“Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features.”
– Steve Johnson
Product Roadmaps — Introduction and Significance
In its simplest terms, a product roadmap is a guiding strategic document as well as a plan for executing strategy. A roadmap is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product offering over time.
The purpose of a product roadmap is to communicate direction and progress to internal teams and external stakeholders. It shows the high-level initiatives and the planned steps to get there. It should not include every feature in the product backlog, or a list of specific engineering bugs. The roadmap is a product management document and should live separately.
Creating a product roadmap should be a continuous process throughout the lifecycle of a product. Requirements and features should be generated by lots of folks including: customers, partners, sales, support, management, engineering, operations, and product management.
To understand the significance of a product roadmap and how it evolves over the lifetime of a product, I will be using Instamojo as a casestudy.
About Instamojo
Instamojo, headquartered in Bangalore,India, was co-founded by the current CEO, Sampad Swain, along with Akash Gehani, Aditya Sengupta and Harshad Sharma in 2012. The idea was to release a product to the market which caters to non-tech audiences collecting payments. They realized that the easiest way to do this was to give the Instamojo user a unique URL (a.k.a. imojo.in payment link) which he/she can share with his/her customers via a text message, email, social media, among others, which they can then click on to pay for the product.
Today, Instamojo has forayed into several business verticals. Thousands of users are using Instamojo to collect payments for ebooks, reports, tickets, tutorials, merchandise, invoices, services, and much more. Some of the current features of Instamojo platform are: Collect Payment, Manage Accounting, Resolve Disputes, Understand Data
Initial Journey of Instamojo (2012–2014):
From its inception in 2012 till 2014, the motto of Instamojo was enabling small and medium businesses, individuals who are selling digital goods to sell and collect payments directly from customers via a simple payment link.
The focus in this duration was primarily on three aspects:
- Reach out to maximum customers
- Retain the existing customers
- Generate revenue from these customers
The focus has been on addressing the pain points of users with existing payment options and prioritise how to retain these users and generate revenue.
To visualise the development of these features on a time scale, the initial roadmap would resemble the below:
Roadmap for Upcoming Quarters
Financial regulations are a constantly shifting sphere. One such drastic change is the roll out of GST nation wide. This is a drastic change as it affects every transaction. A seamless integration with GST codes, GST tax credits and submission of relevant data to the Tax Department should be the highest priority.
Another disruption facing the industry is UPI 2.0, which will bring e-mandates to payments. Once approved by RBI, Instamojo should look for including fully revocable mandates where customers can add, update or delete the mandate anytime as per their choice.
Apart from the regulator enforced changes, as a product, Instamojo’s focus should be on delivering additional value to their customers via online customer support, market analytics for merchants, amongst others.
Additionally, Instamojo as a platform is not available on iOS as yet. This should be prioritized for 2017, as a sizeable market works on iPhones.
The roadmap for the upcoming quarters will look like below:
Conclusion
From the example of Instamojo, we can infer that a Product Roadmap is a powerful document that helps chalk the strategy for the upcoming time. Product roadmaps are never rigid, and should be flexible to allow for sudden changes in the product environment, such as demonetisation of Nov 2016.
A well crafted product roadmap acts as a reference point, a guiding document and a strategy for the company to follow for its future initatives.
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