2013 Roadmap

Brent Halliburton
brent@cogmap.com
215.439.0163

0
First Principles

 Cogmap is the tool people use for building, maintaining and sharing organization charts online

 The goal is data accumulation and a sustainable revenue stream with minimal effort

First Principles - Clearly explain why your product

exists and your approach to running it. This could be a
mission statement, tenets, or principles. The important
thing is that you believe in them, and by pinning them
at the top of every roadmap it will be clear if what
follows in the roadmap doesn't match your principles.
For Quora, a couple principles might be, "We help the
world get their questions answered now, and we create
a lasting resource for others who may have the same
question in the future. We focus on getting high quality
questions and answers, not the most questions and
answers."

1
Goals for 2013

 Grow page views to 5m per month

 Grow contributed charts to 10,000 per month

Goals & Progress Against Goals - If the roadmap is

new, lay out your (numeric) goals. Explain what the
metrics are, what time period the goal is set on, and
what the starting and ending values are. If the roadmap
is an update, state (numerically) how you are doing vs.
plan for each goal. For each goal, give some context
and explain what has happened in the time since the
last roadmap update. State whether you are on track to
meet the goal, and if not, what you are doing to get on
track.

2
Recent Updates

 Gave private mappers ability to manage ACLs more easily in response to user requests –
decreased support time by 50%

 Force users to add a comment when they edit and save a map to create more historical
reference data

Recent Updates - What's been going on recently with

the product? What has been delivered since the last
roadmap update? Explain what's gone well, what
hasn't, and what you've learned. Don't just say a
project was a win, show it numerically. If you don't
have a clear metric that shows it was a win, try to
demonstrate it in other ways (e.g. by comparing to a
benchmark or including some sample user feedback).

Many people are shocked at what actually has

gotten done.

3
Q1 Themes

 Refresh UI for 2013 – UI has not been improved in several years

 Bug fixes – Code has not been edited in two years, backlog of bugs is significant, lay the
framework for new features in second half
Themes (near-term) - What are you going to be
focusing on between now and the next roadmap
update (e.g. next quarter)? Don't just list individual
projects, list the important themes, and explain why the
themes are important. The reader should understand
why you picked each theme, and why you prioritized it
above other ones. Potential themes for Quora might
be, "Increasing question volume", "Automating spam
prevention and detection", or "Moderation tool scaling".
It's okay to list individual projects that will be key in
supporting each theme, but don't fall into the trap of
just listing projects.

You would like to live in a world where you commit

to themes on a quarterly basis and don’t do non-
theme things, but that has rarely been practical for
me.

4
Long Term Themes

 Introduce monetization schemes

 Improve ability to scale large maps and performance

Themes (long-term) - What are the most important

themes over the next year? These are similar to the
near-term themes above, and possibly a continuation,
but over a longer time horizon. The near or long term
themes should not be comprehensive and cover
everything your team is working on, but they should
cover the significant pieces, and roughly line up with
how you are allocating your team's resources.

Historically, my long-term themes tend to be more

“meta” and encompass my short term themes.
Short term themes may relate to a specific aspect
of product adoption. Long term themes may speak
to the nature of product adoption.

5
Cogmap 2013 Roadmap

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

• Improve layout • Improve blog • Integrate

speed formatting sunnytrail
Public Maps

• Improve • Improve admin

outbound email functions for
updates bad email Individual Projects - List each project you plan to
deliver throughout the year with a brief description, a
• Allow users to addresses size estimate, which theme it corresponds to, and
delete maps when you expect to deliver it.

• Allow users to Most organizations expect the document to get

Private Maps

sparser as you look further into the future,

change map reserving increasing amounts of capacity for
state “surprises”.

Rather than tie it directly to themes or put out size

estimates, people tend to want to know when it will
ship, so I present a table like this organized by
product.

6
Out of Scope for 2013

 Monetization

 Viral marketing strategies

This is my addition to Ian McAllister’s work. I think

it is worth it, frequently, to tell people what you are
not doing.