Fintech R&R ☕️🛣 - Product Roadmaps and some myths busted
A deep dive into fintech product roadmaps, the fine balance of roadmapping, examples I admire and some specific myths busted
Which fintechs have the best public roadmaps?
What are the three main types of roadmap?
Why are roadmaps and Highlander not alike?
Why do I sometimes call a Realistic or Honest roadmap Goldilocks?
Hey Fintechers and Fintech newbies 👋🏽
Fintech never sleeps. And apparently, neither do I.
Why do I say that?
Because the majority of this edition was written next to a pool overlooking a lake in a Sri Lankan resort.
Here’s a snap.
Although I’m on a loooooong overdue holiday to recharge from a jam-packed 2023, I thought I’d write a short sharp edition this week because a few things triggered my thought process about this topic and if I don’t get it down this week, it’ll get added to the backlog. And we all know what happens when things get thrown on the backlog…
The first. Multiple discussions about roadmaps, including the Unit.co ‘pivot’
I've spent the past few weeks conversing with some early-stage fintech startups. Some are so early that there are some foundational discovery insights but no complete plan for the product. A couple of others need some help refining their product roadmap to align it with the overarching strategy and make it more strategic. There are a lot of threads to pull at here, from getting a list of feature ideas into a roadmap to how to store a roadmap so it's accessible to a few different formats.
There’s also the ongoing debate about Unit, the Banking-as-a-Service platform, and the uncertainty about whether it has direct bank relationships or a facilitator. Jason Mikula wrote the detailed piece that triggered a broader discussion. A public roadmap would have provided some guidance on this, for sure.
The second. Being in the back of a cab in rush hour Indian traffic
Just before Sri Lanka, I spent a couple of days in India. I had a lightning bolt moment when the cab I was in sped through traffic, weaving between vehicles and people, adhering to precisely zero of the understood rules of the road, narrowly avoiding mopeds and tuk-tuks, and speeding through red lights. Despite the dynamic, or as most non-residents would say, chaotic nature of the driving, we got there in one piece and certainly faster than we would have had we stayed in a single lane.
On the roads, chaos (or dynamism) IS order.
In terms of the topic, it’s a short hop, skip, and jump to compare a linear roadmap and a dynamic one in terms of efficiency and faster achievement of goals.
The third. Reddit’s IPO
This was very much indirect inspiration. I’m not a regular Reddit user, but there are a few things I do use it for: 1. Check out movie conspiracy theories and easter eggs, 2. Get a gauge of different opinions on fintechs and financial problems to aid with discovery, and 3. to see what’s riling up the product community in r/ProductManagement in the way of myths.
When it comes to myths or at least controversial topics in product, there are many, including roadmap arguments.
So this week, I’m diving into Product Roadmaps, their benefits, and the different formats, as well as busting some myths about roadmaps.
As well as interesting news, puns + movie references, this edition includes the following:
What is a Product Roadmap?
Why is it one of the most valuable assets in the product arsenal?
Different types of roadmap?
Linear
Realistic
Strategic
Examples of excellent fintech roadmaps
Monzo
Wise
Up
My own digital bank roadmap template
Some roadmap myths
Let’s get into it.
NOTE: Got a little carried away with this one so your mail client might crop the end of it. Click here to see the full edition in all its gloryWhat is a Product Roadmap? 🛣
Sometimes, kicking off with a Webster's dictionary description is helpful.
It defines a roadmap or road map as
1: a map showing roads, especially for automobile travel
2: a detailed plan to guide progress toward a goal
The second is a broad but accurate description.
I prefer my product roadmap definition, which is as follows:
“A strategic document that outlines the features, direction, key milestones, and sequencing for developing a product.
It's a business-objective-aligned visual representation of a product's strategic vision and planned evolution over time that serves as a blueprint for the product, engineering, design, leadership teams, and other relevant stakeholders.”
The above is an excellent example of a simple roadmap.
But Roadmap Planning or Roadmapping, the process of gathering inputs, using frameworks and most importantly, leveraging expertise to put a roadmap together, is far from simple.
