What’s the roadmap for the channel? | Justin Woods & Phil Hornby

In this special bonus episode, Talking Roadmaps cohosts Justin Woods and Phil Hornby reflect on three years and 70 episodes of exploring roadmapping with industry experts, product leaders, and tool vendors. They discuss key takeaways, including the evolving role of roadmaps as communication and alignment tools, the importance of visualization, and how AI could reshape roadmapping practices. The episode also marks a transition for the channel—moving from an open-ended exploration of roadmaps to a more focused, seasonal approach. The first themed season will centre on Product Operations, featuring top experts sharing insights on scaling product management practices. Justin and Phil also tease upcoming projects, including an audience-focused email course and a visual guide on roadmap styles. If you’ve followed Talking Roadmaps, this episode is a must-watch to see where the channel is headed next.

We mentioned some new resources we’ve been working on. You can check them out here:

• Roadmapping E-mail Course - our free introduction course to great roadmapping - COMING SOON

• Roadmap Audience Canvas - part of our secret sauce to help you create the right roadmap for each audience.

• Roadmap Visuals Patterns - discover the 14 different visual styles we’ve identified for roadmaps.

Here is an audio-only version if that’s your preferred medium - and you can access it through your favourite podcasting platform if you prefer (Apple, Spotify, Amazon).

Coming next is Season 2 focusing on Product Operations. We’re kicking off with Chris Compston, Product Ops Consultant and Advisor. So watch out for Season 2 - Episode 1!

• Transcript

  We're gonna change slightly. And so Phil, what's going on with that?

  So, series two is well and truly underway. I know you've got some people you're talking to tomorrow. I think I've got three in the can now. We're gonna do a short series. We decided that after 70 episodes, whilst we're still learning new things, the amount of new things per episode is going down. And so it is time to go to a new space.

  Welcome to the Talking Roadmaps channel, the show where we talk about everything road mapping from the good, the bad, the ugly. We've had different guests on the show from industry experts, practitioners, and tool vendors as well. And it brings me no greater pleasure than to introduce my other co-host on the channel. Phil, welcome! It's good to have you on here and both of us together.

  Justin, I'm looking forward to today. Coming together and summing up the last three years, the 70 episodes that we've done already. I know the first two were you and me interviewing each other, but now we get to kind of distil what we've thought and learned throughout that process. And then tell people where we're going next. If you're enjoying the channel, subscribe, hit the bell and give us a like.

  What a journey, 70 guests that we've had on series one, which has been phenomenal. We've had some incredible names and some incredible insights from people. And I think we've really got key takeaways from everyone that we've spoken to as well. So I'm wondering maybe if we kind of dig down and do some questions for each other. What do you think?

  Sounds like a good idea. And maybe get each other's view on each other's questions as well. So maybe I'll start you out Justin. What's been your highlight for the last, you know, those three years, one season of this channel? What's been your highlight?

  I think one of the things that's been great for me is just building my network of people that, that I, you know, some of the people that I've got books for, the authors, the people that do workshops, the people that do talks and stages as these events, actually being able to have them on the channel and the opportunity to pick their brains on road mapping has been phenomenal. So building that network and being closer to the people that I've admired has been really good. I think the other bit of it is it that we've had a mix of guests on the show. You know, we've had some of those industry leaders, but we've also spoken to practitioners, hardworking product managers in the industry, CPOs, and they've each shared their kind of nuggets with us from the coalface that have been just as valuable, I've found as everywhere else. So I think that for me, and it's just been a joy actually just working with you, Phil. We've done behind the scenes work, we've been making sure that everything's working together. We've had weekly meetings where we meet up and talk about our businesses, talk about Talking Roadmaps. So it's just been a great opportunity all round. What about you? What's been a takeaway or kind of some of your key highlights?

