What do you mean there is no product roadmap?

How to get started with redesigning a piece of software whose product strategy has been systematically neglected for a decade.

Imagine this hypothetical scenario. Your company has a B2B2C web application first brought to market in 2007. Through the years since, the product has accumulated a large customer base of enterprise companies. These clients, like most enterprises, tend to have a long-lasting relationship with their vendors that gets renewed every few years, often without even questioning if they really have a need for it.

Fast forward to 2019. More than 60 companies worldwide use this product. Half of them pay every invoice reluctantly, eagerly awaiting the expiration of their contract. The other half really don’t care. Your account management team is stretched thin trying to secure renewals from those customers who have begun to question the value of your product. Your sales team is not able to attract new business.

The company’s leadership is realizing it’s in trouble. After resting on its laurels for a decade, it’s time for a redesign. Your team is tasked with it. What do you do? You ask to see the product roadmap and any associated documentation, of course. Shocker, there isn’t one

Years of systematic neglect and lack of product leadership has left the company clueless as to what it wants to do with its own product. So, how does one create a product strategy from scratch? There are many answers to this question. Many of them born out of the Silicon Valley startup boom, but none of them relevant when taken up to a scale of a sizable enterprise software company.

My answer is research.

Two fundamental pillars of research, in fact — market research and user research.

Market research can define product positioning, large scale scope and high-level product recommendations. User research defines the solution, detailed scope and precise output. You need to start doing both.

Begin by scheduling stakeholder interviews with your marketing department. Get a good grasp of the kind of customers they are going after. Then involve sales and find out why the current offering is not sticking with prospects. Chart out the gap between what the market is looking for and what your product offers.

In the meantime, task your UX crew to do what they do best and go talk to end-users. Look for what has changed in the last 12 years from the point of the end-user. Do they still have the same needs? Have their expectations changed? Since you are redesigning a B2B2C product, the C still plays a major part in determining whether any redesign is a success or not.

As long as all your future efforts are grounded in the findings of these research initiatives, you should be able to resurrect this product. Or at the very least, create a product strategy and roadmap for posterity.