It involves the following:
Gathering feedback: Using research and customer feedback-gathering processes to gather feedback from target customers.
Translating feedback into customer problems and needs: Reviewing the research, identifying important insights, defining the key customer problems and needs, and, where possible, converting them into Job statements.
Identifying a set of features: Creating a list of features to help serve customers and solve key problems while creating a unique, innovative product.
Prioritising features: Using a relevant framework e.g. Effort x Impact to prioritise features and identify low-hanging impactful features vs larger effort features to assist with sequencing.
Understanding external dependencies: This factor is often overlooked during the roadmapping process, but understanding external dependencies is vital to understanding the sequencing of key features, integration points, and by which point certain features can be built to ensure regulatory compliance. This one is especially important in Fintech Roadmapping.
Setting key goals: Defining clear and measurable goals and objectives that the product roadmap aims to achieve. These goals should be aligned with the overall business strategy and customer needs, and specific goals should be sequenced into milestones in the roadmap.
Proving a hypothesis: Identifying specific features that will help prove a hypothesis initially surfaced from the research, sequencing them into the early part of the roadmap.
Using expertise to bring it together: I've yet to see an AI program capable of taking some research & key goals, generating a set of features and creating a useable roadmap. Until then, we need experienced and expert product folks to bring all the previous steps together and build out a roadmap, the blueprint that teams will use to create the product.
These are all vital and standard steps to creating a roadmap for a fintech product, or any product for that matter. The last one is by far the most important one, though.
An experienced product person, whether that's a CPO, Head of Product, Product Lead, or Senior PM, is crucial to creating a workable roadmap. Although I've also seen founders/co-founders who really know the problem space and have a good grasp of the above steps create worthy roadmaps.
Anatomy of a roadmap 🧬
Before outlining the benefits of a well-thought-out and relevant roadmap, I first want to cover a few of the components most would recognise and one overarching attribute I think is the most important and that every roadmap should have.
These are ones most product folks and anyone who has seen a roadmap will know and recognise, and many can be inferred from the previous steps, but I'll outline them here for completeness's sake:
Features: Specific features that benefit customers, fit with business objectives, and improve customer experience
Themes: Strategic focus areas or areas of improvement for the product that are aligned with goals and provide context for the features that will be developed. This often looks like features grouped or tagged with specific names, e.g. Transaction Feed
Phases: Sets of features grouped together to achieve a specific goal. MVP is the most relatable phase, which shows groups of features
Sequencing: Phases or sets of features visualised in a logical sequence, i.e. MVP -> Version 2 w/Expanded Customer Personas
Dependency Mapping: Clear identification of dependencies to ensure that development efforts are coordinated effectively e.g. Spending Analytics v1, Spending Analytics v2
These are recognisable components, but one usually unseen and underappreciated attribute of the most successful roadmaps, and I'm talking from firsthand experience here, is…adaptability.
Building one that's clear, solves real problems for customers, and communicates direction is the dream, but the thing that usually throws a spanner in the works for teams is unpredictability. Building an adaptable roadmap mitigates the risk of unpredictably unforeseen customer usage of the product and surprisingly successful sets of features and allows the roadmap to change and evolve with iterative feedback.
In principle, that means creating sets of features that can be easily switched if there is a pivot based on feedback or business strategy, ensuring the majority of features aren't too tightly coupled with each other and building it in a format where adjustments can be made with minimal disruption.
Roadmapping is a delicate balancing act of mapping out features and phases of a product that will serve customer and business needs, whilst also being realistic to build, clear enough for teams to use as a blueprint but flexible enough for components to change if needed.
That's why roadmapping will ideally be done by an experienced product person who has a track record of navigating the tricky balancing act and creating valuable blueprints. Failing that, someone with domain expertise and a strategic mindset.
Why are roadmaps invaluable to a product build?
Product people produce many artefacts vital to new and existing product development, distilling research into a simplified framework, creating customer personas, building metrics hierarchies and more. A roadmap is the one that is invaluable to developing a successful product, and here are the reasons why:
✅ Alignment around a product strategy
A product roadmap aligns all stakeholders around a shared vision and priorities, ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals and creating product strategy literacy across the organisation.
