Need to build an experimentation roadmap and don’t know how? You are in the right place!

A couple of months back, I decided to build an experimentation roadmap that would span a few months out. We had a backlog of 30+ disparate ideas but I wanted our efforts to be more cohesive and consistent towards achieving specific goals. I also wanted to be able to plan resources and prioritize better.

I didn’t really have a ton of experience getting folks in a room and having them all contribute and agree on a roadmap. Sure, I had lead sessions to brainstorm solutions for testing but this was bigger than that. So, I set about researching different frameworks — I found a session titled Experiment Cartography :: Building the Perfect Roadmap (Kenya Davis and Krissy Tripp) from the Experiment Nation conference to be very helpful. I read up on different approaches including Jobs to be Done (JTBD), How might we (HMW) etc.

I won’t go into all that since that is not the purpose of this post. Instead, I would like to share some tips about the planning and orchestration required for a successful output.

Be organized.

Save all your brainstorming tasks (activities, ideas) and reference material (data, KPIs, roadmaps) in ONE place. I created a board on Miro for this purpose. Miro is great for collaboration and provides an endless canvas for sharing thoughts, ideas and other content. Another popular tool is Mural.

Having everything chronologically in one place makes it easier for everyone to reference and build connections between ideas as compared to having separate files saved in a folder. It also becomes easier to see the progress and understand why we are where we are. Participants can also revisit ideas later.

Another part of being organized is making sure you set up time for the team to get through the process. Gaps are killers. You will likely need to divide the brainstorming into a few meetings. The last thing you want is to take your foot off the pedal and allow too many days in between. So, be proactive but also mindful of everyone’s time.

Plan activities effectively.

You need to plan well to make sure everyone is following along and contributing based on their areas of expertise. This is the hardest part. Many ideation exercises get derailed by the loudest voices in the room or folks preferring to conform to the popular/ safe opinion. There is also a chance that not everyone is able to follow the instructions in real time (looking at all you multitaskers).

My biggest learning here was to leverage silent brainstorming. I shared the tasks with participants at least a day before our meetings and had them complete them in their own time. This ensured that participants reflected before adding their thoughts to the Miro board. We had decent participation and all areas were well represented. Silent brainstorming can also be used during meetings, as recommended by HBR.

This ensured that all (most of) the participants were prepared to share their thoughts and rationale when we met. The discussion felt productive as we focused on converging and making decisions.

It is also very important for the person who is planning to stay a step ahead of the group. Be actively summarizing to move things along. The collective wisdom of the participants doesn’t work to summarize and drive conclusions and decisions in real time in meetings. So, be prepared to spend a good amount of time outside of meetings during this exercise.

Don’t go it alone.

Tag team — don’t go it alone. I worked closely with one of the stakeholders to review and summarize the discussions. We also worked on the tasks, prompts and instructions so that they would make sense to the participants and help move us forward.

Lastly, a word on data..

Use as much data as you can but don’t hold up the process due to the lack of. There is value in harnessing the collective intelligence and experience of a skilled product team. Determine the assumptions crucial to your plan and push to test them. Pivot as required as you learn along the way.

As a result of this roadmapping exercise, we now have a living and breathing document that has our goals, pitstops (borrowing from the EN session mentioned above) and ideas all mapped out. We were able to add rough PIE estimates and identified our unknowns for each. This helped us prioritize opportunities to tackle first.

Not everything that came out of this exercise involved testing but it has positively impacted the product roadmap and has equipped us with better questions to ask user research.

So if you get an opportunity to do something similar, definitely take it on. The experience is extremely enriching. I would love to know more about what did and didn’t work for you.