In 1955 David Ogilvy wrote a fascinating letter about his habits as a copywriter. One of his points jumped out at me:

I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

This is applicable to design projects as well. If clients (internal or external) ask us for some quick wireframes, it is our responsibility as user experience designers to push back and make sure everyone agrees on the problem and the goals of the project first – before the design cycle starts. It sounds so obvious, but I see people falling into this trap all the time.

The product discovery process can take months, weeks, or even a few hours if there are tight deadlines. But it cannot take zero hours – that’s a recipe for disaster.

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When I arrived at kalahari.com in December 2010 the site hasn’t seen any significant UI improvements during the 10+ years of its existence. My job description was pretty straightforward: do something about that.

In this post I’d like to talk about the work our team did over the past 12 months to get where we are today. When I look at the site now I still see so much wrong with it – there are way too many things that we still need to fix. So this isn’t an attempt to hold up our work as some kind of standard. I’m doing this in the interest of sharing our methods and lessons learned with the larger design community. I’ve learned so much from others who have shared their stories that it seems only fair that I do the same. So here’s our journey so far.

Making sense of the landscape

Here’s what kalahari.com looked like on December 1, 2010:

If you stepped through the site back then you probably would have felt as overwhelmed as I did. Where do we start? What order should we do things in? After the first few days of having too much coffee and talking to people all over the organization I realized that we had two primary challenges:

• No formal prioritization or product development process. It was the same situation I’ve seen many times before. Requirements went straight from “The Business” to developers. That kicked off an endless back and forth about what was needed, with only a cursory nod to Design. The “First In First Out” approach to prioritization was also quite common. The result was, well, not ideal. We needed to fix this.
• No formal user experience design. This was no surprise, and it was the reason I took the job in the first place. There was no user research, no content strategy, no interaction design, and no visual design beyond marketing and merchandizing materials. This is the part that really excited me: the opportunity to introduce User Experience Design into an organization that was (to their enormous credit) hungry for it but didn’t know where to start.

So we immediately got to work on both those problems.

Hello, I’m a Product Manager

Introducing a Product Management layer into an organization that’s used to working without it is tricky. If you do it wrong it can become a political nightmare and end up ruining your chances of shipping anything good. You might have the best of intentions, but there is always the danger that the only thing people will think when they look at a Product Manager is, “Hey, I used to be responsible for that, jackass!”

We certainly didn’t make this transition perfectly, but I believe the key is to make sure that you talk to as many people as possible about what their organizational issues are, and how they think it can be done better. You have to take the time to explain the benefits of having a Product Team that takes responsible for strategy, vision, and execution of a product (and takes the fall if it fails). And then, most importantly, you have to make the development process fair^[1].

We now have a team of Product Managers who are responsible for delivering measurable business results through product solutions that meet both market needs and company goals. They work closely with their teams to develop the strategy and vision for their products. They ensure that designers and developers are included throughout the process. And most importantly: they make sure we ship.

The Intergalactic Product Force

One concept we introduced that I think is worth talking about is the Product Council^[2] – a formalized way to deal with prioritization.

The Product Council is made up of the heads (VPs) of every department in the organization: Engineering, Marketing, Support, Category, etc. We have a weekly meeting where we discuss the current product roadmap and priorities. We ask ourselves, Are we still working on the most important things? If something more important comes up, we prioritize it higher in the roadmap, and something else shifts down. If we’re happy with the direction, we do nothing. If a new opportunity arises we ask ourselves, Is this more important than what we’re working on right now? Or is this something we should work on next? If so, what moves down in the priority list?

From here, I communicate any changes to the Product Team, and we discuss this to make sure no one missed anything. But then – and this is important – the Product Manager has complete autonomy and ownership over the implementation of his or her roadmap. The Product Council sets the priorities (with input from all parts of the organization), but the Product Managers work with their development teams (and others) to set the timeline, the implementation details, the design, everything.

