Flexibility Without Compromise: Redesigning ProdPad's Core Roadmap Experience
ProdPad is a product management platform known for its opinionated approach to roadmapping. This case study highlights my role in redesigning the roadmap experience to reduce stakeholder reporting friction while staying true to ProdPad’s unique product philosophy.
Jan ‘24 – ongoing
1 PM, 1 Designer
Removing the necessity to replicate roadmaps elsewhere for existing customers —> higher adoption and satisfaction rates.
Appealing to a broader audience —> customer base expansion, more deals won
Discovery research support
Creating concepts, high-fidelity mocks and prototypes
Conducting concept reviews and usability testing, analysing results and iterating based on the new data gathered
When roadmaps become reporting burdens
Connecting delivered features and improvements back to business outcomes is one of the core responsibilities for product managers. Typically, product usage data and business KPIs live in separate systems, requiring significant manual effort to connect the dots and present a holistic overview.
How might we streamline the process of translating product work into business impact for stakeholder communication?
Hypothesis
We hypothesised that to do the above job efficiently PMs needed a quick way to:
1
Assess product health and feature usage
2
Plan new solutions and improvements of the existing features
3
Connect outcomes to business goals
4
Collate the above into a presentation-ready format
As a roadmapping solution, we already provided tools for planning and goal tracking, so we aimed our discovery efforts at understanding the needs around feature auditing and presentation capabilities.
Reality check: Data access is not an issue, interpreting and presenting it is
Our discovery process included:
Adjacent market analysis (evaluating existing analytics and feature mapping tools)
Assumption mapping (identifying the most important assumptions to de-risk)
Exploratory interviews with 34 participants (existing ProdPad users and non-users from various levels, including C-suite)
Feasibility research with Engineering and BusinessOps teams
Key insights:
Product health assessments and feature audits is not something many product teams consistently practice or widely required to report on.
Self-serving roadmap updates is not common. PMs are expected to present them and cater to different audiences, balancing high-level executive summaries with granular operational views for their teams.
Preparing for various stakeholder meetings requires repetitive creation of static roadmap snapshots that quickly become stale. It is a major frustration point distracting teams from the actual product work.
Shifting focus from feature auditing to presentation friction
Combining these insights with the results of engineering feasibility discovery, we decided to focus on the presentation pain point first.
How might we reduce the effort required to tailor roadmap updates for diverse stakeholder needs?
The rigidity trap: Why PMs recreate roadmaps elsewhere
Customer feedback analysis confirmed that existing roadmap view customisation options in ProdPad felt pretty limiting:
Senior stakeholders were struggling with transitioning to Now-Next-Later approach – the fixed number of columns was not offering enough granularity on the work in progress and future plans
Having no other way to group cards but by objective was forcing PMs to re-create their roadmaps in other tools so they could slice and dice information to cater to the needs of different teams.
Early concepts: Adding new grouping options and progress indicators
My initial exploration focused on expanding roadmap grouping options and adding workflow stages for granular status tracking.
Three-dimensional roadmap:
Allow users to use any initiative attribute to create columns
Expand the existing row grouping to include all initiative attributes
Introduce a third grouping option and allow clustering cards within a ‘cell’ for added granularity
Workflow stages for ‘Now’ initiatives:
Introduce new ‘stage’ attribute for Initiatives to indicate what’s happening to the Initiative at a more granular level (Nor started, Doing, Paused, etc)
Allow to expand roadmap columns to show card stacks by stage when a more detailed view is needed
These concepts were shared with our customer research panel and our Sales team for presenting to prospects during demos. Early feedback was positive but revealed two main gaps:
1
Using time horizons as rows did make it easier to present to senior stakeholders who are more used to traditional time-based roadmaps, but it was still offering only 3 buckets which was not enough.
2
Initiative statuses are ‘a step in the right direction’ but still do not provide the level of clarity needed to manage stakeholders' delivery expectations.
Balancing flexibility with opinionation
ProdPad is a highly opinionated tool. Its CEO and co-founder, Janna Bastow, popularised Now-Next-Later roadmapping as an alternative to traditional date-based formats to help product teams to avoid the timeline traps and create an outcome-focused way of communicating product plans.
The market signal was loud and clear though – ProdPad needed to become more flexible.
How can we add flexibility to roadmaps without abandoning ProdPad's core philosophy?
Custom roadmap labels: Flexibility without compromise
We decided to park the idea of adding workflow stages to existing Now-Next-Later columns, so I went back to the drawing board.
The breakthrough came from analysing the roadmaps our users were re-creating in other tools. I noticed a pattern: teams consistently used 4 time-based columns (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) rather than 3. What if users could customise roadmap column labels while keeping the same underlying structure?
Enter custom roadmap labels:
Default to Now, Next, Later labels for the Roadmap attribute to maintain product philosophy
Allow Admins to add custom labels via Account Settings to ensure deviating from the default is a conscious team decision.
This would allow our roadmapping solution to adapt to the teams' current product maturity level and grow with them as they progress – all without introducing new views or concepts that go against ProdPad's ethos.
Managing delivery expectations with target dates and dependency tracking
To address managing the delivery expectations pain point, our PM pitched two complimentary features:
Target dates:
a new Initiative attribute that indicated the projected completion time in a quarterly, monthly, or specific date format.
Dependency tracking:
an ability to link two or more Initiatives as dependent on one another to make spotting and addressing potential bottlenecks easier.
Testing insights: From physical clustering to colour-coding
As the solution was becoming better shaped, we decided to move into high fidelity and test both desirability and usability in one go. For that, I designed a two-part moderated usability test with three task-based scenarios followed by a number of open-ended follow-up questions to discuss the participants’ presentation challenges.
Visual hierarchy wins
New presentation features tested well, but users struggled to distinguish between creating rows vs. clustering within cells.
This confusion, combined with requests for visual status indicators, led us to replace clustering with colour-coding cards based on selected attributes. The result made work distribution and bottlenecks visible at a glance.
Finishing touches
Some of the UI decisions solidified in the last iteration round:
Phased delivery: Building trust through incremental value
Working with our PM and engineering lead, we sliced the work for iterative delivery:
Expand the existing grouping into swimlanes functionality to include more attributes
Updating the UI and view saving flow
Allow choosing attributes to build columns by
Custom roadmap labels
Colour-coding for the roadmap cards
Each phase builds on top of existing features and is a completed piece that delivers value and improves the experience on its own. This approach would allow the team to validate core assumptions quickly while building towards the complete vision.
Kill your darlings: Why discovery isn't validation
Even though I moved on before the project’s completion, I cannot wait to see this update live! I am proud to have found a way to balance the market’s demand for flexibility with ProdPad’s unique stance and product philosophy. I’m positive it will make a lasting impact on the product and business.
Some learnings I will take away with me:
Takeaway #1
Discovery should never be a validation exercise – embrace the pivot and be ready to kill your darlings!
I’m sure the idea of adding a product health assessment layer is still worth exploring in future, but the research has shown it was not a good time to solve this problem – and that’s okay.
Despite the excitement of coming up with something none of your competitors offer, always listen to your user – sometimes no one does it for a reason.
The idea of a third roadmap pivot point felt strong and fresh in the two-dimensional world of columns and rows, but I’m glad I could see past it and take on board what my test results were telling me.