I love this more nuanced approach from David Morris for determining what product ideas should get on the roadmap. The technique I use and coach most often is a bit simpler. It's "doable" vs "desirable". David's Viable + Feasible is a nice way to split out the two aspects of my "doable". I define great product management is a simultaneous exploration of the doable vs desirable space to find the optimal tradeoff between the two. So, the exercise I facilitate has people put post-its up on the wall on a two-dimensional graph where the x-axis is how "doable" the idea is. The y-axis is how desirable it is. The "best" ideas end up closest to the upper-right corner. I then draw two squiggly lines on the chart, generally meandering, going from upper-left to lower-right. The first line is quite close to the upper-right corner, meaning that only a small fraction of the ideas will be above and to the right of it. Anything above and to the right of it is considered a commitment for the roadmap timeframe under consideration. The second line is close to the first and catches the stretch goals for the roadmap timeframe. I'd love to host such an exercise for anyone who's interested, using David's nuanced version of "doable". Thoughts? Owen Farrell, Tony Reinert, and Tony Mantoan, you've seen me host these exercises many times. How well do you think this alteration to my exercise would work? https://lnkd.in/eaTGz6ep
Its interesting. One of the old military planning was you scored everything based on relevant characteristics. I like DVF at a top level but would emphasis getting down in the weeds as you get more specific. For example, are we DVFng a cloud migration for the company or moving a particular Application from onprem to cloud. Another example might be for a specific feature which might lead to further growth in other areas
Good one!
Pragmatic Agnostic Agilist and OKR Coach. I help coaches and their organisations shift from being busy with tasks to focusing on achieving results, ensuring sustainable progress, high morale, and continuous improvement.
6moHi Larry, Thay sounds like an effective approach. I’ve used a similar exercise, plotting ideas against impact and risk (or value and cost). The top right being the disruptive ideas (huge impact with a lot of change), tracking clockwise, down the right hand edge, through quick wins, across the bottom through momentum builders, and back up the left through bridges and necessary evils. The most compelling ideas sit below that diagonal, but we’d pick from the others where we were required to (e.g. regulation or infrastructure platforms). Sounds similar to your approach, though I like your ‘doable’. My challenge with the earlier approach was that it missed out the total cost of ownership; meaning we’d simplify the solution to make it more doable, leading to more human-tronic work making it less scalable and more expensive to operate.