There’s more to it, but in the interest of brevity I’ll stop there. This process has three main advantages:

• It gives the management team complete transparency into what the Product team is working on, and it allows for anyone to make the case for a change in priorities. Why this kind of transparency is so essential is a subject for a different blog post, but in short, it takes away a vast majority of the politics you see in many organizations, and it frees up the teams to do what they do best – execute.
• It prevents scope creep. Nothing can go on the roadmap without something else moving out or down. As anyone who ever worked at a large organization knows, this is an absolutely critical part of a successful development cycle.
• It gives the Product Manager and their teams what they need to be successful: direction and autonomy. As Jocelyn Glei says: “Give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way.”

Hello, I’m a User Experience Designer

I knew that we needed to build a great team if we were going to follow a user-centered approach to identifying and addressing the main issues on the kalahari.com site. But building a team takes time and money, and it’s hard to justify a large headcount request before you’ve proven that you can have a real impact on the business.

So we started small. I fulfilled the UX Design role, and we hired one visual designer since that was the primary need at that stage. Then we got stuck in. On a site of this size, and with the pressure we had to make improvements quickly, we decided on a dual approach:

• Make some initial and obvious changes to the visual design to improve hierarchy and the general aesthetic.
• At the same time, work on a long-term UX strategy to address some of the more fundamental user experience issues on the site.

The goal was to show quickly that we know what we are doing, and then use those successes to build out the team further and attack the areas where we can have the biggest effect on conversion rates.

Building a roadmap

We started this process with a small team of three Product Managers and two Designers, so we didn’t initially have the luxury of user research and a long period of product discovery to build out a roadmap. Instead, we went offsite for a day and built a customer experience map for our different user journeys. It was a great way to focus on what the core experience is that we need to improve.

We also went a bit further. Based on a heuristic evaluation of the site we annotated each of the steps in the user journey with obvious improvements we could make. This gave us a flexible framework for the year, and guided our roadmap throughout.

We decided early on to realign, not redesign. Our approach was to make relentless incremental progress as opposed to doing a 6-9 month project with a big bang release^[3]. Our goal was to release every 3-4 weeks, depending on the size of the project.

In our first two releases we took care of some basics. I won’t bore you with the whole list, but here are the highlights:

• Released a new header and footer.
• Shifted from heavy reliance on orange to a more muted color scheme that allows products to draw more attention.
• Removed several links in the header and footer that didn’t get much use.
• Increased the visual hierarchy of Search.
• Decreased the visual hierarchy of several non-important features.
• Introduced a formal button strategy (primary=orange, secondary=silver).
• Moved from liquid width to a 960px 16-column fixed width design (including the ability to do single-column or two-column designs – every page used to be three columns).
• Started to separate CSS from HTML (better late than never, right?).
• Started to build a UI component library.

These changes had exactly the desired effect. User response was immediate and universally positive. In combination with some good specials, traffic started to increase. And most importantly: we were able to start growing our team to add designers, a researcher, and a front-end developer. Game on.

We spent the rest of the year systematically working through our customer experience map, starting with the most important areas where improved UX can have the biggest effects (Registration, Checkout, Product Details Page, etc.). Our process grew organically and ended up hitting a good stride towards the middle of the year:

• Define the area we’re working on, and define what success looks like (what are the metrics we’re trying to improve?).
• Work in small teams of PM’s, Designers, and Developers to sketch out new flows and develop wireframes.
• Test wireframes with users, utilizing the RITE method so that the outcome is improved designs, not PowerPoint decks with recommendations.
• Refine the designs as they evolve into high-fidelity visual designs (with more user testing as required), and deliver high quality HTML and CSS as the final output.

The outcome is a site that is drastically different from where we were a year ago, with real improvements in the success metrics we set for ourselves (% conversion on registration, checkout, and other flows). The changes include not just the main site, but also a brand new mobile-optimized version, as well as some significant changes to our Marketplace for 3rd party sellers. Here’s just one sample of our Checkout redesign, including one of the initial wireframes^[4].

Old Checkout:

New Checkout:

Initial wireframe:

Final design:

Three more things

My biggest regret about this year is that we couldn’t do more. We made some great improvements to the site, but it is still so far from where it needs to be. And I know everyone on the team feels this way. We set out to build a culture of quality above all else, and it physically hurts when you have to make compromises and do something that’s counter to that culture. Before you jump in and say that there’s never an excuse to compromise, let me remind you of something Erin Kissane said in What I Learned About the Web in 2011:

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity—both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

So, yes, I agree with you – you should never compromise on quality. But it’s complicated. You sometimes run into technical and business complexities that force you to say, “We’ll have to do this later…” It sucks, but that’s life.

