The Product Roadmap should be a Chartplotter

Over the last 6 months, I have been diving into the Lean Startup methodology. I went to see Eric Ries in March. He's a fabulous speaker. In practice, I have found Ash Maurya's book to be the most useful, especially the Lean Canvas companion site. Eric has a book coming out in the fall - watch for it.

My background as a product manager has been with startups: One was small, looking for a product/market fit; and the other was scaling quickly. Like every job, they both had their challenges and I've been looking for some sense on what worked well and what didn't. Many of the lessons in 37Signals' book "Getting Real" spoke to my experience. I had been through the waterfall-to-agile conversion and the light on documentation mantra certainly makes some sense. Which brings me to this post: 37Signals just posted a note in the Signals vs Noise blog: Product roadmaps are dangerous. I disagree.

Their post has the light but oh-so-convincing tone of Getting Real. Hell it's only 332 words! The main points:

1. Roadmaps let the past drive the future.
2. You should only look out a few weeks into the future.
3. Roadmaps create expectations.

I get it - they are in the web applications business: build fast, release often, measure and learn; Repeat... But some of the points seem plain wrong. Here are my objections:

• Yes, focussing on now is great, but trying to predict based on past patterns is important, as well.
  
• Once you grow past the everyone-does-everything stage of a startup, organizational behaviour begins to take hold. Stakeholders will always try to protect their interests: Sales wants the next feature that will reel in their current prospect. Support wants the highest visibility bugs fixed. The CEO is after the next big thing. A product manager who doesn't lay out out a path that extends beyond the next few months, will simply be reacting to these forces.
  
  
• Dealing with expectations is part of the management game. Everyone wants a date: Operations needs time to roll out infrastructure or train customer support for that great new feature you want to release. Acquiring customer in a consumer web business is different than the SMB or enterprise world. There may be limited opportunities to interact with prospects. There is a reason that marketing is fixated about that feature that needs to be ready for the the big conference: everyone who buys will be there! Product managers owe these constituents more than: "I don't do roadmaps, they are out of date as soon as you publish them"

• A Product Manager is not just a feature-monger throwing customer requests onto the roadmap willy-nilly. I won't use that hoary Henry Ford quote, but you won't get quality customer feedback if you ask them only what feature they want in the next couple of sprints. You will get a minor delta from the current product iteration. Show them you have a vision that extends beyond the here and now.

The product roadmap has a bad name - it implies a fixed paper map where you can't deviate from the street grid. The term makes me think of the old Triptiks from AAA. I can still remember the silence that would permeate the Chrysler station wagon when Dad drove us outside the highlighted route... "Are we lost Dad?"

I think a better analogy for product planning document comes from the boating world: the chartplotter: it shows you the ports-of-call (customers) but also the rocks (market barriers) to avoid. Most importantly, it automatically updates with your progress through the environment. I could take this analogy further, but I think you get the idea. Expressing a vision for your product and the intermediate steps to get there isn't dangerous - it just needs to be done in a living document so you don't get lost at sea!

Follow-Up: Asus N73SV Laptop

Last week, I posted on the Asus N71 laptop. Sure enough, Asus has launched an incremental successor and the Register has an enlightening review. Here's the summary:

Wins

• Asus doubled down on audio. The 11 watt system developed in partnership with Bang & Olufsen moves down from the flagship N90 laptop.
  
  Aside: I live around the corner from a high-end audio-video store with a dedicated B&O section. Glad to see this company doing something other than making ridiculously priced products that can't compete. The Great Recession was good for something, I guess.
  
• They bumped up the screen resolution to full HD 1920x1080 and used a much better LED-backlit panel. Great idea - why have the screen be the weakest link.
  
• The processor is bumped up to the latest i7 version
  
• They moved the audio controls to the right of the keyboard and increased their size - much improved usability!

Fails

• The battery is still pretty weak. A larger battery would make this beast altogether unwieldy, I expect.
  
• No backlit keyboard - you gotta be kidding me. This was a weakness I neglected to mention earlier.

Depending on your opinion of Windows 7, this laptop could compete well with the Apple 17 incher. That is, if it had a backlit keyboard!!! In this segment of the market, it's table stakes.

