The most recent Global Study of Product Team Performance provided insight into corporate practice in two key areas:
- When to share the tactical product roadmap with customers and customer-facing employees
- The reporting structure of the user experience group
Let’s take a look at survey responses.
Question: How far into the future does your tactical product roadmap illustrate future development activities when shared with customers! (Check one.)
| Response | Percentage |
| 1 month | 5.2% |
| 3 months | 20.2% |
| 6 months | 24.3% |
| 12 months | 20.6% |
| Over 12 months | 9.9% |
| We don’t share the product roadmap with customers | 19.8% |
Delving Into Product Roadmap Responses
Approaches to sharing product information with customer-facing employees and customers vary. That’s especially true when it comes to how far out they are willing to share. The highest percentage of respondents (24.3%) indicated that their companies were willing to share information six months out. Closely following that are 12 months out with 20.6% of responses and three months out at 20.2%. The answer garnering the lowest response was one month out at 5.2%. Nearly as low (9.9%) was the response indicating that a company shares the product roadmap more than 12 months out. Nearly 20% of respondents indicated that their organizations do not share their product roadmap with customers as all.
Question: User experience is becoming increasingly important to the design and development of successful products. Where does user experience report in your organization?
| Response | Percentage |
| Marketing | 6.7% |
| Product Management | 30.8% |
| Chief Product Officer | 10.7% |
| Technology Architecture, Product Architecture or similar | 10.7% |
| Engineering, Development, Technology or similar | 30.0% |
| Other | 11.1% |
Drilling Down
Two survey answers received the highest percentage of responses to this question. Almost equal in number, each garnering almost a third of responses, reveal that most user experience teams report to either Product Management (30.8%) or to Engineering, Development, Technology or a similar segment (30.0%). Technology Architecture, Product Architecture, or similar areas and the Chief Product Officer each received just 10.7% of responses. Only 6.7% of respondents named Marketing as the department to which the User Experience team reports.
Coming Up
The Global Study of Product Team Performance provides a treasure trove of insight into how organizations operate and what distinguishes the most productive teams from those that are performing less successfully.
Next week we’ll consider what is the most effective place for the user experience team to report and the most effective size of a core user experience design group.
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