Whole Product Experience Roadmap: A Simple Tool for Product Managers

Software product managers with an engineering background routinely use the product engineering roadmap, which is a document that lays out a broad time-line and engineering work items to be completed as a product evolves from one version to the next. Some of the work items are features that end-users can see and use, yet others are improvements that strengthen the product at the back-end with enhanced scalability, performance, security etc. A well maintained product roadmap goes a long way in providing a guideline for product development and maintenance efforts. It serves as a reference point for all planning discussions.

That said, products are rarely mere engineering artifacts. End-users are increasingly experiencing the consumerization of web. Consequently, the bar for total product experience keeps going up. Users need a whole array of value-adds to the core product, at various touch-points along the product experience cycle. These include online user community, social media user groups, forums for sharing best practices, webinars, on-demand videos illustrating product usage, tips, documentation, guidance on product use in specific business situations, purchase justification support, installation support, sample use cases and so forth. Geoffrey Moore, in his famous book Crossing the Chasm, refers to these value-adds collectively as the augmented product. According to him, the core product and the augmented product together make up the whole product.

Which brings us to the Whole Product Experience Roadmap, a simple tool to track the building up of a whole product experience. Prepare a tabular roadmap where rows correspond to several attributes of product experience such as Features, Documentation, Training, Community, Installation, Distribution, Pricing, Expectation Setting etc and columns correspond to successive months. For each month pick a few cells and fill them with goals that aim at enhancing product experience. It is that simple.

Now, you can record progress as you keep enhancing product experience and easily visualize the gaps which need to be filled. Every time you hear back from marketing, sales, support or directly from a customer or a partner something that could be improved in the product experience, you simply add a row to the whole product experience roadmap.

If you provide services instead of products, you can still use the same tool with minor variations. Whatever be the nature of your offering - product or service - the idea of designing a customer experience is much the same. Identify the touch-points throughout the engagement experience and plan improvements with time.