Product Roadmaps aren't Delivery Plans

Hello fellow punks! 

Welcome to the 48 of you who have signed up for this since the last issue. It’s great to have you on board. Hopefully you’ll stick with me while I figure out what this newsletter is all about.

Here’s this week’s issue ⬇️

I love it when a delivery plan comes together 📋

Product roadmaps aren't delivery plans.

Here's why:

A product roadmap is a way to articulate your strategy—it's your best guess of the bets you need to take to move your product forward.

A delivery plan, on the other hand, is your short-term approach for implementing the features you're currently working on to place those bets.

When you think of roadmaps as strategy and delivery plans as tactics then you begin to see the difference.

Roadmaps are conceptual and should be closely linked to your product vision and goals.

Delivery plans should be closely linked to what your engineers are working on now.

Roadmaps are dateless.

It's fine to bucket your bets into time horizons (now, next, later), but you shouldn't tie your strategic objectives to deadlines.

Delivery plans, on the other hand, are all about dates—when are you going to launch the new feature you've got in QA?

As a PM, blurring the line between roadmaps and delivery plans can cause a lot of headaches for you, your team, your stakeholders, and your customers.

Roadmaps and delivery plans are valuable tools to help you execute, but make sure you're clear about what you're using them for.

Resources to help you create useful roadmaps 🚘

Some of my favourite resources to help you build better product roadmaps:

My favourite tweets of the week 🐦

I had a week off to hang out with the family last week so wasn't online much. I still managed to find some awesome product management-related tweets, though 👇

Characteristics of highly effective product managers

Looking at everything through a product management lens

What's holding you back from executing

As a product leader, don't be afraid to challenge

Achieving a revenue goal is not a strategy

What I've been reading 📚

Elon Musk finally bought Twitter. What that means for the social network (and humanity) is anyone's guess right now.

Here's the best article I've read on it so far:

Elon Musk now owns Twitter — and a huge number of impossible political problems around speech, content moderation, and trying to make money.

One of my big goals at the moment is to level up my product leadership skills.

I've been doing a lot of research into how to make the transition from product manager to product leader, but one of the most useful pieces I've read so far is this post on transformational leadership:

Product management is a humbling responsibility, as it revolves around human needs, wants, and desires.

As a product manager, I'm always scanning the edges of technology for new ideas. This one, though, is a little bit creepy:

Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve.

That’s it! 

See you next week (probably). 

Toby 

The Punk PM 

P.S. Feel free to share this with anyone else you think would find it interesting.

I’m still playing around with ideas for content and format for this newsletter, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new structure. Go ahead and shoot me an email with ways you think I can make it better.