Product Roadmaps Relaunched

Chapter 5. Uncovering Customer Needs Through Themes

What you’ll learn in this chapter

The importance of expressing customer needs

Definitions of themes and subthemes

Ways to uncover themes and subthemes

How to use job stories and user stories to support themes

How to transform needs into themes and subthemes

Ways to relate your themes to objectives

How to handle features in your roadmap

Identifying customer needs is the most important aspect of your roadmapping process.

Roadmaps should be about expressing those customer needs. Therefore, most items on your roadmap will derive from a job the customer needs to accomplish or a problem the customer must solve.

Uncovering those needs can be a challenge in and of itself. On top of that, you must vet every need to make sure your understanding is not biased by your assumptions or warped by your rose-colored glasses. So, in this chapter, we’ll go into quite a lot of detail on how to investigate, identify, and define customer needs.

Expressing Customer Needs

In the Preface, we related the product professional to an executive chef, and compared building products to crafting meals. In this metaphor, the roadmap is equivalent to the chef’s menu; it defines what will be delivered. But so far we don’t have anything on it! Now we get to the real value—figuring out what goes on the menu, in what order, and how it will be presented.

If you’ve done the groundwork, you will have uncovered a real problem worth solving. In other words, you have identified a “job ...