Conversation: Paweł Huryn - Roadmaps & Avoiding Product Fiction
For a successful product delivery we need to let go of control and the fiction of having control over the future
Welcome to the Serious Scrum Conversations where I talk to my colleagues from Serious Scrum and we talk all things Scrum and Agile.
Today I have with me one of my Product Management gurus, Paweł Huryn. Paweł is also from Poland and he actually lives in Warsaw. He shares tips and insights on Product Management and you can find him on Substack and LinkedIn.
I wanted to talk to Paweł about the Roadmaps. What do we need to get started? What format to use? What about Gantt Charts? What is a reasonable time horizon for a roadmap? How to make changes to it and notify about any delays? Let’s see where the conversation will take us as we spent quite a lot of time on what are commitments. And also discussing Paweł’s Roadmap format.
Start with OKRs or company goals
Inevitably we start from the company objectives. There is no roadmap without a strategic direction. We could be talking about OKRs for a whole new conversation, so let’s just park the subject stating that OKRs or any company-level goals provide the teams with focus.
Discovery for risk reduction
Discovery is for validation of the High-Risk Assumptions.
“As part of product discovery, we want to address the high-risk assumptions. Identify problems, think about solutions and what can go wrong.”
“After conducting experiments, those high-risk assumptions should be validated, either proved or disproved and then we can make what Marty Cagan called high integrity commitments.”
Paweł Huryn
It means we have product backlog items that have been validated. There might still be surprises but the risk is much lower.
Paweł says that it might be controversial for the Scrum world but learning by developing something in the Sprints is very expensive. The cost of experimentation and validation is much lower than the actual implementation, only to learn something is not usable. He estimates that the cost of experimentation is between 10–20% of the cost of delivering a fully-fledged solution.
Tools and techniques for discovery
There are many techniques you can use to run experiments and validate your assumptions. User prototypes with tools like Balsamiq or high-fidelity user prototypes using Figma. It depends on the risk.
You might also need to validate if something is technically feasible, e.g. create an algorithm. Those are called feasibility prototypes. Another way is developing a small part of an application, not something production ready — this is called by Marty Cagan — live data prototypes and can be used in A/B testing.
How it works is that you can do some high-level discovery upfront, before the engineering goes in. Afterward, you perform continuous product discovery on a weekly basis. You talk to customers, map opportunities, and test assumptions every week.
Seems like a lot of work but it can save the company a lot of time and money on the actual implementation.
The fiction of control over the future
There is nothing wrong with identifying dependencies between the work that you’ll do. However, creating a Gantt Chart is creating a fiction that we have a very detailed-level granular control over the future. It doesn’t bring any clarity and can cause even more problems in the future.
It’s uncomfortable not to have control over the future. But pretending that we have this control will make the problems worse. People might press and demand detailed plans but if you do this, you are just creating a bigger problem for yourself and your team in the future. So it doesn’t solve the problem — it moves it to the future.
Advice for those who have trouble letting go of control over the deliverables
Although we cannot provide the stakeholders with detailed plans and screenshots of what will be delivered, we can still provide some information about what will be released.
For the Marketing teams, it should be enough that they have a rough idea of what will be delivered. We can communicate the outcomes for the customers and problems that will be addressed “we will allow you to get constructive feedback” or “you will be able to register with only a few clicks” etc. Marketing is not about features but about the problems that will be resolved. We are not talking about “our product will deliver 200 features this quarter” but rather “we will solve a couple of longstanding customers' problems.”
Escalation is passé
If we are using the word “escalation”, it means that there is something wrong with the environment.
We should look at the process in our companies. Did my team commit to something or did someone just create the budget without consulting the team? You can’t make other people agree with you or promise you something. Even if you have the best ideas and best intentions you can’t control everything that happens. Apart from something going terribly wrong with the implementation, there are countless other factors outside of our control. What if people get sick or quit their job? What if covid happens?
Product Manager’s Role
The Product Manager needs to communicate with the stakeholders and make sure they understand the situation. The worst case scenario is that the Product Manager makes a commitment to a deadline that someone demands and then they start demanding it from the developers — this is the worst possible antipattern.
Paweł’s Simple Roadmap
On Paweł’s Roadmap, you won’t find any deliverables but “Product Outcomes”. Those can be OKRs that we get for the product team or any outcomes that we can influence for the customers. E.g. “increasing customer satisfaction” or “increasing activation rate.” So we have the “Product Outcomes” that will drive the business results and “Customer Needs” that we are going to address. The latter are not product features but emotional outcomes for the person like “get constructive feedback” not the prescriptive idea of implementation.
There are no dates on this roadmap. Usually, we treat “Now” as the current quarter, “Then” as the next quarter, and “Later” as everything else.
For more information about making deadlines a breeze watch my conversation with Paweł Huryn on YouTube and read his article “5 tips for PMs that will make working with deadlines a breeze.”