✅ Transparency over changes with the strategy
A great product roadmap is accessible to stakeholders, fostering transparency whilst giving stakeholders visibility into the product's direction and progress. It's also a great confidence builder for teams who can see progress and the steps being taken to build a great product.
✅ Decision making and cross-functional collaboration
It helps guide decision-making within and across teams, providing context and rationale for prioritising certain features or initiatives over others. Teams across the organisation can use it to narrow the focus of problems and collaborate to solve them.
✅ Communication
The roadmap serves as a communication tool, facilitating discussions about priorities, trade-offs, and resource allocation among stakeholders.
These are some of the benefits of a product roadmap to an organisation.
It's also worth noting that investors, board members, early hires, and even customers will have a keen interest in the roadmap, how robust it is, how innovative the plans for the product are, and how the product will evolve over time.
For investors specifically, it visualises the ambitions of the organisation and also demonstrates how logically the product and founding team think. A roadmap with a slow ramp-up, one that's adaptable, has a mix of features that solve customer problems, create retention and also generate revenue, will be looked at favourably.
One that has a limited set of features, that looks very similar to products that have come before, doesn’t have clear measurable milestones and lacks adaptability will be looked at less so.
A roadmap is also a core part of a pitch deck, so the value of getting it right cannot be understated.
Straight or Long and Winding Roads 🚗
So, a quick recap.
I've covered:
What a roadmap is
Given my own 2-liner definition
Outlined some of the major steps in putting one together
Defined some of the key components
And specified the benefits a well-thought-out roadmap brings to a range of internal and external stakeholders.
One area I haven't explored is the different types of roadmap. Most assume there is just one type. It goes left to right, has a few groups of features in it and follows a very sequential liner view. This is just one type and each, as with many different formats and frameworks, has its place.
Linear Roadmap (aka Misleading) 📌
The one I've described briefly above is the most common type seen in pitch and product strategy decks. It is usually separated into different phases but follows a very sequential approach, with the next set of features in the phase starting only when the previous set is completed, meaning phases are highly coupled. Put simply, it outlines a step-by-step progression of development without considering dependencies, iterations, or strategic shifts.
Some call this a misleading roadmap due to its linear, rigid nature and the fact that strategic pivots occur, but for early-stage builds and shorter outlooks, this is still a viable option.
💡Best for: Early stage startups where the problems are clearly identified, research shows the need for specific solutions, the short-medium term roadmap outlines the MVP, and the later post-launch phases visualise how the product will evolve over time. Also useful where time and resources are tight and there's less time to create a Realistic roadmap.
Realistic Roadmap(aka Honest) 🎯
As the name suggests, this offers a more realistic view of how the product will be developed and evolve over time. Rather than highly coupled phases sequential sets of features, this type correctly assumes that the early part of the product development is reasonably well understood and later phases have more uncertainty. So, rather than a step-by-step approach, it defines what the early part of the product will look like with corresponding goals and themes, and outlines a broader set of features and themes for the uncertain future. This means once the early or 'Now' part of the roadmap is close to completion, a review of 'Next' is done to understand what should be developed next and so on. The 'Next' & 'Later' phases become clearer once the 'Now' part is close to completion. This is more realistic although it doesn't have clear data-driven decision points guiding the direction of the product, informing what should be built next.
💡Best for: The majority of fintechs with junior- and mid-level product folks have some time to put together a more comprehensive roadmap but maybe don't have multiple success stories for creating a roadmap and executing it. It is also good for organisations with first or second-time founders where they are the ones responsible for the roadmap and are yet to make their first product hire. Basically for organisations that have a bit more time and expertise to dedicate to planning and roadmapping.