  Well, I guess I reflect on what our goals were at the start, right? It was learning public, grow our credibility, kind of grow our networks and maybe discover something new and interesting, but collaborate as well. See what it's like to work together. And so the working together has been fun, absolutely. Growing our network. I mean, going to debate roadmaps with Marty Kagan, having Theresa Torres on and talking about it, then going to conferences and the people that we've had on the channel are the people you go and have a beer with in an evening has been great fun. Every time I find something new, that is the real highlight for me though. It's like they all bring, everyone brings a new perspective and even after 70 episodes we're still finding something new. But some of them were just so eyeopening like, and yet so simple. Like when Harry Max showed me a radial style of roadmap and it's like OMG, I love this and I kinda latched onto it and, we'll come back to it later, but kind of, I've done so much with those sorts of different visualisations that it really, just finding things like that, those golden nuggets have really been my highlight.

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's been a joy to share it with our audience. We, you know, we've gone from zero to over a thousand subscribers now. It's a slow but steady journey for us. We are doing it because we want to provide that value with our audience. And as Phil said, we are understanding these little golden nuggets from people and we wanna share that with you. We wanna demystify road mapping and make it easier. So Phil, you mentioned about kind of some of these takeaways you've had from guests. I wonder what's one piece of road mapping advice you've heard from a guest that really stood out for you?

  I don't think I can name exactly who it came from. This is what frustrates me because I think it's a theme I've heard throughout it. But something that ended up in one of my talks that I've been giving for the last year or so was that the roadmap doesn't belong to the product manager, it belongs to the product team. And by that I mean the cross-functional team, I don't mean the product management department, I mean the engineer, the product manager, the designer as a group, they own the roadmap. It's an artefact that they all have to be aligned on, all have to agree on because it's setting the direction of travel that they're all going on. It might even go out to that extended team, including go to market folks like product marketing and so on. What about you?

  Yeah, it's a good point. I think that was really well said. And I think it's something that different companies embrace in different ways, but kind of reiterating that now makes complete sense to me. I think for me it was one of our most recent episodes. See you said, you know, even up to episode 70, we're learning something new, sharing something new. I had the great privilege of chatting to Ed Roberts and he talked about, or shared with me a proverb, I think it was an ancient Chinese proverb around, "we cross the river by feeling the stones". And what I really like that is that really encompasses my feeling about road mapping. Crossing the river gets a set of direction. We know clearly where we want to get to, but feeling the stones means that we're not necessarily sure how we're gonna get there. We need to go step by step, kind of looking in the short term around where we are navigating. Maybe it might not be a direct route, but we have to keep looking back up at the bank of the river to know where it is that we're going. And I think, you know, we talked about one of our favourite books, "Product Roadmaps Relaunched", and it talks about setting direction while embracing uncertainty. And I think we cross the river by feeling the stones encompasses that really nicely.

  And you've gotta love a classic kind of Chinese proverb. I mean, if anyone hasn't spotted on LinkedIn every Monday I put out a proverb or something like that crossed with product language. So I love phrases like that that we can twist into our world. So, okay, we've talked to a lot of people, we've learned a lot of things. How has your approach to road mapping changed?

  Well, it'd be a lie to said if it didn't, but yeah, it has. I think one of the big things for me was really crystallising my understanding of what a roadmap is there to do. And it's, you know, I think we can all agree now it's a communication and alignment tool. And so the communication and alignment infers that you're trying to communicate and align teams and people. And that's really led us to doing some work in our workshops that we've done earlier in the year around the audience canvas. You know, we've had the opportunity to share this with many teams now with different companies. And it's really trying to think about audience-centric road mapping. Your roadmap is not about you, it's about the communication alignment that you need and therefore you need to really tailor that to that audience to make sure that you get the decisions and the feedback and the buy-in that you need. So, you know, working on the audience canvas with you and that's something we're gonna share with our audience in time has been a really, a really fundamental shift in my mindset of evolving on what road mapping is. Phil, what about you? How's your approach to road mapping evolved?

