Predictive Index

STRONGEST BEHAVIORS

• Jerry’s PI Pattern is extremely wide, which means that his behaviors are very strongly expressed and his needs are very strongly felt.
• Jerry will most strongly express the following behaviors:
• Connecting very quickly to others, he’s strongly motivated to build and leverage relationships to get work done. Openly and easily shares information about himself.
• Strikingly expressive, effusive, and verbal in communicating; he talks a lot, and very quickly.
• Enthusiastically persuades and motivates others by adjusting his message and delivery to the current recipient.
• Very collaborative, he works almost exclusively with and through others. Strong intuitive understanding of team cohesion, dynamics, and interpersonal relations.
• Proactivity in driving to reach his goals while moving at a faster-than-average pace. Inquisitive about the world around him.
• Relatively independent in taking action on his own ideas. Resourcefully works around most obstacles blocking completion of what he wants to accomplish.

Eager for results, his drive is for swift implementation. He works best in fast-paced environments offering a variety of activities, rather than routines.

SUMMARY

Jerry is an engaging, stimulating communicator, poised and capable of projecting enthusiasm and warmth, and of motivating other people.

He has a strong sense of urgency, initiative and competitive drive to get things done, with emphasis on working with and through people in the process. He understands people well and uses that

understanding effectively in influencing and persuading others to act.  Impatient for results and particularly impatient with details and routines, Jerry is a confident and

venturesome “doer” and decision-maker who will delegate details and can also delegate responsibility  and authority when necessary. Jerry is a self-starter who can also be skillful at training and developing others. He applies pressure for results, but in doing so, his style is more “selling” than “telling”.  At ease and self-assured with groups or in making new contacts, Jerry is gregarious and extroverted,  has an invigorating impact on people, and is always “selling” in a general sense. He learns and reacts quickly and works at a faster-than-average pace. Able to adapt quickly to change and variety in his work, he will become impatient and less effective if required to work primarily with repetitive routines and details.

In general terms, Jerry is an ambitious and driving person who is motivated by opportunity where he can use his skills as team builder, motivator and mover.

MANAGEMENT STYLE

As a manager of people or projects, Jerry will be:

• Broadly focused; his attention is on where he’s bringing his team, and what goals he wants them to achieve.
• Strongly focused on cohesion, communication, morale, and team accomplishment; he achieves his goals through them and with them.
• Comfortable delegating authority; he is eager to discuss his ideas with others is amenable to changing his mind if it helps his overall goal.
• At ease in delegating details and implementation plans.
• Quick, friendly and broadly-focused when following-up on delegated tasks; he is eager to get details completed quickly, freeing up his team to work on the next objective.
• Flexible in working with different kinds of people.
• Engaging and enthusiastic – confident in his ability to persuade others towards his point-of-view.

SELLING STYLE

As a salesperson, Jerry will be:

• Confident and persuasive in guiding the process towards his goal.
• Eager to keep the process moving along as quickly as possible; utilizes persuasion, not pressure, to close a deal.
• Skillful with the emotional aspects of the sale; connecting with his prospects more than the specific details of the implementation; leveraging this information to close the deal quickly.
• Adept at navigating the “politics” of an organization; finding the key players and utilizing persuasive talk to win the sale.
• Flexible and adaptable; relying on his ability to think on his feet rather than making a distinct plan to follow.

MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

To maximize his effectiveness, productivity, and job satisfaction, consider providing Jerry with the following:

• Opportunities for involvement and interaction with people.
• Independence and flexibility in his activities.
• Freedom from repetitive routine and details in work which provides variety and change of pace.
• Opportunities to learn and advance at a fairly fast pace.
• Recognition and reward for communications and leadership skills demonstrated.
• Social and status recognition as rewards for achievement.

If you are interested in Profiling yourself, please contact me and I will arrange it for you.

