A few months ago I shared my complexity concerns with a product director from last year. Her wall of color coded sticky notes organized by product line, by market, by stage of development etc. immediately brought to mind that conspiracy board that some detective is running in a crime thriller after being awake for 72 hours on cold coffee and caffeine fueled conviction. She is an organized person for our industry and she said that her engineering team and her marketing team were working from two different and divergent roadmaps for 6 weeks before the problem was discovered by someone.

So even when a company builds a solid product strategy, has done a lot of thinking about prioritization and even done a lot of competitive analysis, the execution of that strategy can easily get muddled by bad systems. I call this the visibility gap that nobody wants to admit to. In the worst cases it feels like a form of corporate blindness, but it is generally just a result of bad planning workflows and disjointed tools, which can slowly create a gap in visibility into what is happening with a product roadmap and related market strategy over time.

The visibility gap nobody wants to admit

Most organizations develop a product strategy with considerable analysis into the competitive landscape and priorization of features and projects. Yet they manage the work to bring that strategy to life with an assortment of spreadsheets, randomly selected tools, and weekly status meetings. It is not until a massive disaster hits that it becomes apparent that, in fact, they were never on track in the first place.

Most issues in a company with huge visibility gaps between departments are caused by the information that already exists in the company, but was not dispersed in time to add value. A very simple example: a sales person does his positioning for a product (based on the assumptions of the organization for Q1) while the organization is working on the roadmap for Q2. Nobody updates the sales positioning deck for Q2 and finally in Q6 the old positioning is presented to a prospect. Meanwhile the competitor closes the deal. Post mortem: a half dozen communication failures. The truth is: there were communication and information throughout the organization that enabled the poor outcome. They just were not shared with the right people at the right time.

The departments most likely to be operating on different versions of reality are:

• Product and engineering, especially when sprint priorities get adjusted without a formal roadmap update
• Marketing and product, where launch timelines shift but campaign assets are already deep in production
• Sales and product strategy, which often feel like they’re playing entirely different sports in entirely different stadiums
• Executive leadership and everyone else, where the portfolio view at the top bears only a passing resemblance to ground-level reality

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be terrible for your company.

The Same Old Problem!

I have found that once one understands the root cause of a visibility gap, pushing back on an organization that views it as a “communication problem” is typically difficult. In reality, in the majority of companies, everyone is already communicating their work. The fact of the matter is that the source of truth for a product or service is always in motion and until an organization defines a single system of record and assigns ownership for keeping that system up to date, people will continue to experience difficulties managing a portfolio of products.

Most of the problems arise from architecture problems as opposed to people problems. In order to manage cross product decisions across lines a shared planning layer for all products in the portfolio is required. This planning layer would then be used to plan for the different markets and phases a product goes through. Sticky notes on a wall do not suffice as the number of products, markets and phases increases rapidly. They will just become too hard to manage in the end.

While every organization will develop their own set of ‘best practices’ or work arounds to manage the planning around a portfolio of products, there is nothing more complex than growing a portfolio of lines and trying to manage decisions across them all without a single, planning layer. Just as it is difficult to navigate a city when every driver is using a different map (or worse yet, a map from a different year) trying to manage a portfolio of lines without a single planning layer is a nightmare. Everyone believes they are ‘on the same page’ until they hit an intersection, at which point it becomes apparent that they were actually working from different sets of assumptions all along. Of course, the problem is that by the time the misalignment becomes apparent it is usually too late, and the cost of going back to redesign is far greater than continuing down the path as is.

Many teams rely on a variety of tools to manage their data for roadmaps and market planning. If those systems are not connected then as conditions on the market shift (and they always do without warning) the updates to your roadmap will not propagate through your systems evenly. Some people will get the updated information while others will not. By the time that this becomes apparent it is typically too late. The fact that your strategy has changed significantly sometime in the spring will only become apparent at your board meeting in the summer when you present your latest roadmap to them based on information that is no longer current.

What better actually looks like