  I've embraced something from my early life. Like, I remember really caring about design, visualisation. I'm not a designer, I know I'm not. I'm just not artistic enough. Maybe if I practised a lot because I do believe that a lot of this can come through practise. But what I really recognised was that it's as a communication artefact, the visualisation is an important aspect. I find that all the tools out there just don't do a very good job, frankly, they're great for managing data, but when it comes to actually sharing it with an audience, communicating your roadmap, they fall short. And as I mentioned, one of my favourite things that came up in the episode with Harry Max was a radio radar roadmap. With through my coaching practise, I came across what I now call a territory diagram, which is another form of roadmap. And it just, we started compiling those different visual patterns. I think initially it was 14, no initially, sorry, it was 12 and now it's at 14 different visual patterns that are just this giving us a visual language for how we can communicate that direction of travel with different audiences. Now that radio one, for example, that Harry shared, I've shared it with a bunch of teams and about 50% of them have ended up using it for their strategic roadmap because it challenges some of the conventions out there of the Gantt chart, the table, et cetera, that we've got so used to and provides a better communication medium. And so it's really driven me to go back to recognising the importance of visualisation. And sadly, I said none of the tools seem to do it yet to the level I want to end up back in PowerPoint. But I'm okay with that. I'm probably not managing the data in there, but at least I'm using that to share the story.

  I'm a big advocate of that myself. Even being, you know, a road mapping tools kind of guy. I think what's important is the context is so important. The company, the people, what they're used to, even, you almost have to roadmap your road mapping journey with them. And what I've found is that, you know, you have to roadmap that journey and they have to be receptive to it. That's why road mapping can be so difficult sometimes because it really depends on the context of the company, the people, the products and everything else. And so it is great that you've been able to share this with a bunch of different teams that I know you coach and you work with as well. What's some of the biggest challenges you still hear about road mapping today when you work with those teams?

  It takes so long to roadmap. I think that's gotta be the hard, the thing I hear every single time, one of my favourite sound bites to throw out there is if you're spending more than 30 minutes on your roadmap a month, you are doing it wrong. And by that I mean creating the artefacts that you are publishing and sharing with people. Because to me, road mapping the activity is an ongoing thing that is really product management. It's making decisions day in day out, deciding what you're gonna prioritise, what you're gonna deprioritize, what you're gonna do, what you're not gonna do. It's making those choices and then actually putting in an artefact should be fairly straightforward and that's where the tools come in 'cause they allow you to quickly make those changes. But if you are constantly in flux and actually making too many changes and spending too much time just updating the artefact, you're just creating a lot of busy work. I remember, I think Elliot Golden, who was on an earlier episode who I know you worked with in the past, talked about at one point in his life, he spent literally days a week rippling through changes to the roadmap to make sure that all the different views were consistent and that, you know, they had, they could tell the story, that's not right. That's a problem, that's busy work for busy work's sake. And we've gotta make sure that we recognise that the value of the artefact is in helping teams get to communicate and align as we go all the way back to what you said earlier. And if we're rebuilding it every five seconds, then frankly they weren't aligned in the first place. So kind of helping find that same level of updates and published cycle so that we're not asking people to spend too much time on this thing that is a minor, tiny part of the real work.

  Exactly. It's not, you know, the roadmap is useless, but the road mapping is invaluable. I wouldn't say useless. We get a great deal of pleasure outta it. The emphasis needs to be on the road mapping.

  Yeah, but you've gotta paraphrase Mr. Eisenhower there and therefore it becomes useless, right? What about yourself? What are the biggest challenges you come across? 'cause I know you work with a lot of teams in particular on their road mapping tool set up and so on, so.

  Yeah, I mean, two of the teams I'm working with at the moment, one of the, which is one of the largest airlines in the world, I'm working with them at the moment to try and differentiate their thinking between delivery and execution and planning and strategy for them. They think, they feel that road mapping is really just extending the delivery and execution cycles out from, you know, this quarter to next quarter to next quarter. And actually what we need to do is elevate that thinking. And it's not surprising they haven't had a tool necessarily that was allowing them to plan and roadmap. So really it was more around execution and cadencing. But I'm working with them really now to try and look at those upper levels of what you and I know as strategic road mapping or you know, strategy, bringing that in and having that longer term. And so that's been one of the challenges really has been breaking the mindset of the teams, the companies even of what they think road mapping is and show them that there's a different way.

