Roadmapping toolkit

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Supplement to Colorado Innovation Conference talk, “Turning feedback and goals into the Universal Preschool product roadmap,” presented by Debra Alban of the Colorado Digital Service on August 7, 2024

How to use this template

• Slides with a yellow background and slide title with the word “Tip” include tips on the background work needed to generate the content for a roadmap deck.
• The other slides show examples of content the product management team used in the Universal Preschool roadmap deck at CDEC. The content and data in the slides is for illustrative purposes only. The actual roadmap was longer but repeated various slide templates.
• This template is guidance, and not meant to be prescriptive. This worked for Universal Preschool, but may not work for every use case. Design your content as you see fit for your product and audience.
• To edit this document and leverage the template slides, save a new copy.
• Accessibility statement: If you need this in an alternative format please contact debra.alban@state.co.us

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Universal Preschool - Year 2

Product Strategy & Roadmap

January 2024

Universal Preschool - Year 2

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VISION

Offer every child in Colorado access to funded early care and education services the year before they enter kindergarten.

1. Increase the Universal Preschool family uptake rate by 5%, from 59% in school year 2023-24 to 64% in school year 2024-2025 by June 30, 2024
2. Retain 94% of Universal Preschool providers from the 2023-2024 school year to the 2024-2025 school year by June 30, 2024

SUCCESS MEASURES

MISSION

All Colorado children, families, and early childhood professionals are valued, healthy and thriving

PRIORITIES FOR 2024

• Increase Provider Satisfaction: Improve the matching process by adding specificity and flexibility to how programs are defined and communicated to families. Allowing providers to optimally fill their classrooms.

• Increase Family Engagement: Ensure that families can intuitively access, understand, and apply for universal preschool benefits while creating the necessary paths to ensure continuity of care.

Example content for illustrative purposes only

Tips for assembling the vision and strategy

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Where to look for the vision:

• Your agency or program team counterparts may have this.
• It will usually be around long-term outcomes, not outputs.

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How you define the strategy:

• This is the bet that you’re taking for your product to achieve its vision.
• A product manager may develop the product strategy but a variety of stakeholders, such as leadership, the program team, engineers, designers, data analysts and others need to buy into it.
• The product strategy may be based on testing, data, feasibility, compliance or other factors, and therefore should be defensible.

Tips for identifying success metrics and priorities

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Defining success metrics:

• These may be WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) or similar goals like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).
• If not WIGs, they should be outcome-oriented measurements, not outputs. For example, an output may be “Use AI in our business by Q1 2025.” An outcome may be “Increase application processing by 10%.” Learn more about outputs vs. outcomes here.
• Read more about effective public sector goal-setting here.

Priorities:

• Priorities should should align across program, product and end user needs.
• Learn more about product prioritization frameworks here.

What we’ve learned

Pain Point Analysis Summary

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LOOKING BACK

Example data for illustrative purposes only

Tips for surfacing qualitative data

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Use qualitative research to understand WHAT the pain points are.

• Develop a clear understanding of where you’re making assumptions and what you actually know.
• Direct user feedback – such as a one-on-one interview, on-site visits and small office hour sessions – is the most meaningful.
• To collect feedback efficiently, seek diverse participant segments. For example, it’s more efficient to interview 4 people each with different circumstances than to interview 24 people with the same circumstance.
• Hint: Once you start hearing the same thing over and over, you’re done with that participant segment.

Tips for surfacing quantitative data

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Use quantitative analysis to understand HOW BIG the problems are that surfaced in qualitative research, and which users experience it.

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• Measure the qualitative insights to understand scale.
• If your product already exists, you may use website or application analytics to measure pain points in the experience. Conversion funnels are often useful here.
• You may use survey data here to show user sentiment. Finding a qualified survey writer is really important for data accuracy. Learn about survey best practices here.
• If possible, find data points to measure administrative burden. That is, the costs associated with learning about and applying for public services. Source

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Areas that received positive affirmation

• Defining programs by primary language of instruction

Process pain points we’re still exploring

• The number of seats are difficult to forecast; need the ability to update easily

Communication and training needs

• Training video
• One-pagers

Provider prototyping and listening session insights

Example content for illustrative purposes only

Tips for testing with real users

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• Test your product with end users and people with lived experience. This is different from QA testing and internal user acceptance testing (UAT).
• Test prototypes before building the product or feature. Prototypes can be as low-fidelity as showing users shapes or diagrams within a slideshow. Learn more about low- and high-fidelity prototype testing options here.
• Iterate on your prototype based on user feedback, and test again.
• Testing 5-15 users often surfaces the majority of usability issues. Here are some sample size recommendations.
• If you’re testing with the public, you should compensate them for their time.
• Try not to be defensive or explanatory about incoming feedback. (This is really hard but critical.)