Strategic Roadmap 🧠
As you can tell from the flow of the previous two types, this is the most desirable type of roadmap, and lack of time, resources and expertise are not a factor. Similar to the 'Realistic' roadmap, it has a reasonably clear view of the present and has a realistic outlook for the future with key decision points built in. Each decision point considers metrics and success factors from previous enhancements, customer feedback, and market and competitor analysis before deciding on a path forward. Most people want this roadmap but not for the cost (time, expertise and effort it takes to put this together).
💡Best for: Growing or scaling fintechs with experienced product leaders and clear growth and scale strategy. Also for any early-mid stage fintechs with similar expertise at the helm willing to invest the time to build out a longer term roadmap.
From my experience, having done a few Realistic roadmaps and a couple of Strategic ones and speaking to product folks at different organisations, the Realistic roadmap is the most popular. This is likely due to the not-too-expensive extra effort and expertise required to build a realistic vs. linear roadmap, but a significant extra time and expertise is required to take the next step. Hence why I sometimes call it the Goldilocks, because it's often the 'just right' balance between effort and outcome.
Examples of Roadmaps 🗺️
It wouldn't be an edition of Fintech R&R without some real examples to point to. First, I have one caveat to cover. Most of these are public-facing roadmaps, and as I'll outline in the myths section, they are sometimes different from the blueprint used internally.
Monzo's Trello Roadmap
London's Fintech darling was always going to get a mention here. This version of their public roadmap gave early Monzonauts visibility of what was coming down the line. It followed a standard Now, Next, Later format and gave customers the ability to 'like' features they were keen on. It's a simple format and structure but great for building advocacy.
Wise’s Precise Roadmap
I've written about Wise a few times because for me they are one of the torchbearers for great product vision, strategy, and execution. Their roadmap is split by product stream (accounts, business, platform, transfers) and has great clear language for each of the features in progress. It can also be split by region and upvoted by customers. They also have a great explanation of the roadmap from 2021, describing what it is and why they do it.
Up Banking's Tree of Up
The Tree of Up from Aussie digital bank Up is a stroke of genius in my opinion. Tilt it 90° anti-clockwise and it's comparable to the Strategic roadmap icon outlined earlier and it even has a key for different states and full release note history. Click on each feature and it gives you a tooltip with more information.
Another great thing about it is that it's constantly being updated. Look at the above current version on their site vs a snapshot of the roadmap from Feb 2020.
Very clear, informative and shows strategic thinking. And likely not too dissimilar from what they use internally. The gold standard for public roadmaps.
My roadmap for a digital bank
This last one is from my own archive.
I've built several digital banking roadmaps and used a few different formats. This one is a templated version of a roadmap I created a few years ago for a challenger proposition incubated by a large retail bank.
It resembles an internal Realistic roadmap with clarity on the early part of the product and some broad product themes and features for future phases. Each phase has a goal and timeframe, and there's a clear evolution from the initial version. I did also have a kanban version somewhere in my archive.
NB. I've stripped specific features off this image as I don't want to give away too much secret sauce.
And finally…Some Roadmap Myths 🤔
These are largely ones I've experienced, but there are a couple I crowdsourced from a Fintech Product WhatsApp group.
"A roadmap has to have dates!"
It can have dates but doesn't have to. The best roadmaps tend to have some time blocking, e.g., Q1, Q2, or Month 3-5, but not necessarily fixed dates down to a feature level. This goes down to one of the key factors of adaptability, and putting dates on a roadmap makes it much less flexible.
"Roadmaps are like Highlander, ‘There can only be one’"
This reference is for nerds and fans of the classic and slightly cheesy fantasy movie Highlander. The plot of Highlander revolves around immortal warriors, including Connor MacLeod, who fight each other throughout history with the ultimate goal of being the last one standing, as proclaimed by the tagline: 'There can only be one.'.
As you've probably guessed from the previous section there are usually multiple versions of a roadmap. A common pairing is one internal roadmap that remains confidential and another that is for customers, investors, partners etc.
"A product roadmap is the same as a project plan"
This couldn't be more wrong, and I've heard it so many times before.
