Drive Real Growth With 4D Product Roadmaps
One of the core pieces of work that Product Managers do is prioritizing product work into a product roadmap. However, all too often they rely on overly simplistic prioritization frameworks that lead to low leverage product roadmaps.
To create and prioritize roadmaps, teams often use traditional prioritization frameworks like one of the following approaches:
Voting-based prioritization and
RICE (or scoring-based) prioritization
However, despite their advantages, these approaches to product road mapping still don’t effectively create optimal leverage.
They each have inherent biases in their approach that create risks that include: lack of needle-moving work, suboptimal effort focus, and difficulty getting leadership buy-in.
To solve these problems, Great Product Managers take a more focused, strategic approach to product roadmap prioritization.
We call this approach 4D Product Roadmapping.
This brand-new concept comes directly from our Mastering Product Management program. If you want to learn how to build a compelling product roadmap, and a whole lot more, be sure to check it out!
For now, we’ll review:
What Is A 4D Product Roadmap?
Creating 4D product roadmaps involves a process that brainstorms roadmap initiatives from 4 different lenses, each with their unique strengths and weaknesses, and constraints and prioritizes those initiatives to only those that improve a specific set of metrics and objectives.
The 4 product roadmap lenses are:
Strategy - what deeply aligns with your product strategy
Vision - what gets you closer to realizing your vision
Customer - what your users have explicitly requested
Business - what improves critical input metrics
Each lens has its unique benefits, but also drawbacks if over-indexed, making it important to balance ideas from each to construct a proper roadmap.
3 Benefits Of a 4D Product Roadmap
It’s these four lenses, along with the systematic decision to limit brainstorming, that helps your 4D product roadmaps create leverage in a way that RICE and voting typically do not.
First, by actively considering and balancing work from these four lenses, you avoid the incrementalism bias that you typically have in RICE and voting; instead, you move towards needle-moving work.
Creating a 4D product roadmap actively forces you to brainstorm and prioritize initiatives from your strategy and vision lens; this lens tends to be less incremental and more needle-moving.
This is high leverage because these initiatives would ordinarily be skipped over in RICE and voting due to their generally higher-investment requirements, with less certain returns.
Second, 4D product roadmaps force you to constrain and prioritize your initiatives to only those that improve a specific set of objectives and KPIs.
This creates focus in your work and makes it easier to get product leadership buy-in.
The 4D process roadmap process also restricts your ideas on 2 levels:
First, you determine a set of target KPIs that all your brainstormed objectives must improve.
Second, you limit all the initiatives that you finally implement to just those objectives.
By constraining your ideas in a top-down way, you force your roadmap to be highly concentrated on improving just a couple of key areas. In other words, by constraining your ideas in this top-down fashion, you create leverage through focus.
This contrasts sharply with RICE and voting, where you do a bottoms-up brainstorm of initiatives.
This lack of top-down constraint means the brainstormed initiatives are more likely to relate to different objectives and improve a disparate set of metrics. This creates a lack of focus in the final roadmap as well.
Finally, the focus of the 4D product roadmap process translates into another benefit: It gives you a much clearer and more focused story to tell to leadership, making it easier to get their buy-in.
Each initiative you implement will be part of a broader set of objectives, which all ladder up to the set of very specific KPIs you want to improve.
Contrast this to RICE and voting-based approaches, which are much more likely to have an unfocused roadmap; this makes for an unfocused story to discuss with leadership.
Product work can create value in different ways, and the best products create value in multiple ways. Evaluating your product roadmap through each lens helps ensure that your work is creating balanced value.
Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into each of those lenses.
1. Product Strategy Lens
The product strategy lens focuses on furthering your product along its strategic dimensions.
Objectives and initiatives brainstormed from this lens tend to require longer time to implement but are also generally more needle-moving.
This is because product strategy work often entails making major advances in your product’s design or functionality.
However, as beneficial as the strategy lens is, it also has its downsides if you completely focus on it; primarily, over-indexing on strategy lens work creates the risk of the user not feeling heard.
Strategic initiatives are transformational but can take significant time and effort to develop.
In order to make space to work on these strategic initiatives, you often end up needing to clear the roadmap of quick, incremental work like immediate user requests.
The problem is that if you don’t implement at least some user requests, users start to feel like they aren’t being heard.
