Do Startups Need a Roadmap?
It is essential to be able to steer the resources and efforts of the organization in the right direction when looking to bring our startup ideas to life. This is one thing that product roadmaps can greatly help with. Surprisingly though, some think that startups need not bother with roadmaps. They might consider them as limiting or a waste of precious time. But does it really save time overall, to not think a couple steps ahead?
The Danger of Not Having a Roadmap
Startups do themselves a great disservice by going without a roadmap of any sort. While it is important to stay nimble and perhaps not over-plan the unknowable of an early-stage product, it is also important to look a couple steps ahead, and anticipate while may be true, given certain assumptions.
In the absence of a clear focus, the team becomes easily distracted. We can become carried away with almost every new feature – the “shiny new object” phenomenon. The lack of a product roadmap makes it difficult to tell whether a new feature ties into our strategic objectives or not. We also become vulnerable to the whims of various ideologies – one person might the product should be A while another thinks B. Engineering wants to re-architect – without a clear north star and plan to get there, you will end up doing a potpourri of all of these things.
If we work in a startup that chooses to do without a roadmap, it can become harder to tell what feature requests to say “Yes” or “No” to, since there is no clear plan (or vision) to defend. This can make us more vulnerable to influential customers. For instance, if a major well-paying customer requests for a feature, we might not be able to critically assess such a request before giving in.
Importance of a Startup Product Roadmap
One can easily deduce from the foregoing a key benefit we get from a roadmap is focus. The document helps us to make clear the vision and direction of our product. It provides a point of reference that we can quickly turn to if we are going off track. If it’s difficult to see any other benefits for having a product roadmap, that of promoting focus suffices. A lot could go wrong when work isn’t done strategically. The team should have something that helps it to make meaning out of the work that is to be done.
A product roadmap is useful for determining what matters most. There will often be a lot of things calling for our attention. It is up to us to try and figure out what’s more important. But how do we do that? The roadmap is what forms the basis of what is important. It determines priorities. The relevance of any work depends on what it contributes to our strategic plan. What then happens when a startup doesn’t even have such a plan? Team members easily get distracted by shiny new objects and this is capable of causing the young company to fail.
What’s a Startup Product Roadmap Like?
The roadmap of a startup will be unlike that of a mature product. Because finding product-market fit is paramount for a startup, it is necessary to do a lot of exploration, before building a lot of features and before created optimized systems. That means, the roadmap needs to be a lot more broad-stroke to allow for such explorations. And so whereas a mature product may have a precise timeline for delivering various features so the cross-functional teams can align, the startup roadmap tends to focus on broad themes and coarse timeframes instead.
Startups are also likely to plan for a shorter time horizon. You might see a Kanban style roadmap for example (Now, Next, Later) that only plans for the next 6 months rather than a 12-18 month horizon. A roadmap with a short time frame makes it easier for a startup to ship quicker. It enables fast feedback to help us quickly spot issues and adjust our priorities. Startups don’t have the luxury of resources to delay for too long before shipping.
In summary, even startups need a roadmap and need to think a few steps ahead – its just less precise and a shorter-time horizon, reflecting the early stage and all of the discovery that still needs to be done, which could lead to pivots or refinements in the vision, along the way to product market fit.