  So road mapping is gonna change over the next few years as I'm sure a lot of products work is. What do you think the roadmap looks like for road mapping?

  I mean there's a question, right? And I like to think about road mapping with my clients again because road mappings a journey. It's a step let's phase one, let's just at least have the next quarter on a higher level. Phase two might be let's set some objectives and key results that are six months out. I think there's definitely a journey there. I think the journey for road mapping, what I'd really love to see for road mapping in the next couple of years or five years is, I think the tools are gonna evolve. Of course they are, but as you and I know the tools still aren't quite where they need to be. And I think that's really because a tool might just, it has a table of features and it puts them out over time and therefore there is your feature roadmap. But really good mapping actually looks at different records across different horizons and there's no tool that's really able to do that because it's a bit more complex from a database perspective. So I'm gonna be really curious to see where tools go, where they can support kind of multiple records across multiple timeframes, even logarithmic let's say. But I think I also want to see road mapping, road mapping as a practise is gonna go where product management as a practise goes as well. You know, the two are intrinsically linked. Road mapping is a discipline or a function of product management and that is in a big state of flux as well. So my hope is that first of all, people will agree whether a roadmap is what a roadmap is within their companies and whether they even need one. And most of the time they do, but do it well. And then I think understanding their product management process and make sure that road mapping underpins that. 'cause you can tell a lot by a company by looking at their roadmap. What do you think, Phil, do you agree with what I'm saying there? Where do you see that going in the next five years? Maybe from a process and tools perspective?

  Yeah, I think you're gonna, you're right, you're gonna see evolve with the product practise and I find myself up to at this junction where AI is everywhere and I'm not a big fan of talking about AI too much, but I've had some really interesting conversations in just the last couple of weeks about the art of the possible where we see you going, you look at Satya Nadella's comments about what's gonna happen at where they see SaaS products and so on disappearing with AI. And I start to wonder if that's gonna help, are we gonna be able to say it's okay, we can have all this data in our tools, our management tools and when we want to actually create and surface up the information that we need for our particular audience, we can say go and find it and create the right version and then we can as experts sense check it and address it. 'Cause I still think for at least the foreseeable future AI is gonna be an assistant working with the human and we're kind of pairing together where an experienced person who also knows the reality to avoid hallucinations can sense check. But if it can find what is in there in our management systems over and some of those being more strategic and visionary, but then say, well can you create a view and the right message for this audience that I can tell you about the audience providing a profile maybe in the format of our audience canvas, then maybe it's gonna allow them to surface that information from the management tools. That I think could be a really interesting kind of direction of travel.

  Yeah, agreed. And I don't think road mappings gonna go away for the fundamental reason that it's a communication and alignment tool which is designed to communicate and align between humans. So I think it's still gonna be there, we just need to work out whether we need it and to see how it evolves. And maybe we can use AI to ground some of that in reality, you know, from a capacity planning perspective, is this what we're planning to do in reality? Maybe we can kind of use AI to sense check our strategies and things like that. There's some great exciting things that can go on there. But like you said it with, there's hallucinations as well. I think many people's roadmaps hallucinate without AI

  And I come to this really sort of fundamental thing, I think it's an IBM paper from a few years ago. A machine can't be held accountable, therefore it shouldn't make management decisions. And so it still has to come back to a human to make the ultimate call, the ultimate decision. But we can be helped by the tools and the technology around us. And I think that, that if anything is gonna be the most important trend in product management going forwards, it's focusing on that decision making using the tools to support decision making.

  We've covered a lot, we've spoken to a lot of people, a lot of influential people that may have coloured our thinking a little bit differently from when we first spoke. So Phil, I'm curious if your philosophy on road mapping has changed from when we first started at the beginning of the series through to now.

