Product Management: Foundations to Practice · Roadmapping and Planning
Outcome-Based vs Feature-Based Roadmaps
The choice between listing features and listing outcomes on a roadmap reflects a deeper choice about when a team commits to a specific solution.
A feature-based roadmap lists specific things to be built, organized by time period, which is intuitive to read since stakeholders can immediately picture the concrete deliverable. The drawback is that it implicitly commits a team to a solution before that solution has been validated through discovery, which runs directly counter to the Opportunity Solution Tree principle of exploring multiple candidate solutions before converging.
Key Takeaways
- Feature-based roadmaps are intuitive but implicitly commit to a solution before it has been validated.
- Outcome-based roadmaps preserve flexibility to find the best solution through discovery, at the cost of feeling less concrete.
- Outcome-based roadmaps require organizational maturity to adopt, and sales teams often resist them.
- A common hybrid uses outcomes for anything beyond the current quarter and specific features for near-term commitments.