Leveraging Adjacent Roles/Skills19% of the exam
Product roadmaps and iterative release planning
How a strategy designer partners with the product manager on a roadmap that stays true to the vision: roadmap types, the anchors every decision ties to, value, effort and confidence, clustering features into complete-idea releases, keeping the roadmap living, and defending user value at go-to-market.
Given an aligned vision, create a roadmap for implementation that is feasible and holds true to the vision in every iteration.
~8 min read · 15 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Explain what a roadmap is for, pick the roadmap type that fits a planning need, and set expectations for its stability.
- Confirm the discovery anchors every roadmap decision ties to, and keep the product manager as roadmap owner while the strategy designer partners.
- Prioritize with value, effort and confidence: bring in feasibility early and validate the riskiest assumptions first.
- Build the roadmap by clustering features, then bundle releases so each iteration is a complete idea true to the vision.
- Keep the roadmap living and defend user value when go-to-market pressure waters the vision down.
- Key terms: product roadmap (the shared source of truth for how the team will fulfill the product vision); strategic vision (an aspirational view of a future state); RAT (a riskiest assumption to test: high importance, low evidence); just-in-time decisions (delaying crucial decisions until the last responsible moment).
Key facts
Important, not urgent
- Detail
- Exam audience trait; on a roadmap, prefer sustainable long-term value to short-term wins
Roadmap purpose
- Detail
- Shared source of truth: what you deliver and when
Four common roadmap types
- Detail
- Portfolio, strategy, releases, features
Stability
- Detail
- New-to-market: best guesses; existing products: generally more stable
Roadmap owner
- Detail
- The product manager, who is accountable for it
Decision anchors
- Detail
- Rationale, outcomes, validated value proposition, customer priorities, product principles
Prioritization factors
- Detail
- Value, effort, confidence
RATs
- Detail
- High-importance, low-evidence assumptions
First roadmapping step
- Detail
- Cluster features by impact and difficulty
Cloud Kicks Tracker
- Detail
- Full-featured maturity in three release cycles
- When is a product roadmap generally more stable over time?
- Which three factors does the module weigh when prioritizing the roadmap?
- What does a releases roadmap show?
- Why does it matter that everyone is clear about the roadmap's destination?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
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