You Don’t Need a Roadmap, You Need a Flight Plan

WHERE TO: You navigating product development with flexibility and agility.

WHERE FROM: Struggling with rigid roadmaps that fail to account for unforeseen changes and challenges in your product development journey.

WHERE NEXT: Embracing the flight plan approach, continuously reassessing your product’s path, and making adaptive changes as needed.

Product Management is like using Google Maps

Imagine you want to go somewhere. You open the app, enter your destination, let it assess your current location, and it calculates a series of steps to get you to where you want to go. It also presents you with a few options to get there: you can walk, drive, or take a taxi, for example.

As a Product Manager, this exercise is part of your daily work. Your job is to take your product from A to B. To achieve that, you need to understand what your destination is (based on the company and product vision), assess where you are, and then define the steps that will allow you to get there.

 

To do this sort of planning, product managers tend to use roadmaps. This is a helpful tool to get everyone on the same page regarding scope, objectives, and timeline. Usually, leadership is also keen on this because it gives them a degree of certainty about what lies ahead.

A roadmap shows how you go from point A to point B. But the possibilities for this journey are virtually infinite. Think about it in traveling terms: you can go from Miami to Orlando following a straight road for 3 hours, or fly around the world for months before arriving back in Florida. Which one is best? There is no right answer, it depends on your situation - and this situation can change as you go.

When you create a roadmap, you prescribe the route upfront, based on what you know at that moment. Roadmaps are not inherently, they are actually quite good if we overlook the undeniable fact that changes are inevitable.

Let’s imagine you want to do that Miami - Orlando trip by flying around the world. You plan to take 3 months and visit every continent on the way. But after a few weeks, you run out of money because you miscalculated your expenses. Or you start getting homesick. Or a family member has an emergency and needs your help. What do you do? You adapt your plan. You get a direct flight back to Florida instead of continuing your journey. You still arrive at your destination, just not how you thought you would when you started your endeavor.

This is why so many of us find roadmaps challenging. They don’t account for unforeseen situations and force you to continue driving blindly. So what can we use instead? I’d like to suggest we start calling them “Flight Plans”.

 

Why You Need a Flight Plan

By now, we agree that circumstances change and a roadmap is too limited and restrictive. But why is a flight plan better? It is a plan generated before you leave the ground for the route you will take, it seems like a semantic change.

One benefit is that when you’re up in the air, you can adjust your route much more easily. Most of us have been on flights where, faced with turbulence, the pilot had to take the plane a little higher or a little lower. Or they changed the trajectory slightly to avoid a storm.

Would the pilot have known all of this before taking off? No, these are changes that are hard to forsee, but a good pilot will read the situation and adapt the flight plan accordingly. They’re constantly assessing the variables at their disposal and making decisions based on the collected information.

In most cases, the destination remains unaltered, unless it’s an extreme situation where a passenger feels bad on the flight and you’re forced to land in the closest city. This is equivalent to killing a feature before launch. But most of the time, the pilot brings the passengers to their planned destination eventually, even if the route has changed a bit.

You’re the pilot!

It’s your job to make a plan and be smart about adjusting it mid-flight. Rather than sticking to it, blind to what’s around you, find a way to escape the Build Trap. Like the pilot, you constantly need to assess where you are and the circumstances that have changed since your last evaluation. Does it make sense to keep the same route? Should you take a shortcut? Or maybe give yourself time to walk slowly and go in-depth into the context you’re navigating.

This is also what Google Maps automatically does. If there’s a traffic accident which will significantly delay your arrival, it re-routes and provides the current fastest option. Let’s imagine you were driving to your grandmother’s house and there was an accident on the road. You could have turned back and returned home, but you’d be aborting your plan and never getting to your destination. Instead, Google Maps recalculates the route and presents a better one based on the updated circumstances. That is also what a great Product Manager does, when faced with bumps in the road, they suggest alternatives which will still produce the desired outcomes.

Flight Plans and Stakeholders

This analogy will not only guide you to make better product decisions throughout the development process, but you can also use it to manage stakeholder expectations more effectively. Think about what would happen if you used the paradigm of flight plan during a kickoff and then later when providing status updates. How would that shift their expectations?

Before an initiative gets off the ground, you can share your flight plan with your stakeholders. Explain that this is your best guess for how we will get from where we are now, to where we want to go. Be sure to add that if unexpected turbulence appears, you will adjust accordingly (and therefore they should keep their seatbelts fastened ;)

You can also use those moments to get more clarity on the why. If a stakeholder tells you they want something, the reasoning behind their request isn’t always clear. But if you dig deeper, for example using the “Five Whys” technique, you’ll uncover the layers beneath it and get to the heart of the matter. You can ask questions such as “Why do you want this? Why is that important to you? What’s the value going to be?” and so on.

This helps get alignment on the final destination everyone wants to reach together. Armed with the information you’ll uncover, you can make more informed decisions about your flight plan. You can change the next steps and the “how” without compromising the end goal, fostering agility in your processes.

Imagine it’s time to communicate that something didn’t go according to the plan. Share what information you uncovered along the way as this will help you justify delays or changes in the planned features (hopefully based on customer inputs). As long as you can center the conversation on how you will still reach the goals agreed upon earlier, the precise path to get there is less important.

Conclusion

Whether you use a roadmap or a flight plan, the key is to continuously embrace change. By regularly assessing where you are and where you want to go, you can make informed decisions about your next steps. Ultimately, this leads to better products that address your users’ needs, and materialize the vision of your product and organization.

This is what true product management is: a relentless process of asking the right questions and making decisions based on the answers. Being flexible on the path, but being clear about the destination.

If you’re struggling to ask the right questions for your products or your product career, I am here to help. I invite you to check my programs to find the right fit for you or schedule a FREE 30-minute chat to talk about your current situation. You can also always send me an email at [email protected] to share your story or a question.