Review of Product Roadmaps Relaunched by Todd Lombardo
tl;dr — Product Roadmaps Relaunched is an excellent guide for creating and maintaining product roadmaps.
The roadmap is a critical — and frequently missed — opportunity to articulate why you are doing this product, why it’s important, and why the things on it are absolutely vital to success.
What is the book about?
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty is written by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan and Michael Connors, all of whom are experienced product leaders.
The premise behind this book is straightforward. Product Roadmaps, which were once a staple in traditional hardware product companies have lost their charm in this new and dynamic world of digital products. This book takes Product Roadmaps into an agile and more chaotic world where nothing is certain and things change rapidly. It talks about the need for roadmaps, how to create and maintain them as well as getting buy in for them from multiple stakeholders.
What does this book cover?
Product Roadmaps Relaunched is a short book with 11 chapters that covers the following topics.
- Introduction to roadmaps
- What makes a roadmap
- How to gather inputs to make a roadmap
- Linking the vision & strategy to the roadmap
- the importance of themes
- Making your roadmap richer
- Prioritization
- Getting Buy-in (two chapters)
- Maintaining your roadmap
- Relaunching roadmaps in your organization
Every chapter is independent of the other and is followed by a summary.
What did I like?
Product Roadmaps Relaunched covers everything you would need to know about roadmaps — the need for having one and building and using it effectively & efficiently. Obviously, while this book has all the fundamentals to build a roadmap, you will not learn and improve until you actual put it into practice. To help you do this book has tons of real world as well as fictional examples and insights from product leaders. This makes it easy to grok the concepts spoken about in each chapter. In addition, there is one meta-example that is carried forward from chapter to chapter which helps in understanding how a rich product map can be built.
All of this information is presented in a easy to read manner and this makes it accessible to all roles.
What did I not like?
Nothing.
My Recommendation
I strongly recommend this book to anyone involved with building products, whatever role they are in.
Originally published at Digital Amrit.