I’m exiting this year with three major takeaways – lessons learned and re-learned through our successes and failures:

• Love your developers. Too many companies see their developers as “resources” whose only reason for existence is to make The Codes. When you pull developers into product planning and design, everything changes. You build better products, and everyone has more fun.
• User Experience Design is a real thing. I saw way too many dismissive comments about UX this year. If you do it right, it will improve conversion rates and/or make more money. If you don’t believe me, come sign an NDA and I’ll show you our metrics.
• Culture is everything. In one story out of the Steve Jobs biography, Bud Tribble (one of the Macintosh team members) is quoted as saying, “Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.” You need a team that has a relentless focus on quality. A team that cares enough to fight for moving that button 3px to the left. It’s the only way to find real meaning in your work.

We have a lot of work to do on our site (sorry, did I mention that already?). But I’m happy that we’ve been able to introduce a fair and effective product development process into the organization. We made user experience an intricate part of how we build product. And we now have a 14-person team of brilliant and dedicated Product Managers and User Experience Designers who care deeply about the product.

It was a good year.

1. I wrote more about this in The most important characteristic of a good Product Manager  ↩
2. No one liked my “Intergalactic Product Force” suggestion ↩
3. I wrote more about this for Smashing Magazine in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience  ↩
4. I’ll spend some time over the break putting together some more before-and-after shots, including stories about the process we followed (if anyone is interested) ↩

Marty Cagan argues that splitting the Product Manager and Product Ownership roles into two positions is a mistake:

This approach has two common negative consequences.  The first is that there is no clear owner (neither person takes responsibility for the product), and the second is a common lack of respect or understanding between the two (the “product manager” doesn’t appreciate the technical complexities, and the “product owner” doesn’t appreciate the customer’s pain).

I agree, and I would actually go one step further. I view Product Ownership activities (representing the voice of the customer, interacting with the development team, managing the backlog, etc.) as a subset of the overall strategic Product Management position (product planning, execution, and marketing). I’ve resisted calling my team Product Owners, and prefer to say that they are Product Managers who fulfill a Product Ownership role on Agile projects.

The problem is that splitting these roles into distinct job titles also splits their goals. It’s easy for one to become all about the market, and the other to become all about internal development tasks. Instead, a Product Manager should ultimately take end-to-end responsibility for the development of product solutions that meet user goals and business needs. That’s the job. Managing the backlog and working with developers on specifications are just part of that overall function, not a thing on its own.

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I’ve written about Dhanji R. Prasanna excellent post on Google Wave and working at big companies before, but I wanted to come back to something he said that I just can’t get out of my head. In one section he talks about a topic I care about very much – what motivates people to do great work. I really like his perspective on the importance of incremental progress:

[As] a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.

I like the analogy of these small wins as Deus Ex Machina:

[It means] “God out of the machine”; a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

It’s so important for large teams to celebrate those wins with the people they work with every day – and to call out the “characters” responsible for accomplishing Deus Ex Machina. It is hard to get that right in large organizations because the invisibility of individual team members and the pressures to move on to The Next Thing aren’t naturally conducive to this type of behavior. But it’s possible if you work at it.

Whether you keep some champagne in a fridge, send out company-wide emails thanking people personally, or ring a bell every time code gets deployed (ok, that last one is lame, sorry), being in a large organization isn’t an excuse for acting like a faceless corporation.

Jared Spool in The Value of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator: Gruber Has It Partially Right:

When teams don’t have a vision […], each person is walking around with a different understanding of what the end of the journey should look like. When there’s no common understanding on what that end point looks like, each decisions is evaluated on a different criteria and the resulting products end up looking like crap.

This is why I believe that product roadmaps are not evil. As I’ve written before, at our company we are very clear that the product roadmap is a flexible guideline that can (and must) change frequently as needed. But it gives the teams (and the management team) something to work towards. It’s a common vision, a sense of direction that’s more than just fluffy language – it’s concrete evidence that we’re headed somewhere good, and we know how to get there.

