Problem
It may seem strange that a five year old tech company didn’t have a working end to end product roadmap until six months ago, but that is exactly what happened at Givingli. After the departure of our Product Owner, I, along with another designer stepped up to put such a process in place. I led this initiative and still own the product roadmap, along with all of its accompanying meetings and decision making processes to this day.
Objective
Create a functioning product roadmap to track projects from ideation, through design, development, and experimentation, and then back into the cycle again.
To incorporate metrics and experimentation results into our decision making around which projects to do when.
My Role
Product Owner
Process
Overhauling a major process within an organization is no small feat, especially when prior to the roadmapping process Givingli used “gut feeling” as a way to decide what projects to prioritize next. Trust, along with continued reassurance to our leaders that this was the right way forward had to be earned. Thankfully the results spoke for themselves pretty quickly after a few major projects indicated, with the new metrics tracking, that our changes had a big impact on how our users were interacting with the product.
Overview of the Process Change
Review all past product ideas, attach them to KPI metrics, and prioritize them against the new protocol
This step allowed us to build trust with leadership because it assured them that past ideas were not lost. Those ideas are still accounted for today in the backlog.
Update the product design template within Notion to include additional information so that designers could own their portion of this process, for example:
Unique identifiers for each project
Connecting projects / blockers
Metrics
Design to developer handoff documentation
Experimentation tracking
Funnel all product ideas from the team into a streamlined survey
Now ideas are captured and evaluated in the same way ensuring again that no idea is lost or forgotten
Host biweekly product meetings to ensure that the entire team is aligned and in agreement on what was happening and what was important. We do this by:
Reviewing the current roadmap
Looking at new project ideas and deciding yes or no as a team
Assign projects to designers and rearrange the project order as new ideas arise
Track and update projects as they move from design to development to experimentation
Hold team accountable in following the new protocol
Proof
Through this process we have been able to prioritize projects in a real metrics driven way. The first project to show this was when we updated our Onboarding for the mobile iOS project. This was a project that had been put off for a long time as it wasn’t deemed “necessary” until the new process (via research and metrics) proved otherwise. After we updated the onboarding we saw an increase in completion from 24% to 92%.
