What does the roadmap process look like for growth product teams? And Is it working well?
The roadmap process is no different from any other product manager. They work closely with marketing, engineering, design, and data science to create the roadmap. There are sprints & prioritization processes for all features. They are focused on continuous experimentation and learning - which is an input into the prioritization process.
Focus Area > Problem > Hypothesis
First, the focus area for the team must be defined. This starts by mapping out the possible areas the team could focus. My recommendation is to assess the opportunity size using the product of "What's the business value if [x] area was improved?" times "What's the likelihood of that happening?"
Next, you want to align on what problem you are tackling. For example, when I first started at ezCater we decided to improve initial landing experiences for visitors. I leveraged the Google Ventures style Design Sprint. That meant working closely with stakeholders to map the customer journey, bringing in analytics and data insights, inventoring customer research, and auditing competitors. Consolidating that all in a Miro board, I could walk the working group through these materials over a multi-hour session and come together on facts and insights to identify the most fruitful opportunity areas.
Last, you generate solutions. To avoid group think, have people generate solutions individually. From there, the PM can take lead organizing the ideas and ensuring they have crisp hypothesis that tie back to known insights and there’s a sizing of projected reach, impact and effort to inform relative prioritization.
I think this process works best to do quarterly, providing enough fuel for the team to run for a period while giving a recurring blast of fresh context and ideas!
I think a roadmap is just a tool to get alignment with stakeholders, it should not be used as a commitment on what's coming, and definitely not like a plan to just follow.
So any roadmap for product growth would actually map out the outcome and then the different initiatives to reach it, and adjusted any time necessary.