Are roadmaps ever useful? - Marty Cagan

Published 2023-06-01

Season 1 - Episode 26 - Marty Cagan

Before founding the Silicon Valley Product Group to pursue his interests in helping others create successful products through his writing, speaking, advising and coaching, Marty Cagan served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.
Marty began his career with a decade as a software developer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories conducting research on software technology, and building several software products for other software developers.

After HP, Marty joined a then young Netscape Communications Corporation, where he had the opportunity to participate in the birth of the Internet industry. Marty worked directly for co-founder Marc Andreessen, where he was vice-president for Netscape’s platform and tools, and later e-commerce applications, and worked to help Internet start-ups and Fortune 500 companies alike to understand and utilize the newly emerging technology.

Marty was most recently senior vice-president of product and design for eBay, where he was responsible for defining products and services for the company’s global e-commerce trading site.
During his career, Marty has personally performed and managed most of the roles of a modern software product organization, including product management, software development, product marketing, user experience design, software testing, engineering management, and general management.

As part of his work with SVPG, Marty is an invited speaker at major conferences and top companies across the globe.

He is also the author of the books INSPIRED: How to Create Products Customers Love and EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.

Marty is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz with B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Applied Economics (1981), and of the Stanford University Executive Institute (1994).

"Used properly roadmaps are a helpful tool, the problem is almost no-one uses them that way" - Marty Cagan

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:11 What is the purpose of a roadmap?
08:06 What is the relationship between the roadmap and other artifacts?
12:13 What about roadmapping your discovery efforts?
14:22 If not a roadmap in discovery, what are we using?
15:30 Why are roadmaps so popular in product?
21:50 When is a roadmap useful and how is it useful?
23:21 What do you consider to be best practices on a roadmap?
24:32 What are the biggest mistakes or anti-patterns you see on a roadmap?
28:23 Can you put your pledge to customers from product teams into the context of roadmapping?
30:52 If you had to distill your philosophy of roadmapping into one or two sentences what would it be?
31:32 What should I have asked you about roadmapping that I haven’t?
33:06 What is SVPG, how people can get in touch and how you can help them?

Thanks for watching 👍

Be sure to check out Marty's links...
- www.svpg.com/
- twitter.com/cagan
- www.linkedin.com/in/cagan/
- Inspired book www.amazon.com/INSPIRED-Create-Tech-Products-Custo…
- Empowered book www.amazon.com/EMPOWERED-Ordinary-Extraordinary-Pr…
- Loved book www.amazon.com/Loved-Rethink-Marketing-Products-Si…

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Phil Hornby and Justin Woods, Co-hosts and Co-creators of Talking Roadmaps
www.talkingroadmaps.com/

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