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I was privileged to speak at Tech4Africa 2011 about a topic that I care about a great deal: how our environments and the way we work impact the quality of the software we produce. The talk came out of a question I keep asking myself over and over: why, despite our best efforts, do we still too often produce low quality software? Here’s the talk summary:

Why do we see so many web applications with inferior user experiences? Why do UX designers often get stuck being asked to “make the design pop a little more,” with no room or incentive to innovate? Why do some web developers feel demotivated and unable to break out of doing things the way they’ve always been done?

In this talk I explore some of the main causes of ineffective software development, and discuss practical recommendations on how to improve team structures and development processes to build high quality software that users care about, want to use, and that therefore makes more money for the business.

I discuss how designers and developers can work better together, how to ensure everyone gets input into the roadmap without it becoming chaos, and how to make sure that the business benefits are clearly articulated and communicated.

So here are the slides from my talk – I hope you find it useful. If you’d like to read more about this topic, you can check out a two-part series of articles that I wrote for Smashing Magazine.

Des Traynor wrote an excellent article for .net Magazine called The death and rebirth of customer experience:

Customer service online has been relegated to “handling complaints”. Sites like to boast about how quick they can respond, but it’s rare you’ll hear any boast about what a great shopping experience they had online.

Online businesses are obsessed with user experience, optimisations, page rankings and much more. Yet a thousand of their customers could walk past their offices every morning, and they wouldn’t even recognise them.

In our quest towards total commerce automation, we’ve failed to bring the most important part of commerce with us. The customer experience.

The personal contact and connection that is needed to bring customer experience back to online retail reminds me of Dan Frommer’s thoughts on the intersection of commerce and editorial content. In Commerce as content, shopping through art he writes:

[T]he best wave of new e-commerce companies may also be the ones that are great content producers. That means: Clear writing, attractive photography, and good design. I haven’t done the math, but it seems to me that great content with devoted readers could be a heck of a lot more effective at generating sales than just buying banner ads on random websites.

He goes on to give some great examples of quality editorial content. Both these articles are indicative of a welcome shift away from product-based to context-based e-commerce.

Product-based e-commerce sees the product as the unit of measure, and the user experience is built around presenting products in the best possible light to convince a customer to buy them.

Context-based e-commerce sees the a customer’s unique situation as the unit of measure, and the user experience is built around delighting them based on who they are and how technology can help improve their lives. Quality, personal, context-based content serves as the bridge between product and customer.

Horace Dediu recently wrote about iCloud and, among other things, discussed what happens when “value moves from selling things to ‘getting to know you’”. That phrase is a perfect way to summarize this shift. In getting to know us, e-commerce sites can move away from just selling us stuff, and instead sell us ways to become better people.

I love the Automattic Creed that all their employees have to sign before they join the company:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.

I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

(h/t to @SwimGeek for the link)

This is going to sound like such a lame “management guru” thing to say, but it’s true: the cultural fit of the people you hire is more important than their past experience or absolute skill level. I’ve seen this time and time again. If I have a choice between hiring someone who is highly skilled in their work but doesn’t display humility and a genuine drive to learn more, and someone who knows enough to know that there is much to learn and they’re hungry to get there, I’ll choose the latter every time.

We recently went through an exercise to define our team values, and in many ways it’s similar to Automattic’s creed. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but here are the main points. This is how we want other people to describe our team:

• We are zealots about quality
• We have autonomy to do what’s best for the product, its users, and our business
• We have a high fix:complain ratio
• We have a healthy work/life perspective
• We are empathetic to the core

The relationship between a healthy culture and doing great work is causal, not simply correlation. Good culture is the prerequisite for great work to happen, and actually causes it. Alan Cooper recently address this issue in a great article called The pipeline to your corporate soul:

If you want to improve the quality of your website, app, or software, you need to also improve the quality of your organization. You need to ferret out the people who play politics but don’t get things done. You need to squash bureaucracy that stops innovation with doubt and red tape. You need to eliminate the energy drains, systemic distortions, and toxic people that force others to act like corporate drones instead of like entrepreneurs with a vested interest in success.

