Prioritizing a product roadmap can be a nightmare for a new product. As a product manager, you might find yourself unsure of where to start. These are the days where you find yourself sitting and listing off your questions. Why are we building this product? Which market problem will this product solve? And so on…
From these questions, you move to draft a product vision and start to create a product strategy accordingly. But what comes later? Where will you start to develop those ideas?
There are different methodologies to keep your product within your strategy. To this end, product themes come into play at the point where you want to shape your product roadmap and allow you to divide your plans into achievable, high level descriptions.
In this article, you’ll learn about product themes, as well as the differences between other product terms and their importance in strategic planning.
A product theme is a high level determinator of the activities you’re planning to achieve. This approach creates a combined effect and connects all the tasks of a product. They lead the way for you, so you don’t have to worry about how to reach your end goal.
A product theme creates a visual presentation for how the product is going and summarizes the goals, benefits, design, and roadmap for product with below questions:
Product themes summarize product goals. You can even use the same theme in different products, as they’re not unique for one product/project.
Product managers mostly get confused with the difference between themes and metric categories. Metrics and their sub breakdowns aren’t your themes. They’re completely different tracking terms. If you consider it hierarchically, metrics serve as the parent category of themes.
For example, while deciding on a product’s long term goals, one might select one like “increasing customer retention,” or “increase monthly revenue.” Both of these are categories of AARRR pirate metrics framework. Some can try to create themes as acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue for their roadmap.
The AARRR pirate metrics framework helps you to understand which user behavior or product growth goal you focused on. But these are metrics you need to be tracking:
If your company vision focuses on customer retention, you can break it up into solutions so that you have a better sense of what you can do to influence it. Your product themes should be the solutions you propose to those metrics you want to increase. However, it wouldn’t exactly be correct to describe themes as short-term goals because one theme can cover more than one short term goal or vice versa.
Themes sit just above epics in the product/project management space and rarely can be defined as feature-based. An epic is for explaining big user stories that need to be broken down and links together multiple tasks and other types.
However, if you compare them side-by-side, epics serve as sub-breakdowns for themes. The tree should look like themes, epics, stories, tasks and sub-tasks. This is why you can address one theme with more than one epics:
Themes are the guardian of your strategic initiatives. When developing features, you can add ideas inside the sprints, but if you label everything as themes you can clearly see what you’re delivering. You need to label each feature with the theme to avoid getting off track from your product roadmap.
In agile, one theme may have a number of similar epics so you can open a board to track it.
While managing a roadmap you can use a feature-based or theme-based structure. Feature-based product roadmaps need a prioritization technique to show where to start. For theme-based roadmaps, you can use themes as a prioritization method.
Requirements/features can quickly change in agile and your scope may shift. If you use a feature-based roadmap you’ll need to change it every sprint. On the contrary, themes help you to switch between features without changing your roadmap.
Your documentation won’t drown inside small details, you’ll be able to focus on the big picture while presenting your roadmap to other stakeholders, and when a change is required, you don’t have to notify others unless necessary.
Before I implemented a theme strategy into our roadmap I was changing every line inside the roadmap multiple times and we had a complex prioritization technique to re-prioritize features. A small request required changing the document, which required a lot of additional work. As our team grew, it became impossible to keep it updated ‘
To mitigate this, we created themes. We only prioritized the themes according to our product strategy. We presented our themes after we finished and it increased our roadmaps readability and decreased our efforts to update.
As a PM, you can create a theme based roadmap, but it’s not enough to achieve your product strategy. You need to support your themes with measurable metrics so that you can track the progress that you make towards them and know where to shift course when necessary.
Once set up, themes can help you better define the work that you need to take on and allow you to easily communicate next steps among your team. One of the biggest benefits of themes is that they allow you to focus more on the big picture and spend less time adapting to minor changes that have little impact on the product. It’s important that your roadmap remains as readable as possible and themes are a great way to ensure this.
Featured image source: IconScout
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