It's not common for a product roadmap to:
Contain specific dates for tasks broken down to day and week level
Have a breakdown of resources and FTE effort on tasks
Have specifics on budgets across different resources and departments
Specify a list of potential risks to the initiative
Be rigid and that be a positive attribute whereas detail well-planned project plans are
So no, a project plan isn't like a product roadmap.
This is also true for company-wide strategy. A roadmap is the execution of the product strategy.
"A roadmap is cast in stone"
This is another common one. The assumption is that a roadmap, once created, shouldn't change. I've already called out adaptability as one of the key attributes of a successful roadmap, so my position is clear on this. That's not to say it should change every week, but it certainly shouldn't be carved into stone and changed once every five years. There's a happy medium where things change based on feedback and experience.
"A roadmap is the golden artefact for product"
Although I've praised a good product roadmap and its numerous benefits and yes, said it's the blueprint for the build, it is very much the blueprint of how to build. The discovery work and strategy briefs give details on the why, customer personas outline the who, and project plans give more colour to the when. A roadmap is a key tool in the product strategy arsenal but not the only tool.
…
A stitch in time saves nine
For many experienced product folks, this has been a part validation of assumptions and the last part, a mini-therapy session. For non-product folks, this has been a whistle stop tour of roadmaps, their value, different types and some myths to watch out for.
For any and everyone I have some takeaways.
👉🏽 A roadmap should be built with the customer in mind, and to do that, it has to be based on research. Creating a roadmap 'blind', guessing the customer wants and trying to serve them is a recipe for disaster.
👉🏽 Adaptability is one of the most important attributes of a successful roadmap. I'm talking from my experience as well as many other fintech product folks so don't carve your roadmap into stone.
👉🏽 Making a roadmap accessible to all internal and externally will make it clear to everyone what you're building and why. Internally especially, the roadmap should be easy to access and understand as it'll drive many conversations with partners (including BaaS providers), investors and many other stakeholders.
👉🏽 And don't go with the easy option of a linear option if you don't have to. Yes, I've given an example where a simple step-by-step roadmap is sufficient, but taking the easy option might cause bottlenecks when things need to pivot.
The phrase a stitch in time saves nine comes to mind.
Investing time into a roadmap for the short, medium and long term can save time, effort and potentially lead to more investment and better prospects.
Anyone going through a roadmapping process looking for some help, I'm happy to give a bit of advice and for newbies to product roadmaps I hope you learnt something new 🙂
Fintech Spotlight 🔦
I had to highlight a Sri Lankan fintech initiative this week. Although the region I stayed in largely preferred cash, there was more innovation in the less remote areas and one logo I saw more and more was that of LankaPay.
LankaPay is a national payment network established in Sri Lanka to facilitate electronic transactions between banks and financial institutions in the country. It operates as a shared services utility, providing interoperable payment solutions and infrastructure to facilitate various types of electronic payments, including interbank transfers, ATM transactions, card payments, mobile payments, and online transactions.
It's a network that is connected to other global initiatives such as UPI which allows indian residents to come to Sri Lanka, scan a LankaQR code paying for goods and services at over 450k+ locations through the Unified Payments Interface via LankaPay.
Sri Lanka is at the early stages of a digital transformation with fintech at its heart. Infrastructure is a core part of transformation for its 22 million strong population and LankaPay is leading that charge. Watch this space.
Favourite bits of news 🗞
FinPropTech firm Coadjute raises £10m to shake up home buying - This is huge news as the firm raised funds from Lloyds, Nationwide, NatWest and Rightmove to really shake up the PropTech sector, especially for homebuyers.
The Coadjute platform "brings estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage lenders, buyers and sellers together onto a single network where all parties are verified and data can be shared securely in a standardised way. important information, from deeds to digital identity to financial transactions, are exchanged quickly and securely regardless of the system the party involved uses."
Many have been talking about using blockchain for property purchases, but this investment round could supercharge the process of bringing it to the masses.
This is also the inspiration for the next edition on FinPropTech so watch out for that in two weeks.
turns out that my previous idea of linear roadmap is really quite perilous & rigid. thanks for shedding light!
The original Highlander movie is epic