Product Manager Accountabilities (Part II): 7 Essential Product Roadmapping Questions

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Product Management   Strategy  

In this article series, I am outlining 42 questions that a product manager should ensure are answered across the following SDLC phases:

• Product Strategy – The reason a product exists, and its intended goals.
• Product Roadmapping – The broad timeline in which future product capabilities are slated for release.
• Initiative Planning – The definition of a project to deliver capabilities within a budget and schedule timeline.
• Solution Design – The people, process, systems and policy designs required to deliver the required capabilities.
• Solution Development – The people, process, systems, and policy capabilities have been developed and are ready for testing, training, and deployment planning.
• Solution Readiness – All solution aspects are accepted and ready to be deployed.

In my previous article, I focused on seven product manager’s accountabilities when developing a product strategy. This article focuses on seven questions to be asked when developing a product roadmap.

1. Does the roadmap align to a clear product vision and strategy? This fits hand-in-glove with the product strategy phase. The product roadmap and its components generally should have a line-of-sight back to the strategy. Certainly, there may be some exceptions to this, but any exceptions should be accompanied with a clearly documented justification as to…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.