Predictive Index

STRONGEST BEHAVIORS

• Jerry’s PI Pattern is extremely wide, which means that his behaviors are very strongly expressed and his needs are very strongly felt.
• Jerry will most strongly express the following behaviors:
• Connecting very quickly to others, he’s strongly motivated to build and leverage relationships to get work done. Openly and easily shares information about himself.
• Strikingly expressive, effusive, and verbal in communicating; he talks a lot, and very quickly.
• Enthusiastically persuades and motivates others by adjusting his message and delivery to the current recipient.
• Very collaborative, he works almost exclusively with and through others. Strong intuitive understanding of team cohesion, dynamics, and interpersonal relations.
• Proactivity in driving to reach his goals while moving at a faster-than-average pace. Inquisitive about the world around him.
• Relatively independent in taking action on his own ideas. Resourcefully works around most obstacles blocking completion of what he wants to accomplish.

Eager for results, his drive is for swift implementation. He works best in fast-paced environments offering a variety of activities, rather than routines.

SUMMARY

Jerry is an engaging, stimulating communicator, poised and capable of projecting enthusiasm and warmth, and of motivating other people.

He has a strong sense of urgency, initiative and competitive drive to get things done, with emphasis on working with and through people in the process. He understands people well and uses that

understanding effectively in influencing and persuading others to act.  Impatient for results and particularly impatient with details and routines, Jerry is a confident and

venturesome “doer” and decision-maker who will delegate details and can also delegate responsibility  and authority when necessary. Jerry is a self-starter who can also be skillful at training and developing others. He applies pressure for results, but in doing so, his style is more “selling” than “telling”.  At ease and self-assured with groups or in making new contacts, Jerry is gregarious and extroverted,  has an invigorating impact on people, and is always “selling” in a general sense. He learns and reacts quickly and works at a faster-than-average pace. Able to adapt quickly to change and variety in his work, he will become impatient and less effective if required to work primarily with repetitive routines and details.

In general terms, Jerry is an ambitious and driving person who is motivated by opportunity where he can use his skills as team builder, motivator and mover.

MANAGEMENT STYLE

As a manager of people or projects, Jerry will be:

• Broadly focused; his attention is on where he’s bringing his team, and what goals he wants them to achieve.
• Strongly focused on cohesion, communication, morale, and team accomplishment; he achieves his goals through them and with them.
• Comfortable delegating authority; he is eager to discuss his ideas with others is amenable to changing his mind if it helps his overall goal.
• At ease in delegating details and implementation plans.
• Quick, friendly and broadly-focused when following-up on delegated tasks; he is eager to get details completed quickly, freeing up his team to work on the next objective.
• Flexible in working with different kinds of people.
• Engaging and enthusiastic – confident in his ability to persuade others towards his point-of-view.

SELLING STYLE

As a salesperson, Jerry will be:

• Confident and persuasive in guiding the process towards his goal.
• Eager to keep the process moving along as quickly as possible; utilizes persuasion, not pressure, to close a deal.
• Skillful with the emotional aspects of the sale; connecting with his prospects more than the specific details of the implementation; leveraging this information to close the deal quickly.
• Adept at navigating the “politics” of an organization; finding the key players and utilizing persuasive talk to win the sale.
• Flexible and adaptable; relying on his ability to think on his feet rather than making a distinct plan to follow.

MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

To maximize his effectiveness, productivity, and job satisfaction, consider providing Jerry with the following:

• Opportunities for involvement and interaction with people.
• Independence and flexibility in his activities.
• Freedom from repetitive routine and details in work which provides variety and change of pace.
• Opportunities to learn and advance at a fairly fast pace.
• Recognition and reward for communications and leadership skills demonstrated.
• Social and status recognition as rewards for achievement.

If you are interested in Profiling yourself, please contact me and I will arrange it for you.

So what are the qualities and KPIs of a well defined, well supported, confident product roadmap and what expectations should you set for it?

• Firstly, do not expect the roadmap to be a detailed project plan.  It’s an articulation of your product strategy.
• It’s a dashboard that must be able to communicate if you are on the correct path in order to reach your destination.
• It should indicate, based on the information you have had to date, when you are likely to reach your goal.

