The deck was presented to the whole Old St Labs team on how we are going to start to change the way we build out our product roadmap and how we can leverage the knowledge in the company and our users.
A big thank you to @tconrad for his article here - http://bit.ly/1JiUFep that inspired the whole presentation. We used all of his thoughts and made them work in our current process.
3. We’re in a really exciting, scary, and
intense part of the products lifecycle. 😅
4. Our biggest challenge as we continue to grow over
the coming months is how we all stay aligned and
all have a voice 🗣 into where we take the product.
5. We are currently making big decisions without
all the team being behind what we are working on.
More importantly not everyone understands why we
are working on them and what value they will bring,
which will soon lead to a lot of frustration. 🤔
6. They’re either gut feelings that a part of the product
needs to be improved or a reaction to a piece of
feedback from an important customer. All valid routes,
but we can’t operate like this going forward. 🙌
What feels like a priority today almost certainly won’t be
the next week so managing work like this is impossible.
7. We’re also not in the market for a fail fast and
fail often mentality at the moment. 🤕
We need to make sure whatever gets put into the
product funnel we get right and understand
exactly how many resources it will take.
8. Each epic piece of work is a massive investment.
1 month design
+
2 engineers for a month if not more
=
A nice a lump of cash from the investment we
are raising!
9. So, as much as the product team are guiding the
product well so far (yes, well done Nick, thanks Nick 👀),
it’s becoming very clear that, as a small team, we need
to leverage the knowledge 🤓 and insight from each
member of the team to build out a roadmap that we all
believe in and can get behind.
11. We need to move fast 🏃
But also incredibly carefully
12. 90 days is the length of one quarter.
That’s how far you can reasonably think and
plan ahead when you’re in the stage we are at.
I could easily put together a 6 month roadmap and 3
months in we could find ourselves working on work that
just isn't a priority anymore 😫 Things change fast.
13. So as a * team each quarter we need
to ask ourselves one question.
14. What would be stupid for
us not to do in the next
90 days?
15. ✋ Before I explain how it all works…
This is not about all the cool things we think we might
want to do. The bar is, someone has to be able to
articulate why the company would be dumb not to
invest in a particular idea or feature in the next 3
months.
16. You’re also not trying to impress anyone. 💃
This shouldn’t be a competition for how many ideas
people can think up. The person pitching for an
idea has to truly believe it is vital for the
company right now.
19. In the run up to the sessions, people will have
the chance to get their idea(s) down, one idea
per slide. 📋
You will then pitch the idea to your team
in the session and discuss.
20. Description
How would it Value the User? What does Success look like?Why do we need to do it in the
next 90 days?
Feature name
21. Just so we’re clear…
You will not be judged for not providing any ideas.
You will be, however, if you submit every idea
under the sun without giving some thought into
where the company is currently and how we can
add value to the user.
23. After the team sessions, it’s important for us to
work out a rough estimation of how long each
feature will take to build. 🛠 I will do this with the
help of Mike and the engineering team.
24. How do we work this out I hear you say…
The first step would be to work out how much
engineering resource we have in total and we
would do this in pounds. 💷 The key here is to be as
realistic as possible.
25. How it works is we put a value on an engineers time.
So, the cost of one engineer for a month = £50
Then the cost of one engineer for 3 months = £150
The total cost of 4 engineers for 3 months = £600
27. With our £600 engineering resource value in mind we
can start putting prices on each feature.
28. To give an example
A particular feature that would take 1 engineer 2 weeks
would have a price of £25.
If we wanted to add this to our 90 day roadmap, the price
would come out of our £600 budget.
29. The next and final step is to run a prioritisation
session where a small team will get together for a
longer period of time (around 3 hours)
The Prioritisation Team
Mark, Mike, Nick, Darragh, Jordan
30. Before we start it’s important that we discuss what
stage the business is at and the current business
objectives and goals to get everyone on the same
page.
For example
If our overall goal with the product was to increase
engagement, this would have a massive impact on
what features would get prioritised.
31. If 5 people were involved in the prioritisation
session, we would split the £600 budget between us
in the form of £20 post it notes.
32. Then comes the hard (and fun) part. The prioritisation
team review the slides and begin “buying” the
features they think are most valuable by applying
their £20 post it notes.
33. After a lot of discussion and the moving around of post
it notes, in the end we will get to a point where only a
small number of features approximating our capacity
are left standing. Most of the features won’t actually
make it.
Brutal I know, but this is why we are going through this
process. 😳
35. Our 90 day roadmap is born…
We will then produce a blog
post off the back of the
session to explain what has
been prioritised and why we
are all aligned as a team. This
will also act as a great post
for sales and marketing to do
their thing with.
38. We want to start this 90 days on the 26th September
The team sessions will happen the week starting 5th
September and the final prioritisation session will be
on the 9th. This will give design a 2 week buffer
before the 90 days start so we can get going.