  So let's reflect on it. What was my philosophy? It was one version, one source of truth, multiple views for your audience to communicate direction. I mean I think it misses, it probably missed a line, it probably missed the element of ownership of it's the team that needs to own this and there's probably a subtlety of not just what of multiple views but also multiple levels that's in there. I think you had a session where you talked about different flight levels in one of the calls. Yeah, and that really kind of resonates with me because there are different levels of detail that engineering and operations care about. Middle management, the leadership, the investors, the customers, the customer leadership, the customer at the operations level and kind of recognising that different level of fidelity is also there. Now it's a form of view but I think it's almost a hierarchy at that point as well. So I think recognising that and recognising that in B2B it can actually be a sales tool as well. I think that's worth just calling out. It enables the conversation both internally and externally.

  Yeah, it's intrinsic to what you'd written, but I can understand calling that out. Audiences really importantly can be external as well. Maybe we'll talk about that in a moment.

  And I thought, I'm wondering whether audience is the right term as I stand here, it's like audience implies a transmit, are they collaborators? So just in one of your thoughts, how how has your philosophy changed?

  Yeah, I think in some ways it's reinforced what I'd written. So I think, you know, or what I'd spoken about, so my kind of quote was, it should be an aspirational journey of where we are and where we want to be. And I still think that holds, but the aspirational part of it for me is probably a little bit more in strategy. I work with a lot of clients and I see the strategies aren't aspirational enough. I don't think they're stretched enough. I don't think they're exciting enough. You know, strategy within companies is a big problem. Phil, I'm sure you see this with your clients as well. And so I think the strategy should be aspirational, but the roadmap, yeah, it is an aspirational journey. I like the word journey in there, but actually I'd like to say that the strategy is the aspirational thing that we're wanting to go to move towards. It should also be the decision making framework of what goes on and doesn't go on our roadmap. And therefore the roadmap itself is maybe more of a, I like aspirational, but I dunno, it's just a, I think I'd change it to, it's more a journey of where we are and where we want to be. But it needs to embrace that uncertainty. It needs to talk about feeling the stones. And I'd love to sort of think about how we can put that into that statement of discovery and exploration and take road mapping back to what it really is, which so many people talk about roadmaps with the analogy of a road. And I don't love that because a road is where people have been a thousand times before and even a thousand times before it was a road, it was a path and even before that it was something else. So we are not, a road just says, you know, we've been there thousands and thousands of times. There's actually, if we talk about it from an exploration route, it's completely unknown and therefore talking about the road doesn't make sense. I think going back to a compass even makes more sense than a route planner or GPS because you literally only have that direction and then you make these course corrections to it. So I'd love to embrace that a little bit more in a sentence and maybe I'll come up with something pithy that we can share in a later episode.

  Yeah, I mean I think that you almost went into Janna Bastow is there's a prototype of your strategy. 'Cause you were talking about the aspiration has to come from the strategy, not from the roadmap itself because the roadmap is the thing that implements the strategy. And if you haven't got an aspirational strategy, you shouldn't expect an aspirational roadmap. You should expect an operational or whatever type of roadmap, it should align with where we're aiming to go and how we're aiming to get there. So Justin, what do we got next in talk coming in talking roadmaps?

  Well, we've got a couple of things in our pockets that we're really excited to share with our audience and we've gathered at least a large theatre now of people over a thousand followers, which is great on YouTube and of course on the podcast as well. We are gonna carry on doing some of the good work that we've been doing already, you know, through the years we've had the opportunities to go in and speak to clients, to lead roadmap in workshops with them. We can bespoke those to their needs and we've got a number of different modules that we can kind of pull out that talk about visualisation or presenting your roadmap. So I think Phil, I want us to see some more work on that area where we can share that with a wider audience and you know, be able to benefit product managers to do their road mappings better.

  Totally agree. I'm looking forward to it. 'Cause yeah, whether it's virtual or getting in the room with you, I love running those workshops and seeing how people move from here to there in terms of their road mapping in practise and process and just the artefacts that they have.