But most importantly, it should be able to indicate potential phases of your product.  Often the initial launch product can be refined and simplified to a more efficient minimum viable product (MVP).  Your roadmap should detail when this MVP is delivered as that points to a potential for when it can start to earn revenue.

The minimum viable product is always there.  It deconstructs the grand plans, into component deliverables that enable you to generate revenue every step of the way. The roadmap brings this valuable asset into focus.

Finally, it’s more effective to think of the Roadmap as a process, more so than just a deliverable.  The process you go through to define your roadmap brings enormous value in it own right (so much so it has its own blog entry on this site).  The roadmap is an indication that you have managed to align your stakeholders, set their expectation, communicated to many different audiences and gained support.  It’s the final articulation that you have a strong and healthy product vision and it is a confident statement of your intent as a product centric business.

Water water, everywhere!

It’s very likely you are not short of ideas and possible ways to enhance your software products. In fact it’s often that case that product managers are appointed simply to gather all of these request and ‘make them happen’.  A product team is often asked to

• Extend the product in all directions
• Do all the enhancements all at the same time
• To do this without compromising quality, increasing cost or flat-lining the code base

(With those demands, it’s easy to see why the Roadmap is abused so frequently, right?)

Product Managers are asked to gather these requirements and produce a roadmap to show that they will be delivered.  A sales function may ask for a roadmap to support their sales cycle, and look to indicate that a new piece of functionality will be delivered (i.e. promised) in order to reach a sale.  The roadmap is put under pressure to show everything that has been asked for, without giving it the protection of qualifying the items it accepts.  It becomes a false representation of what can be done, a bone of contention for resource allocation and sighted as a evidence that there has been a failure to deliver.

Developers will have a reluctance to commit to a roadmap.  Executives will want to tinker with it, using that tactic to ‘steer’ the organisation.  It is often set in place and added to without the thought that new business drivers have come into play.  It becomes bloated with new ideas and pummelled by the Executives to give confidence in the ability to deliver. 

In truth, it is the output of a process.  It is impossible for it to remain as an articulation of your product strategy if it contains items that are not the result of considered analysis. 

Its like a number sentence, 5+14+6=20, where the roadmap the result to the left of the equals.  It’s a sum of the operations before the equals.  Adding numbers or operators, without re-running the number sentence produces a false statement.  5+14+6+9=20 is wrong and the sum does not equal 20, even if it was the CEO who added the 9.

It the case of Product Roadmaps the number sentence is hidden under a blanket of activities.  Sometimes the process is a mystery with the entire component parts their, but no one person steering the qualification through well defined steps.

Mass, Height, Width.

The activities under the covers of the product management process may not be clear even to those in the product marketing and product development teams.  As a result, items pass through some, but not all of the steps before being placed on a roadmap as the individual executing the request is not aware that an item has to be weighed.  They might be just measuring its height and width.  Take for example a Courier that fails to qualify on of the three properties of Mass, Height and Width.  They come to collect a 10cm by 50cm box having charged the client £15, only to find the box is full of lead and exceeds the weight limit for the channel they were intending to use.  Something now has to change; at least one party is going to be upset either with an increased cost, longer delivery, a non-profit transaction – or all three.

The check-up

There is a way to effectively qualify every item (contact us for more details!) and this suite of processes need not be an overhead that causes frustration.  Quite the opposite in fact often happens in that having a level of due diligence around the road-mapping process gives everyone a feeling of confidence and makes them feel truly involved in the process.  Adding to the collaborative nature of Product Management and attaining commitment through trust and clarity.

So a healthy roadmap is one that can be seen to be providing the organisation it belongs to with clarity on its direction, and is able to represent the product strategy.  It must be able to articulate with Business, Marketing, Sales and Development functions, i.e. ask a member from each of those departments “Where will be in 1 year according to this”.  Each business area should be able to articulate what the road-mapped deliverables do for them, or how they are contributing to it.  They should be able to give information on how their activities feed and draw from the roadmap.  Essentially,  it’s a mirror and should reflect your organisations objectives and status.  Any distortion to that is a sign you are off the mark.

