Sunday, 11 November 2007
Yes you do need a Product Road Map
You've got to love David Heinemeier Hansson. He may be the new Mark Fleury: always ready to give you his opinion on why everything you know and do is wrong. His latest: a little essay on why product road maps are harmful.
While it's good to question the sacred cows, I'm not so sure that 37signals has really sustained growth over a long enough period of time to deserve any special credibility in this arena. There is an arrogance that often comes to upstarts who produce some innovations and get market success and I suspect DHH is surfing in the wake of his own big head on this one. You would think that if it actually worked to ignore customer input and just innovate, that it wouldn't have taken until 2007 to discover it. Certainly there has been no shortage of really smart people who tried to ignore their customers (I just can't remember any who were successful over the long laul). Yet it seems like the old rich guys all say the same thing: listen to your customers like they are God, because they are.
The problem with DHH's argument is that it is a cynical straw man. He assumes that having a road map and peddling vaporware are the same thing. They are not. The fact that road maps can be and are often abused by "bullet point" management only proves that the abuse is bad, not tool used by the abuse. Good companies almost by definition execute well on their road maps.
I suspect "most people can make do without [a road map]" is the kind of idea that only occurs to small companies who are growing really fast. While you have the big growth, you tend to take customers for granted, though most don't have the nerve to celebrate it like DHH. If you lose a few customers in that situation, who cares: you can't grow fast enough to accommodate them all anyway. Unfortunately, the problem with this is that it never lasts and sooner or later you'll wake up and find you aren't the hot thing anymore, and you'll realize that your customers have no loyalty because you've treated them like crap for years in terms of discussing their needs, desires, and goals. Once the market buzz has died, it's a whole lot better to be eBay than AOL.
DHH compares software product road maps to big upfront software design in the derided waterfall software development methodology. By the way, I recently saw Dan Pritchett of eBay say that they use waterfall. He was almost apologetic about it, during a talk about how they solve their insane scalability problems, but I digress. Even assuming that big design up front is bad for software design, I disagree with the point. Product management and software design are not at all similar. Examine java: it's hardly developed waterfall style. Most of the agile principles out there originated or found early homes in the java community. Yet java has a roadmap created by the Java Community Process and Sun's (and IBM's and BEA's and Oracle's) business strategies. The road map serves as a direction to unify cooperation. It makes the strategy tangible.
Want to know what's going to be in Java 7? It's there in detail. Want to know what's going to be in Java 8? It's there too. See something you like and want to help, click the link. For example, coming is JVM support for for dynamically typing for scripting language support, which will make groovy and jruby substantially faster. Did Sun have a road map when they hired the jruby team? Yes, you bet they did. And jruby is already at par performance-wise with ruby, and Glassfish will leverage this to be the most scalable app server for rails. Did they have a road map when they added ruby support to the Netbeans IDE? Yes, you bet they did. Did Java have a road map when they created groovy? Yes, it's called JSR-241. If DHH really believes that road maps are harmful, I suspect he's happy that there seems to be a road map within the java community of equaling or bettering all of the purported innovations of RoR within the java stack. Sooner or later, no matter who you are and how gifted, one of your competitors will innovate and jump ahead of you in some area. What do you do then? If you are smart and humble, you put closing the gap on your road map and rally your people on how to do it. If you want to lead, you have to tell people generally where you are going, unless you want to attract sheep. Maybe you do, but sheep aren't that lucrative.
Nobody can sustain their business on ground breaking innovation year after year. Do companies that innovate more do better, yes. Can innovation jump start you from where you are? Yes. Is innovation the only thing that matters, long term? No. Once you've innovated, you've got to get and keep customers. Tivo is a great example of an IT company that missed this point. The jury is still out on whether Rails has any long term staying power. I predict Rails is more like Tivo than like the Macintosh, but we'll see.
The simple fact is that people don't spend money on non-commoditized things unless they have confidence in the road map. That includes both customers and investors. I have personally been part of several large dollar purchases of software (the kind will more than one comma in the price), and you can be damn sure we asked vendors about and factored into our decisions the vendor's road map. The road map tells you whether they understand you or not. If you don't want me as a customer, don't have a road map.
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