Product Roadmap Template For 2016 Is Not A Spreadsheet.

Serge Doubinski
iheartpm
Published in
5 min readJan 20, 2016

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For the last two years I have been publishing a spreadsheet-based template for maintaining your product roadmap. (2014, 2015)

Having used it myself across 3 companies with many products it was great to see hundreds of other Product Managers around the world utilizing it in their own product planning.

These template posts always got a lot of traffic, exposing a need for a simple yet comprehensive way of displaying our roadmaps. The spreadsheet format worked. Not because it was the best, but because it was the best at the time.

This year is different. There is a new tool available which I’ve been using for over 6 months and I’m confident that it will help you significantly improve your planning process. I even think that it will make you a better Product person as well.

In 2015, Product Management discipline continued to evolve and topics like Theme Based Product Planning and OKR focused Development got a lot of well deserved attention.

As more Product organizations started looking into overhauling their planning methods, I too started revisiting how other teams capture Goals and Themes. That’s when I discovered Aha!.

Aha! Roadmapping Software (www.aha.io)

The visual roadmap feature in Aha! immediately peaked my interest and I was starting my trial in no time. Six months later I can confidently say that this is one of the most comprehensive and robust tools I’ve had the pleasure of using.

Aha! comes with a wide variety of features which help you plan and visualize your roadmap as well as prioritize projects in one place. As a result of being so comprehensive, transferring your activities to Aha! will take some time.

Customizing Aha! to match the specificity of your product is key. Luckily, their team has been doing a really good job walking through all features on their blog and the help center.

Even then, once my 30-day trial was over, I asked for an extension just to make sure that all this effort will pay off. Moving all the strategic and tactical workflows into a single tool was a big decision and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t rushing into it.

To understand what makes this tool work, let’s briefly look at the features that directly parallel those of our spreadsheet template.

Presentation.

The reason why the spreadsheet works is because of the intuitive view it gives into the plan for the year. Color bricks representing initiatives and projects were easily understood at a glance.

Aha! allows us to automatically generate the same view but with many more sorting and filtering options. Check out this post to see it in action.

For those who used the spreadsheet this should look very familiar.

Collaboration

I specifically used Google Sheets for the template because of easy sharing and commenting that was built into Google Docs. This is critical when you’re evangelizing your roadmap across your organization.

Aha! does this with commenting and page publishing. A clean and configurable view for any one in your org is just a few clicks away.

Sharing in Aha! with the “Notebook” feature.

Goal and Initiative ties.

One of the main points of the template was organizing your plans by using initiatives and tying them to goals and metrics. This is where Aha! especially shines.

There is a clear hierarchy for Goals → Initiatives → Features, which organically forces you to constantly consider the bigger picture.

Because Features can be seamlessly connected to Initiatives, you constantly ask yourself “Why would we build this?”. This forces a tremendous amount of focus and makes prioritization and backlog grooming a lot easier.

Initiatives and Goals

Prioritization

Speaking of prioritization. Moving projects and initiatives in the spreadsheet was kind of a pain and probably my least favorite part about it.

Depending on your product, your priorities might shift more or less frequently but no matter what, they will shift.

It has been very interesting to use a feature called Aha! Scorecards to prioritize both Features and Initiatives. Similar to sizing exercises with your development team, time and practice are needed to transform guesses into more precise estimates.

Second only to generating ideas for your products, prioritization is where the Art of product management is just as important as Science. These scorecards helped my teams go from “We think this is more important” to “Here’s why we think this is more important”.

Summary

I know this post makes it obvious that I have become a very big fan of Aha!.

I have not only started using the service for my teams, but also recently held a demo session for 12 other Product leads in my company. Most of them became interested in considering it for their teams as well. It will be interesting to see if we can standardize our planning processes further by using the same tool and I’ll write a follow up on this later.

There are many features not covered by this post and half a year later I’m still discovering new things, so to get the fullest picture please go to aha.io and check out their overview of the product.

One last thing that I wanted to mention was price. At $1,200 a year for the Enterprise plan this might be a bit tough for teams with smaller budgets. Our working spreadsheet template was free after all. Which is why I highly encourage you to check out the 30 day trial.

When you do check out the trial, make a point of using the product heavily, don’t jump in there only for a day or two. You have to make sure to set yourself up to derive all the value the service provides.

Another argument for spending the money is that every year you probably spend countless hours putting together your Product Roadmap, followed by many hours of looking at it and talking about it. Add all those hours up and estimate the cost you’re already investing. Then consider improvements on every aspect of that process.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

Happy 2016 planning!

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