so I can change it and modify it as things go in different directions. Sometimes, I mean, when I look at my roadmap for the hundred dollar mba, when I look at my roadmap for webinar Ninja Boy, were there some changes. But when things hit you and things don't work out, you can always look back at your roadmap and quickly know what to do instead of put your hands up in the air and be like, hey, I don't know what to do anymore. I hit this roadblock. What do I do now? What do I focus on? Having a roadmap that allows you to say, hey, this is what needs to get done. This what is important. This is what's next. It's right in front of me. All right, I hope that helped. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, let us know in an iTunes rating and review. We would love to hear from you. And remember, if you don't hit subscribe, you don't get access to our over 890 episodes in our archives. By hitting subscribe, it allows you to download all our episodes. That's nearly over 900 episodes and we have some gems in there, so make sure you hit subscribe so you can have access to those. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes we're in a rush to build and to put things out in the world and we don't take the time to plan. Trust me, I was one of those people before. I'm so glad that I saw the light and realized that planning is really important and it doesn't take that much time. Creating a roadmap will take you an hour or two max, and you can always just start it and continue to iterate as you're building. So get to it, start planning and thank me later. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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