Making the case for public roadmaps
Last week I attended a Product for the People unconference organised by NHS Education for Scotland. I used to attend these sorts of forums regularly, but it had been a minute.
It was great to be part of the gathering, and meet other practitioners. So a big thank you to Dan, Jamie and Jonny for organising and welcoming me along.
As per the unconference concept, the organisers put out a call for participants to come along ready to pitch ideas for sessions, and I took the opportunity to propose a session on making the case for public [public sector] roadmaps.
I’ve done sessions on why roadmapping (in general) is a good and important practice for the public sector, but this was the first opportunity I’d had to focus in on the act of making a public sector (product or service) roadmap public. I also wondered — given our location — if there was a particular Scottish public sector angle to public roadmapping we could explore.
I started off the session with a bit of provocation on the topic. I presented on my own journey with public roadmapping. How it had started at GOV.UK and recounted all the value we’d got out of that in terms of questions, ideas and supportive engagement to learn and deliver iteratively. How I had since then made it my mission in the organisations I’d worked in to make our product and service roadmaps public, and how sometimes I’d succeeded in making them open, and how sometimes I’d even succeeded in keeping them open.
Despite encouragement and guidance, I lamented that the examples of public public sector roadmaps were good but few and far between. And shared examples from the private sector that are perhaps ironically better at public roadmapping.
I then rounded out with what I thought were some of the lovely things about public roadmapping and, for balance, what some of the challenges and costs were.
I probably went on too long but it is a topic I care about.
We did then have a good chunk of time in which we did an exercise as a group to generate what we considered to be some of the:
- User needs public roadmaps have to meet
- Benefits of public roadmaps
- Challenges to they present for teams and organisations.
The notional idea was to come up with some material to help people make the case for their public sector product or service roadmap to be made public
Here’s what we came up with (after grouping, unprioritised):
Benefits
- Promotes transparency and accountability
- Creates some pressure to generate momentum
- Shows the whole of delivery, not just the output
- Demonstrates where public money is being spent
- Encourages engagement in outcomes over outputs
- Generates feedback to help teams prioritise
- Gives users and stakeholders something valuable to feedback on
- Platform to test new ideas
- Generates questions, ideas and collaboration opportunities
- Helps other service providers plan and align
- Promotes credibility and trust in ability to deliver
- Encourages teams to get aligned on goals and narrative
Challenges
- Creates expectation and commitment
- Describing things as outcomes
- Divergence from internal plans
- Giving away too much about data and security implementation
- Hard to get the detail level right
- Keeping it updated regularly
- Attracting the unsolicited marketing
- Engages self-selecting users
- Lays bear duplication/shortcomings
- Managing multiple product roadmaps concurrently
- Explaining things you aren’t clear or certain about yet
- Delivery teams leave the roadmapping to product managers
- Might not match political narrative and timetables
User needs (framed as features for expediency)
- On the web
- Easy to update
- Easy to read, write and recall URLs
- Ability to search
- Simple, intuitive and accessible layout
- Clear timeline like now, next and later
- Closely tied to internal version of roadmap for consistency
- Clear on vision or problem being addressed
- Updated based on progress
- Uses plain language
- Describes the outcome(s) being targeted and activity leading towards achieving it
- Instructions on how to give feedback
- Instructions on where to find more information
Not bad for 45 minutes from a cold start. Not definitive but hopefully some useful material to crib from and develop.
It felt like a properly lively discussion, informed by real-world practice amongst the group, and fuelled by a lot of frustrated attempts to open up roadmapping. So maybe a cathartic and energising discussion as well. Ultimately it generated a lot of enthusiasm for giving it a go (again, or for the first time).
As for a Scottish public sector angle on public roadmapping? Well there didn’t seem to be anything particularly unique. The needs, benefits and challenges we came up with seemed to be universal.
But we did round off with a good chat about whether there could be a particular push made on public roadmapping in the Scottish public sector as a means to energise a community of practice and promote direct engagement with users. And we wondered if that committment to public roadmapping might then become something of a defining marker of quality in the Scottish public sector delivery.
Finally at the end of the session, I was opportunistic and the other participants were very kind as they heard out my case for reframing roadmaps as routemaps. A framing I prefer because routemapping is more multidimensional and adaptive than roadmapping, and more in keeping with our carbon conscious times. We’ll see if it ever catches on :)
Here are some examples of public roadmapping I drew on in my opening presentation:
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap
- https://github.com/github/roadmap
- https://www.gov.uk/roadmap
- https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/features/roadmap
- https://workspace.google.com/whatsnew/calendar/
- https://trello.com/b/FNEatI34/monzo-business-account
- https://digital.nhs.uk/services/nhs.uk/nhs.uk-roadmap
If you’ve tried, are trying or are managing a public roadmap, I’d love to hear from you!
