Enhance your product roadmap using Milestones Professional

As a high tech account management professional with over 20+ years of industry experience, I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that getting clients to continually invest in your company's software products is directly related to how well you keep them aligned to your product roadmap. Seems obvious right? How hard can it be? As long as you're setting up key meetings for your client to interface with your product management team, what could possibly go wrong? Well, if you start thinking about all the current obstacles in play, you will quickly understand the challenge. Listed below are 3 common, yet often overlooked, points to consider before your next product roadmap initiative…followed by a time tested solution I am recommending to maximize your success.

Current realities impacting the success of your product roadmap:

More product choices.
It goes without saying that today your customers have a lot of choices. They can choose between implementing an on premise software product, connecting to a SAS (software as a service) product, or even combining strategies to use a hybrid approach. And if at any time they are not satisfied with the results, they can abandon your product and quickly migrate to a new alternative. Understand that your product roadmap is only one path and that your customers are always exploring alternate routes.
Information overload.
Suppose you're an IT professional responsible for ten or more vendor software products used in your company. Now imagine receiving a PowerPoint presentation for every product, each with 20 or more slides. Are you pretty excited about sifting through hundreds of slides trying to find support expiration dates, new version info, key product enhancements, beta releases, and more? Even if you’re lucky enough to have face to face meetings with each vendor, do you have a photographic memory? Are you organized enough to consolidate all the information and have it readily available, in just a quick glance, for upcoming internal meetings?
Responsiveness to change
Product requirements and dates can change on the turn of a dime. When they do, is your company's product management team able to update all their internal and external documents in a timely fashion? Furthermore, are your customer facing teams updating key clients? The slower you are to respond to these changes, the greater the chances your customers can drift into unchartered territory.

All of these real world obstacles can negatively impact the effectiveness of your product roadmap strategy and send your customers scrambling to react to situations you thought you prepared for months ago. This means you can no longer afford to treat your product roadmap as a one dimensional, series of static slides, (see Figure A). Instead, your roadmap should be a one to two page document, containing multiple data points that give users one click access to additional information. It should give your customers a clear understanding of current and future events so they can navigate safely ahead. The bottom line is you must have a more dynamic approach in place or your customers can quickly head down the wrong path, ultimately costing you their future business.

Figure A – A typical static product roadmap slide. There are no links to
additional data points and only one topic is addressed per slide .

So let’s begin discussing a great way to tackle these challenges. The important question to focus on is: How can you ensure your product roadmaps stand out from other vendors, are easy to understand, can be presented on 1 or 2 pages, provide access to multiple data points, and can be updated and shared in seconds?

As a longtime user of Milestones Professional by KIDASA Software, I’ve discovered you can accomplish all of these objectives and more. Throughout the years, I have used Milestones for a wide range of project scheduling and reporting needs and remain impressed by its strength to streamline and communicate time based data from a dynamic, Gantt chart interface.

The end result are stunning product roadmap dashboards I’ve created providing absolute clarity. They also give my customers that quick glance advantage, empowering them in future meetings so they can answer questions on the fly, instead of frantically flipping through multiple slides. Below are 3 examples product roadmaps with explanations on how they can be used to help you with your product roadmap strategy, as well as some Milestones tips you’ll want to remember along the way.

Example 1 – Product roadmap dashboard for a single product.

This example illustrates a truly dynamic approach to communicating your product roadmap. Your customers now have access to multiple data points (industry trend info, version releases, new feature bullet points, support expiration timeframes, available beta versions, and training/webinar info), all from a single one page dashboard.

Tip: Use a legend to assign meaning to a set of symbols and provide that quick glance appeal.
Tip: Use vertical links to create dependencies between key dates. As dates change, you’re a single mouse click away from updating any dependent dates. The vertical links (dependencies) on the above roadmap are linking versions 3.0 and 3.5 to their respective training webinars in the bottom task line. If these version release dates slip, the webinars will automatically move forward by the same slipped time increment.
Tip: Use symbol notes to annotate your roadmap. The above symbol notes list product features, support expiration dates, webinars, and the industry direction trends on the top level task line.
Tip: Use symbol hyperlinks to provide one click-access to additional data points such as details on new features, end of support life documentation, and more. Additionally, any symbol hyperlink to a PowerPoint file can be preceded by a "slideNNN," and then, Milestones will open the PowerPoint file and your desired slide (NNN) will be displayed. For example "slide002,c:\temp\slideshow.ppt" will cause c:\temp\slideshow.ppt to be loaded into PowerPoint and slide 2 to be shown.
Tip: Use task row hyperlinks to provide one click access to your product’s primary web page.

Example 2 – Product roadmap dashboard for multiple products.

This example shows how you can track multiple products on a single roadmap. In addition to using a legend, and symbol/task hyperlinks, the following Milestones tips apply to this example:

Tip: Use a Birds on a Wire style chart to communicate key dates for multiple products.
Tip: Use symbol text to annotate symbols with product/version/release information.
Tip: Use the schedule recurring task feature to place recurring, quarterly patch sets on your roadmap.

For strategic clients, you can include customer specific information on your roadmap. This example adds additional data points (overall product health and quarterly support case metrics) to the previous example. A new color theme has also been added.

Tip: Use a datagraph to display quarterly support metrics. A type 2 value set is used to show quarterly values for each product, (support cases), alongside each task line which can then be totaled and displayed in the graph area.
Tip: Use a stoplight smart column to display overall product health for your customer.
Tip: Use free form text to point out key trends.
Tip: Use color themes to pick a presentation format that matches your client’s company colors.

Sharing your product roadmap:

Once you’ve chosen the best approach for your product roadmap, you should decide how to share your file with both internal and external stakeholders. Milestones provides a variety of options you can consider:

Share by saving as a PDF file or copying/pasting into Microsoft PowerPoint.
Publish to a web page.
Present from within Milestones using full screen mode.
Use the free Milestones viewer - Your coworkers and clients can download the viewer, then view and print your file.

Good luck with your next product roadmap!