5 Suggestions On How To Do A 2-week Roadmap

Q: I just got hired as a Product Manager for a new product & the CEO needs me to prepare a roadmap in 2 weeks. What do I do?

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Ideally, incoming Product Managers need 60 to 90 days of observation & collaboration with teams/customers before they can start steering roadmaps effectively. I shared a deck on this previously too.

However, I can understand the concern. They're probably burning cash flow and can't afford to keep resources idle or underutilized.

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Assuming the CEO doesn't budge much on relaxing the timeline, I'd suggest the following:

1. Pull up your socks to fast track your onboarding

Conduct 1 to 1s with leadership, engineering & design in the first week. Align on top priorities & items already on the assembly line.

2. Try to understand the problem

Pick the brain of your CEO & other leaders to understand the problem space, the vision & short-term business goals.

Find out what user stories they had in mind before you hopped on.

3. Schedule a call with customers

Does the product have any customers yet? If yes, schedule a call with them, evaluate their current experience & get validation for ideas collected up till now.

If no customers exist, then jump on a few pre-sales calls (or reach out yourself) to see what prospects have to say.

See more: 15 questions to ask your customers to know their expectations

4. Plan to your roadmap

Next, you're going to wing it & create a shorter "Quick-Win" runway to "buy" time for a proper roadmap.

This plan will primarily focus on course-correcting the existing product & making incremental changes rather than suggesting massive pivots or extensions.

5. Items to include:

A- Identify & prioritize all outstanding bugs, sub-optimal user flows & vague messaging in the product & club them under a "Stabilization" epic.

If the product just launched, they'll be plenty of those, I assure you.

B- Then, take the ideas the CEO and wider team had in mind, vet them against insights you received in point 3, and add those in.

Elect safe bets.

Don't greenlight initiatives that'll take months to develop because you still need research to justify that investment. (the exception would be a unanimously accepted necessary feature without which your product will crash & burn)

C- Conduct competitive analysis & read their reviews.

Are there any must-haves that you are missing? Or are there any existing grievances with their offering that you could easily plug in? Queue them up.

This should be enough to consume the next 2 months & ease expectations while you get time to evaluate the product & inspect customer needs.

Hopefully, by the end of the "Quick Win" phase, you'll have a better idea of the top initiatives you want to undertake.

That's when you can afford to chalk up more ambitious epics that'll drive the product forward in the right direction.