If you put a bunch of talented, energetic, ambitious people together and make it easy for them to collaborate and do great things, they will. I haven’t seen a single example of great work preceding a clearly defined and healthy culture – even if it’s just an unspoken understanding between two startup founders. Spending time on getting your culture right is worth the effort.

Jason Mesut made quite a few waves this week with his presentation Truth and Dare – Out of the echochamber into the fire. It’s definitely worth your time so I recommend you click through and read it before you continue here. There’s a lot to like and a lot to think about.

Jason explicitly asks for feedback and counter-arguments, so I do want to address one slide in particular, shown below:

Now, I might be putting the puzzle together wrongly here, but since these slides came out right after I published a two-part series on Smashing Magazine called “Breaking Down Silos”, I’m going to assume he’s talking about those articles. If my assumption is wrong this is going to be really awkward, but oh well.

So, let’s look at why Jason is calling this concept “naive”. I wasn’t at the presentation, so all I have to go on is his bullet points.

Organisations are complex

Of course organizations are complex, and if anyone tries to argue otherwise they’ve never worked in one. But I never said that this is simple:

There are no shortcuts to breaking down silos. You can’t fix the environment if the organization doesn’t understand the problem. You can’t improve the development process if the right environment doesn’t exist to enable healthy guidelines. You have to climb the pyramid brick by brick to the ultimate goal: better software through true collaboration.

I don’t propose “7 steps to a happier you” in the article. I propose a process of understanding the problems and unique needs of the organization, followed by a tailored solution that takes those unique needs into consideration.

People are better in small groups

I absolutely agree, and that’s why prioritization at an organizational level needs to take this into account and empower small teams to do the work without interference. Here’s what I said in the article:

[Once strategic priorities are set], projects would move to small dedicated teams, which would have complete ownership of the design and implementation. The product council sets the priorities, not the details of implementation — those are up to the teams themselves.

I go on to talk about the importance of autonomy and the meaning people find in their work when they work in these small groups.

Change takes too long

I don’t understand the argument here, so maybe this is one of those “voice-over required” points. But if the argument is that change takes too long so we shouldn’t even try, I don’t buy it. Here’s how I end the article, again acknowledging how difficult it is:

Building collaborative environments is not easy, because change management is not easy. But the positive outcomes of doing this far outweigh the pain of making it happen. You’ll end up with happy, creative teams that feel a sense of ownership over what they’re building and a sense of pride in its quality.

I’d also like to point out that I wasn’t being academic in these articles. Everything I wrote is based on principles we’ve tried and applied in real life in the organizations where I’ve worked. There’s always room for improvement and growth, but this wasn’t a theoretical exercise.

I know this doesn’t matter that much in the bigger scheme of things, and I admit that the only reason I’m even writing about it is a slight irritation with the word “naive”. But if Jason is indeed referring to my article (again, this is going to be really awkward if he’s not) I at least wanted to clarify my viewpoint.

So there that is.

Over on the 37signals blog they just reposted an old article entitled Product roadmaps are dangerous. Jason Fried says the following:

Instead of the roadmap, just look out a few weeks at a time. Work on the next most important thing. What’s the point of a long list when you can’t work on everything at once anyway? Finish what’s important now and then figure out what’s important next. One step at a time.

It’s hard to disagree with a person (and a company) you have great admiration for, as I do for Jason and 37signals. But I do think it’s important to set the record straight on product roadmaps – particularly when it comes to large organizations. The post highlights two main concerns with product roadmaps:

• Product roadmaps assume you know what’s going to happen 6 – 18 months from now
• Product roadmaps set expectations, so you can’t change them (and if you do change them it becomes a worthless exercise)

So let’s look at each of these points in turn.

Product roadmaps assume you know the future

Jason writes:

When you let a product roadmap guide you you let the past drive the future. You’re saying “6 months ago I knew what 18 months from now would look like.” You’re saying “I’m not going to pay attention to now, I’m going to pay attention to then.” You’re saying “I should be working at the Psychic Friends Network.”