How I Chose the Aircraft Carrier of Laptops: The Asus N71

It's been 9 months since I bought my first laptop - plenty of time to become acquainted. Here's a  review for shoppers: "Should I buy one of these?" along with a "What I thought I needed vs what I actually got" review for the product managers. TL;DR summaries at the end.

Before we begin:

• I’ve no axe to grind with any consumer electronics company. 
• I don't like to be wed to brands, but I will always love Canon point & shoot cameras, as long as this category exists (smartphones are eating their market share)

Background

My old Dell Dimension 8400 desktop had put in yeoman service over a life of many Windows XP re-installations. Nothing could make this machine fast again! With a new Canon Powershot S90, I needed more horsepower. The S90 shoots in RAW format and I wanted to see what could be done with Panoramas and High Dynamic Range photographs using files "straight from the camera". Turning RAW into JPG or TIFF takes CPU cycles. Having a fast multi-core processor really helps.

I wanted a laptop but had a desktop mindset (didn’t want to sacrifice anything):

Spec	What I Thought I Needed
Processor	Mid-level processor for photo heavy-lifting. See comments above.
Screen	HD resolution (1920x1080) or close to it
Sound	Superior quality built-in speakers
Optical Drive	For use as an audio/video component for home AV system.
Keyboard	With a number pad
Output	Three analog outputs to drive Logitech 5.1 system

I purchased an Asus N71. This is targeted as a desktop replacement / entertainment focussed machine. Here's a great review providing a thorough look at performance specs.

Spec	What I Got	What I Actually Needed
Processor	Intel Core i5 M430 @ 2.27 GHz	All 4 cores max out when processing RAW files. Watching this on the CPU Meter makes me happy!
Screen	1600 x 900 TFT (not an IPS panel)	I really don't need a screen this large. Occasionally, I watch high definition content (DVD) directly on the laptop. But the possibility of doing this appealed to me when I purchased Overall the screen is good - the reflection and limited viewing angles aren't a showstopper. What has bugged me is the small colour gamut. It is pretty obvious beside my second Samsung SyncMaster 226CW monitor - where are the reds?
Sound	"SonicMaster" Technology	This truly came as advertised. The 2.1 speakers are awesome, especially considering the size of a laptop. I especially like the cute little subwoofer on the bottom. It is really a "mid-woofer" - the speakers are well tuned to cover the mid-to-high frequency range.
Optical drive	DVD drive	Adding a Bluray drive was too expensive and not needed for my home A/V system. I am only set up for 5.1 not 7.1 Connecting to home A/V was a big FAIL. Beyond being a pain in the ass to arrange settings for displaying DVD onscreen, I could never  get to full HD dimension on the TV. It defaulted to 1600 x 900 instead of 1920x1080 no matter what I tried Netflix was option 2. However, it failed partially as Netflix outputs stereo sound and the receiver borked on handling this in the HDMI input from the laptop. By itself, Netflix on the laptop is good - too bad the selection is so limited in Canada.
Keyboard	With a number pad	I didn't really need the extra number pad. When doing heavy duty number crunching in  Excel or Quicken I am at a desk and use an external keyboard.
Output	Three analog outputs	I use a Logitech 5.1 system to play music with stereo right and left speakers set up in the office and kitchen. The centre speaker fills out the stereo on my desk. The system works just fine with a single analog output!

Wins

• Sound quality
• Solid construction and design
• Powerful i5 processor
• USB 3.0 for future peripherals
• Nvidia Optimus graphics processor - useful for Google Earth, but probably best suited for gamers

Fails

• Battery life is pretty miserable, about 2 hours.
• Size - can't lock in a safe and it's heavy to transport. there's a reason most people don;t buy laptops this size.

Consumer Summary

This is a great entertainment laptop, but I would go for the Asus N61 model unless you absolutely need three analog sound outputs for your systems. If you plan to do photo editing on the laptop (no external monitor) get an IPS screen. This is likely taking you toward the Apple line-up. Dells have high-end RGB-LED screens with large colour gamut, but who wants to go through their crazy ordering process.

Product Management Summary

• Having never bought the exact type of product before (laptop), I fixated on silly stuff like the need need for a keypad. 
• One marketing message really got through to me: the higher quality of sound was a call to action
• Overall, the Asus brand appealed to me. In two phrases I would describe it as: good value and advanced components
• PC laptops still market strongly on spec sheets - no wonder it is so hard to choose amongst the manufacturers.
• fanboys for any model!