So there are clearly risks to over-indexing on strategy.
One potential indicator that your roadmap is over-indexed on the strategy lens is when you see a steady, unanticipated decline in metrics.
To mitigate risks like this, 4D product roadmaps balance out strategy lens work with business and customer lens work, which is focused on producing immediate, incremental improvements, often in response to current customer feedback.
2. Product vision lens
Next, there’s the vision lens. The product vision lens focuses on developing your product closer to a product vision narrative you have already created.
Brainstorming from this lens forces you to actively plan work towards achieving your vision, which should create a highly needle-moving outcome when realized.
By breaking your product vision into a series of objectives that can be prioritized over time, you ensure that meaningful progress is put into making your vision a reality.
Without this lens, it might be too easy to avoid investing in the necessary groundwork that has to be done to realize your product vision, even if it doesn’t yield immediate results.
When the vision lens is over-emphasized, it creates the risk of underinvestment in the existing core product.
Because all effort is focused on developing a vision, existing requests for the current product go ignored.
One key signal that you’re over-indexed on vision is when there’s a significant investment in new initiatives despite the core product still having significant room to improve.
To mitigate risks like these, 4D product roadmaps balance out vision lens work with customer lens work, which is heavily focused on the existing product.
3. Customer Lens
The third lens in the 4D product roadmap is the customer lens.
The customer lens focuses on solving problems that users have explicitly surfaced through feedback. Brainstorming from this lens typically creates immediate engagement wins.
It ensures you incorporate customer feedback that you may not have initially anticipated in your product strategy, vision, or specs.
Customers also feel like they’re being listened to and you’re solving issues they’ve explicitly brought up.
Over-focusing on the customer lens is one of the most common problems with roadmaps, because common wisdom is to obsess over the customer.
However, over-focusing on the customer lens creates major risks.
The first risk is the long-term lack of differentiation.
The second risk is a tendency to over-index on power users, which harms the product experience for the rest of the user base, and steals product effort away from features that could go towards acquiring new users.
The third risk is an overly complex product. This can happen if customers keep requesting new features to better serve niche use cases.
This ends up not only diluting the product experience for other uses, but also hurting monetization.
Consequently, over-indexing on the customer lens has two common signals.
The first is a steady decline in the impact of product work. As easy wins from customer feedback get implemented, the impact of implementing other feedback begins to decline.
The second over-indexing signal is an increasingly bloated product with features that most users don’t use.
4D product roadmaps balance against this by considering the product strategy and product vision lens, which are focused on the long-term success of the business and all future users, as opposed to just the current set.
4. Business Lens
The last lens is the business lens. The business lens considers what your target KPI’s most influential input metrics are, and focuses its objectives and initiatives on improving those as quickly as possible.
Brainstorming from this lens tends to lead to ideas on how to create immediate, incremental improvements.
But over-indexing on the business lens creates the risk that you over-invest in short-term incremental work, and under-invest in longer-term, needle-moving work.
This is actually one of the most common issues with most product roadmaps, because RICE and voting-based approaches tend to favor incremental initiatives.
There are two common signals for when a business is over-indexed on the business lens:
A lack of significant improvements to product functionality
The release of features that fail to create underlying value
In other words, the product team releases features that improve specific metrics in the short-term, but quickly start declining.
4D product roadmaps reduce this risk by balancing the business lens with the strategy and vision lenses, which are explicitly focused on increasing product functionality and value.
Mastering More Than Product Roadmaps
In summary, like a well-functioning team, each lens complements the other in their strengths and weaknesses.
As Helen Sims says: “You have to balance your product work. You have to keep the lights on, but also make sure you’re keeping the lights on for something big.”
Working on lenses that tend to produce immediate, incremental impact, like customer and business, helps keep the business moving; this happens alongside investing in the lenses that tend to produce longer-term, more needle-moving impact, like strategy and vision.
Now that you know what a 4D product roadmap looks like, it’s time to create your own!
Join Reforge to gain access to the whole 4D product roadmap process in our Mastering Product Management program that will help you:
Determine the target KPIs you want to impact
Run a constrained brainstorm for objectives and initiatives that move those target KPIs
Prioritize those objectives and initiatives to come up with a concrete product roadmap