This is not what a product roadmap is, or what it’s supposed to do. The purpose of a product roadmap is to set forth a long-term vision for the business, and break that up into smaller, meaningful pieces of work, based on what you know now. It’s fallacy to believe that this is an unchangeable list of dates about where the business is headed. A product roadmap that doesn’t react to day-to-day changes in the market and within the company is a pretty dumb document.

At my organization we are very clear that the product roadmap is a flexible guideline that can (and must) change frequently as needed. But it gives the teams (and the management team) something to work towards. It’s a common vision, a sense of direction that’s more than just fluffy language – it’s concrete evidence that we’re headed somewhere good, and we know how to get there.

We can change direction as many times as we want. This doesn’t make it a useless exercise, it means that instead of starting fresh on a new “roadmap” every few weeks, you build on your past successes, don’t make the same mistakes twice, and keep making measurable progress since you can see where you came from.

Product roadmaps set the wrong expectations

Elsewhere in the post:

The other problem with roadmaps is the expectations game. People expect you to deliver what you say you will in 4, 5, 6 months. And what if you have a better idea? What if there’s a shift in the market that you need to address? What if what you thought wasn’t what actually happened? Any change in the roadmap nullifies the roadmap. Then the map isn’t a map at all.

If you have this problem it doesn’t mean that product roadmaps are wrong, it means that you’re doing it wrong. As long as everyone in the organization buys into the fluid nature of the roadmap, you won’t have this problem. In our organization we do this mainly through the mechanism of what we call the Product Council (I was partial to Intergalactic Product Force, but for some reason that didn’t fly so well). Here’s how it works.

The Product Council is made up of the heads (VPs) of every department in the organization: Engineering, Marketing, Support, Category, etc. This body has a weekly meeting where we discuss the current product roadmap and priorities. We ask ourselves, Are we still working on the most important things? If something more important comes up, we prioritize it higher in the roadmap, and something else shifts down. If we’re happy with the direction, we do nothing. If a new opportunity arises we ask ourselves, Is this more important than what we’re working on right now? Or is this something we should work on next? If so, what moves down in the priority list?

From here, I communicate with my Product Team about any changes, and we discuss this to make sure no one missed anything. But then – and this is important – the Product Manager has complete autonomy and ownership over the implementation of the roadmap. The Product Council sets the priorities (with input from all parts of the organization), but the Product Managers work with their development teams (and others) to set the timeline, the implementation details, the design, everything.

There’s more to it, but in the interest of brevity I’ll stop there. This process has three main advantages:

• It gives the management team complete transparency into what the Product team is working on, and it allows for anyone to make the case for a change in priorities. Why this kind of transparency is so essential is a subject for a different blog post, but in short, it takes away a vast majority of the politics you see in many organizations, and it frees up the teams to do what they do best – execute.
• It prevents scope creep. Nothing can go on the roadmap without something else moving out or down. As anyone who ever worked at a large organization knows, this is an absolutely critical part of a successful development cycle.
• It gives the Product Manager and their teams what they need to be successful: direction and autonomy. As Jocelyn Glei says: “Give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way.”

Why product roadmaps are safe (and essential)

At a practical level I went through the exercise of figuring out how we could execute in my organization without a roadmap. And I just can’t see it. Changes to current pages/flows affect changes we’ll make down the line – I have to think about that.

If you’re serious about frequent incremental change as opposed to large redesign projects (as we are), you can’t live without a roadmap because you’ll have no idea how far you’ve gone, what you still need to do, and what’s more important than something else. And perhaps most dangerous of all, everyone in the organization will come to you and want all their projects done right now, and you’ll have no systemic method for dealing with that in a way that’s best for the business.

Andy Wagner summed up my feelings on this issue quite succinctly in a comment on the 37signals post:

[Product roadmaps are] an opportunity to dream about what the future might look like so that as you make your day-to-day responses to the customer, you can do so consistent with building the future state. It emphatically should not be anything to be slave to, it should be dynamic and notional, not static and specific.

Jason says, “The further you get from now, the less you know. And the less you know, the worse your decisions will be.” We agree on that. My argument is that without a roadmap you only see now. And if you only see now without seeing yesterday and tomorrow, you don’t see a whole lot. And “the less you know, the worse your decisions will be”.