This is expected as centric to a product based business should be its’ Product Strategy.  Centric to that strategy is the Product Roadmap.  So, acceptable to have the ‘Roadmap’ front of mind.  However, Roadmap is not a Noun, it is in fact a Verb.

“A Roadmap is the result of a process.  A process of alignment and prioritisation that results in a collection of artefacts, tailored for the ongoing product development process”

The failure I have seen is ignoring the process of creating the roadmap or roadmapping items.  This is not a process heavy area, and the bulk is conversation but bypassing the drivers for creating a roadmap and cutting corners on the reason it contains the items it does breeds a whole host of issues:-

• Too many projects
• Fragmented resources
• Departments not aligned on what to do next
• Missing information & articulation of strategies
• Being opportunistic more so than planned and targeted

To explain why Roadmap is a verb, lets look at why we build one in the first place. 

Roadmap (verb)

A product roadmap is your bridge, articulating between technically oriented functions and business oriented functions.  It is central to your strategy for effective product management. It’s a planning and alignment tool and it articulates your portfolio strategy.

You can answer questions:-

• “What are the pros and cons of the options we have?”  
• “What should be next, what is the order of things?”
• “What brings the most value to our markets and our company?”
• “What is the logical next step of our products strategies?”

You gain Alignment

• “Internally, what are our strategies and what markets do they target?”
• “What are the goals of the Executive function?”

Effective product management creates an extensible product, giving sight of the enhancements needed tomorrow.  However it must also give a clear view on the bigger picture leading into the future. 

“We may not be targeting Market X tomorrow, but the goal is to be there by 2012”. 

Cost Efficiency

Knowing where you are headed limits rework.  Strong product management will provide enough in the requirements to ensure we facilitate today without compromising our route to tomorrow.

Business Development

When a customer buys your product they invest in you.  They have a right to know how the product will be enhanced over time.

It’s a sales tool that empowers your business development team with the collateral they need to win business based on your products offering today and its future direction.

Collaboration

Collaboration is not a buzz word.  Roadmapping promotes communication and gives audiences, internally and externally a point of discussion.

Roadmap (noun)

Your roadmap is a living, evolving document based on what you know and feel today.  It sights a possible destination.  Key to the roadmap is it ability to grow, accepting feedback from all sources.  This behaviour promotes involvement and gains support by showing how important customer and stakeholder involvement is to your product  strategy.

The Roadmap itself is a powerful artefact, which is often why they are abused.  Your key Product Artefact should be given the respect its due and is owed the correct level of attention and process.  The benefits of a strong Roadmap, as in the artefact, are clear.

Ability to execute

Roadmaps are an item of evidence when you need to prove your ability to progress & deliver. They can be used to detail where you were and what you delivered to reach the place you are in today.  A natural extension of something this grounded is showing where you intend to be in the future.  Being able to prove the route you have trodden so far done gives a significant amount of creditability with a potential client when talking of what is coming next to your best-in-class product.

The Healthy Roadmap

In theory, before building a roadmap, you have completed the pre-requisite tasks around indentifying the market problems you are aiming solve, how the competitive landscape looks in that area, how your product hit the needs you’ve identified and what are the driving decisions your customers or users have made in buying or not buying your software.

In reality, many organisations have just a vague collection of deliverables stretched over a timeline, without the support of real evidence or business cases to support the opinions.  They refer to this artefact as their roadmap.

“80% of Product Managers report they have no evidence to support their roadmap and spend 90% of their time in tactical, support based tasks of gathering requirements and (re)setting expectations”

Not making time for market data, competitive analysis and product strategic based tasks present a Danger. The real, very real danger is that you develop and deliver products that the market and your business do not want.  The hard truth is that you are likely to have evidence that prove that is the case where you are now.

If you have found yourself fielding questions and managing expectations post launch around the “this isn’t what we wanted” arena, use that as a symptom to indicate the problem of a weak roadmap.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”

Of course, building an effective roadmap relieves those symptoms and maintaining it with the due attention pays dividend way beyond that of just a collection of prioritised software deliverables.