How we’re responding

Customer-facing Phases

Program setup and participation agreement

Pre-registration (Continuity of Care, Sibling, Employee)

Direct enrollment for students with disabilities

Family application (primary path)

DAA runs

Direct enrollment (secondary path)

Example content for illustrative purposes only

Tips for determining phases

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• In narrative format, it’s more powerful to display this high-level view first and then drill down to the details later. In terms of working order of operations, it may help to first identify epics, stories and priorities so you can confidently display dates.
• In addition to defining phases by dates, prioritization should consider the impact of launching a given product or feature. This article describes nine product prioritization frameworks and the pros and cons of each.
• Identify unmovable dates and milestones and work around them.
• Develop a high-level visual for execs and people without a lot of context into the project that shows what happens and when.

Roadmap & Timeline

• Provider program setup redesign
• User validation sessions

Phase 1 (complete)

Present – January 2024

SO THAT…

• Providers can define programs in a more nuanced way than in year 1, enabling families to rank providers with programs that best suit their needs
• Providers and families understand the programs offered

• Family application redesign
• Pre-registration application

Phase 2

January – February 2024

SO THAT…

• Providers can more easily honor continuity of care, children of employees and siblings of students
• Families can provide required demographic data, enabling better reporting as well as access programs with available seats

• Direct enrollment model implementation (for applicants after matching ends in late Spring)
• Migrate authentication to enable non .gov website authentication

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Phase 3

Spring - Summer 2024

SO THAT…

• We can reduce the manual processes related to directly enrolling children in programs
• We can enable rebranding on a non .gov website

• Payments refactor
• IDXR to CCAP and other CDEC programs

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Future

Fall - Winter 2024

SO THAT…

• We can reduce manual processes related to paying providers
• We can unify CDEC’s programs

Provider setup opens

2024 - 2025 school year begins

Example content for illustrative purposes only

Tips for designing the feature rollout

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• Keep in mind that a phased approach to feature rollout reduces risks introduced by a “big bang” product drop in which requirements are defined and documented before testing and validating solutions with end users. Source
• Be specific about timing for imminent features.
• For features going out later, timing may still be up in the air. Make that known.
• Acknowledge critical dates.

Product Foundations & Reporting

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PROBLEM STATEMENT

In year 1, a lot of reporting was manual and hard to deliver due to the data collection methods. In addition, the absence of a test environment made it difficult to perform user-acceptance testing and usability testing with end users.

HYPOTHESIS

By teasing out family application responses for demographic data we can generate more insights in reporting. By standing up a test environment we can test more effectively, increasing stability and usability.

KEY USER ACTIONS PRIORITIZED YEAR 2

• Stand up a test environment
• In the family application, separate questions for race and ethnicity, and ask for income as an integer instead of a range
• In the family application, ask whether children have continuity of care, are siblings of students or children of employees in separate questions
• Stand up a database for data storage and more turnkey Tableau reporting

SUCCESS CRITERIA YEAR 2

• SMART Act compliance
• Less time spent creating custom reports
• Fewer usability issues reach production

DEPENDENCIES

• OIT work to deliver database

RISKS

• Meeting all the requirements of the database in advance

EPIC OVERVIEW

Example content for illustrative purposes only

Tips for defining epics

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• Categorize the feature candidate stories into associated epics and group those stories within a single problem statement.
• Clarify the hypothesis around this epic, and the success criteria to validate the hypothesis.
• Identify the key user actions (or user stories) prioritized within that epic.
• Be thoughtful and transparent about risks and dependencies.
• Rinse and repeat for all epics.
• Hint: After performing this exercise, this may become a checklist for epic “done-ness.”