  Yeah, exactly. And I know in some of those workshops we've shared some different ways. You mentioned this earlier, different ways of articulating in roadmap and showing that roadmap. So what are you thinking about that around visualisation of roadmaps? Have we got anything we can offer?

  Well I am trying to work on a visual guide. I mean it is one of those perpetual projects that I work on and I put down and I pick up and I put down. But I'm trying to crank it out at the moment to get those 14 visual guide or 14 different visual patterns documented in a way that kind of explains when you would use one, what are they useful for? And yes, it's gonna have a Gantt chart in there. You can't have a complete conversation about road mapping without have talking about a Gantt chart, but it's also gonna have the radials and the territories diagrams and the various other examples that we've derived in there. And yeah, hopefully that'll be available in the not too distant future for people to grab a copy of and just make their roadmaps look better. What about other things we're gonna help them with in terms of their learning?

  So something we started late last year and we're gonna be bringing and finalising to our audience and the clients that we work with is a bit, I think we need to do a bit of an email course. You know, people within our industry are great at sharing knowledge but we are also extremely busy. And so what about if we create an email course that can just take people through the concepts of what a roadmap is, what a roadmap isn't, maybe taking them through some of the artefacts that we spoke about, the audience canvas, the the visual guides, maybe just a short series of just bite-size emails that can take people through. So if they weren't sure what a roadmap was at the beginning, they start to have those questions answered, start to get them to think a little bit more and leads on to maybe some of our materials as well. I think that's certainly possible for us to deliver.

  And obviously we're gonna do that one free. We're not gonna charge people for that. We wanna help raise the ships in terms of road mapping approach.

  Yeah, definitely. But that's not everything we are doing this year, is it Phil? It's gonna be a slight change to the talking roadmaps channel in that we've now come to a close as series one. As Phil mentioned, we've spoken to 70 incredible experts, thought leaders, tool owners and authors, but we've not stopped there. We're gonna change slightly. And so Phil, what's going on with that?

  So series two is well and truly underway. I know you've got some people you're talking to tomorrow. I think I've got three in the can now we're gonna do a short series. We decided that after 70 episodes, whilst we're still learning new things, the amount of new things per episode is going down. And so it's time to go to a new space. Not ignoring roadmaps, we'll still talk about roadmaps a little bit. Can't ignore our heritage. But the first series is gonna be about product operations. We've got world leading experts on product operations talking to us. And so we're gonna have 10 to 12 episodes as a season two all about product operations on talking roadmaps. Heck, then we're gonna go onto another subject, we'll do the same thing again. And we kind of started realising this not just because the amount of new stuff per episode was going down, but also because some of the conversations we were having, they were a little tangential to roadmaps. Like I had a lovely conversation with April Dunford quite a long time ago now, but it was much more about go to market and product marketing than it was about road mapping. And so we thought, well let's start getting the best out of those guests and really leverage their knowledge in a better way with a little bit of road mapping. And so that's the plan. We're doubts kickoff. Well, it'll come out straight after this episode, probably about two weeks after this, after you see this. But yeah, we're looking forward to having that slightly different spin on our content.

  Yeah, definitely. So should we look to wrap it up, Phil?

  All I'm gonna say, Justin, it's been an absolute pleasure working with you for the last three years on this. I'm looking forward to the next three.

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's been great to share that journey with you, to build friendships, a stronger friendship with you, friendships with the wider community and to build a gathering of people that are interested in talking roadmaps with us and with our guests. So that just leaves us to say, guys, thank you so much for watching today's episode and supporting us in the journey. If we've shared value with you, please do give it a like and subscribe to the channel, check us out on the podcast as well. And if you want to get in touch, you can go to talkingroadmaps.com. We've got episode lists there where you can catch up on what we've said with other people. And if you're curious around things that we've talked about already, the workshops, the audience canvas, the visual guides, then you'll be able to find information there. But otherwise, Phil, thank you so much. It's been great and thank you to our audience.

  Thanks everyone. Let's make some better roadmaps.

  Absolutely. Cheers.