Successful product management roadmapping in a recession

The global economy is in constant flux. Sometimes, it’s firing on all cylinders, allowing businesses to invest profits and take risks. But what happens when the market contracts and organizations face an economic downturn? 

Although recessions are a fact of life, they don’t necessarily spell doom for your ambitious initiatives. A downturn in the economy provides an opportunity for businesses to prioritize internal improvements, reconnect with their customer base, and innovate.

Conducting product management roadmapping in a recession lets companies look beyond the cut costs and layoffs they may use to survive in the short term. Roadmapping leads to improved internal processes and product strategies that help organizations outperform their competitors in the near term while building strength for their future comeback. 

Many companies have pivoted during a recession to rebound spectacularly. Here’s how to use strategic roadmaps to help your organization do the same. 

Prioritize what to build next

Product managers are a critical voice, helping to determine how a company adapts during an economic downturn by establishing a solid roadmap for innovation and digital acceleration. The roadmap becomes a guiding light, helping the team keep sight of big-picture goals while fostering adaptation to market circumstances. It helps the company launch profitable yet affordable new products without imposing on reduced resources and revenue. 

Prioritize and understand customer needs

Examine products currently in the development pipeline and consider which ones best serve customer needs moving forward. A customer-centric strategy during economic uncertainty helps you stand out, especially if your competitors’ response is to curtail innovation. 

Renew your customer outreach initiatives and reiterate your commitment to innovation by:

• Adopting new marketing initiatives like online or in-app surveys to gauge audience sentiment and evolve the customer experience

• Conducting internal, cross-functional surveys of customer service, sales, and other teams to source feedback from multiple client perspectives

• Attending trade shows or other networking events to encourage off-the-cuff customer conversations and uncover insights into needs, challenges, and experiences that can inform product development decisions

Review your processes

With the influx of customer and stakeholder feedback, there’s a lot of input to consider. The organization needs feedback and idea management systems to prioritize and quickly act on high-value ideas.

The “reach, impact, confidence, effort” (RICE) technique is a standard prioritization methodology. RICE highlights four factors that determine developmental priority.

1. Reach

Estimate the number of people a product’s development and launch affect within a given period, such as customers per quarter or transactions per month. Wherever possible, use actual numbers from product metrics to ensure your estimates are accurate.

Example: Of the 200 customers on average who enter the product’s sales funnel each month, 35% opt to buy. The reach of this item is 

200 customers ✕ 0.35 purchase rate ✕ 3 months = 210 customers per quarter

2. Impact

Every product’s release focuses on moving the needle on organizational goals, such as increased adoption, improved bottom line, or maximized enjoyment. That’s its impact.   

Impact is difficult to quantify, so most organizations opt for a multiple-choice scale to avoid relying on gut feelings: 

• 3 for “massive impact”

• 2 for “high”

• 1 for “medium”

• 0.5 for “low”

• 0.25 for “minimal”

Once the impact is determined, it’s multiplied by the Reach score to scale it up or down. 

Example: A new product’s reach is 210, with a high impact on customers. Therefore, the cumulative score thus far is:

Reach ✕ Impact =

210 customers per quarter ✕ 2 (high impact) = 420

3. Confidence

Rating the organization’s confidence in a product’s success mitigates enthusiasm for ill-defined ideas. It’s an essential part of the equation, especially if you believe an outcome could produce a significant impact but lack the data to back it up. 

Define confidence as a scaled percentage similar to the one used for impact:

• 100% for “high confidence”

• 80% for “medium”

• 50% for “low”

If your confidence in an initiative’s success is lower than 50%, it’s a warning sign you should look elsewhere.

Example: The development and marketing team believes the new product has a medium chance of success. The score becomes:

Reach ✕ Impact ✕ Confidence =

210 customers per month ✕ 2 (high impact) ✕ 0.80 confidence = 336

4. Effort

Finally, consider the time product development requires from all team members, including design, engineering, and marketing. Then, forecast effort as the number of person-months (work one team member completes in a month) needed to bring the product to market.

With so many unknowns, you may need to review previous projects to increase the accuracy of your rough estimate. Try to provide your estimate in whole numbers or use 0.5 if you expect to take a fraction of a month.

Finally, divide the total of your previous calculations by this number.

Example: Product management estimates that launching the initiative will require four person-months. Calculate the final RICE score as follows:

(Reach ✕ Impact ✕ Confidence) ÷ Effort =

(210 customers per month ✕ 2 (high impact) ✕ 0.80 confidence) ÷ 4 = 84

The final RICE score is 84. Run each project in your product portfolio through the RICE calculation and compare the scores. During a downturn, consider prioritizing the highest-scoring projects. 

Review your product management tools

During a recession, company leadership expects everyone to do more with less, increasing the pressure to deliver quality products and meet quarterly goals. Product management must eliminate repetitive tasks and other inefficiencies to optimize processes and performance. An inefficient tech stack could impede the development team’s efforts to reach those targets.

When vetting current or new technology solutions, zero in on two crucial questions:

1. Where are the communication gaps?

Review your collaboration tools. Do you have a centralized platform that tracks ad hoc decisions, or do they go undocumented? Excel or Google Sheets may seem convenient, but you’ll struggle to parse details or communicate strategy across multiple teams.

Instead, find ways to communicate visually as much as possible. A simplified and accessible communication platform with color coordination and a streamlined interface helps teams identify and understand their role while connecting work to the company’s overarching goals.

2. Can you eliminate busywork?

Improve productivity by consolidating the tech stack, removing redundancies, and eliminating repetitive tasks. Seek integrated technology that creates seamlessly coordinated platforms and reduces the need for extra meetings or check-ins by keeping everyone on the same page.

Jira is a great example. Jira supports multiple apps, leveraging the same data and eliminating errors or inconsistencies between groups by connecting their dedicated tools.

Create a product management roadmap

Delays are costly. They sap finances, erode confidence, decrease ROI, and disappoint stakeholders. Worst of all, they often lead to missed opportunities in an already contracted marketplace. So, once the organization has consulted its customer base, prioritized projects, and optimized its product management tools, it’s time to craft a product roadmap to support the timely delivery of innovations. 

A roadmap charts milestones while building visibility around the desired goal, keeping the development team focused on producing deliverables. Roadmapping also breaks down silos, creating alignment between departments and ensuring everyone nails their targets. Essentially, it results in better outcomes.

Building a roadmap keeps team and organizational goals front and center, driving prosperity despite the recession. With a strategic plan in place, the organization boosts accountability and helps teams hit short-term milestones along the path to long-term success.

Build your roadmap with Tempo

When the development team collaborates to establish a product roadmap, they help keep the organization’s eye on the ball, no matter the economic climate. That’s why Tempo has created Strategic Roadmaps, an intuitive application that integrates with your existing Jira platform. 

Strategic Roadmaps ticks all the boxes for your organization to thrive in a recession. The app creates boardroom-ready product roadmaps incorporating client feedback, prioritizes initiatives, and builds alignment across departments while ensuring the development team meets its goals on time.

With Tempo in your corner, you don’t have to fear market cycles. You’ll have everything you need to embrace any challenge.