Thought Ladder 1: Managing Multi-Team Roadmaps

Introduction

Managing large team product roadmaps can be complex and a challenging task. Especially if these teams span multiple geographical timezone locations, had different reporting structures and internal culture, and cover a subset of large service or product space.

In the last few years, I have been fortunate to work with teams that manage, run and develop core distributing logging systems for Facebook. This system is mission critical and used by thousands of engineers internally. In the next few series of articles, I would be sharing some of the learnings and insights regarding the roadmap planning framework that would work across large organisations.

How did it all start?

Back in 2018, when I first joined Facebook I started working with one of a large engineering team that was internally structured with multiple sub-teams.

Very quickly I was involved in the roadmap planning and management of key programs and product features the team was working on. Over the course of several years, we started developing our planning process that evolved into a scalable and well-structured roadmap framework.

Key Principles

The roadmap framework we set out to build was to achieve certain goals and here are key principles around which the planning process revolves around.

• Bottoms-Up Approach: We wanted to build a roadmap planning process that will reflect Facebook’s internal culture. We hire highly talented engineers and we strive to empower our engineers to develop and build world-class products.

• Transparent & Inclusive: We wanted the framework to be open and inclusive to everyone in the teams involved irrespective of their specialised domains or tenure. Great ideas come from everywhere, and we wanted to make sure everyone involved in the process had a voice and safe-space to share their ideas.

• Themes & Pillars: One of the biggest challenges I have seen when it comes to roadmap planning is around shifting focus from day-to-day operational and tactical stuff we all have to do but also making sure that we keep focusing long term as well.

• Goals Oriented: Roadmap planning is not only about collecting possible project ideas and developing a set of priorities to execute on, but also making sure roadmap projects are focusing on to hit top level goals and objectives which get defined as part of the process as well.

• Phases & Stages: With 10’s of people involved in the planning process with 100’s of ideas to sift through, prioritise etc; it’s important to have a well-structured and phased approach that involves focusing on outcomes within well defined time boundaries. It helps everyone involved understand what to expect at each stage of the planning process.

By using these above principles, we managed to develop a roadmap planning framework that is both flexible and scalable to cater the needs of larger organisations when it comes to having systematic ways of developing new product features and launching them.