Strategic Roadmapping Workshop

Understand product strategy and customer needs, visualize opportunities, and map them to a timeline.

Overview

In this two-day workshop, teams collaborate to create a product (or portfolio) roadmap. The workshop combines top-down strategy definition with bottom-up planning to help balance strategic bets and user needs with the necessary support and small feature development required to keep the lights on. In the end, you have a 12-18 month roadmap and a clear definition of a path forward for further product validation and learning.

This workshop immerses participants in techniques and activities that help teams visualize, organize, and sequence the mountain of requests and ideas that are piling up. Through practices like collaborative framing, work in progress (WIP) visualization, affinity mapping, persona development, value stream/opportunity mapping, and more, you determine the most strategic things to build and subsequently, create a product horizon that delivers value and fuels product learning.

By the end of the workshop you will have:

  • A product frame (light-weight business case)
  • 1-2 user personas (if applicable)
  • High-level visualization of your product journey
  • A 12-18 month product roadmap

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Full course details

Course outline

Part 1: Collaborative Product Framing

  1. Gain a common understanding of the who? what? and why?
  2. Establish goals and success measures for the product/product line and map those to corporate initiatives
  3. Identify the target market segments and design targets
  4. Identify and document market conditions
  5. Discuss and document strengths and constraints that will be leveraged or need mitigation plans

Part 2: Market Segment/Design Target Definition

  1. Prioritize identified target design targets or market segments
  2. Identify design target’s desired goals and outcomes
  3. Define how to measure success in meeting the needs of the design targets
  4. Develop pragmatic personas for 1-2 design targets

Part 3: Visualize Your Candidate Initiatives (Large and Small)

  1. Apply techniques for visualizing our opportunities for solving user problems. It might look like one or more of the following:
    1. Story, opportunity, or value stream mapping
    2. Affinity mapping
    3. Work in progress (WIP) mapping
  2. Discuss balance of market needs, buyer needs, user needs, and product needs (e.g. KLO or technical health)

Part 4: Techniques for Grouping and Sequencing Those Ideas – Affinity Mapping & Customer Journeys

  1. Discover horizontal paths through the experience or other logical groupings
  2. Identify areas with greatest need for minimal viable learning (MVL)
  3. Begin to order or “bucket” initiatives

Part 5: Roadmapping

  1. Relative sizing of initiatives
  2. Sequence based on cost/benefit analysis and release robustness
  3. Identify the MVP and subsequence release timing and form into a roadmap artifact
Audience / prerequisites

Anyone who is charting the course for a product or group of products will benefit from this workshop.Typically, this includes:

  • Product Managers
  • Product Owners
  • Engineering/IT Leaders
  • Business Stakeholders
  • Any key influencers

Smaller groups are recommended to take this together.

In this class you will learn how to
  • Establish high-level mission and goals alignment; gain a common understanding of the following:
    • What you are building?
    • Why are you building it?
    • Who you are building it for?
  • Identify and understand your markets, buyers, and users to provide clarity to where value lies for them
  • Visualize existing work (big stuff and small stuff) and group it into like groups
  • Discuss “Minimum Viable Product” using journeys, affinity mapping, and more
  • Align to a consolidated product (or portfolio) roadmap and ensure a common understanding of your product(s) horizon and strategy 

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