Product Roadmaps (along with Gantt charts) had ruled over many years to develop and present Product Strategies. However, this sort of planning comes with its own pitfalls.
- In the real world, lengthy and complex plans do not work as intended. The longer they exist, the more they are out of sync.
- Product Strategic planning usually adopts the Waterfall approach i.e. changes at the top cause huge ripple effects of replanning and project terminations at the bottom. Agile development has mainly addressed Project Waterfall, but didn’t change the Waterfall way of planning at organizational level.
- Product Roadmaps majorly highlight a few big projects and programs for funding, coming from top management. Prioritization kill many potentially good ideas upfront that may have come from bottom levels in the organization
Is there a better alternative…? To address the concerns stated above, organizations needed a lightweight planning exercise that adapts ideas coming from everywhere (a 360 degree approach) and keeps on evolving with changing needs to align with the organization vision.
GIST is an acronym that stands for Goal, Ideas, Steps and Tasks. It is a present-time alternative to Product planning introduced by Itamar Gilad, a senior professional and ex-Product Manager at Google. Gilad introduced this methodology while working at Google and has continued to improve it over time with Lean and Agile methodologies. Using GIST, product strategy is defined with the desire to achieve goals, and everything that follows is traceable back to those goals. The results of using GIST were rather consistent lightweight plans, lower management overhead, improved team velocity and ultimately better products and solutions.
Itamar Gilad’s version of GIST Product Management is explained in detail here
Let’s Deep-dive GIST:
GIST planning is an iterative process that involves the following steps:
The building blocks of GIST are discussed in detail as follows:
Goals:
A goal is the anchor point of any strategic plan. It gives purpose to the existence of the organization and outlines the direction that an organization would like to ultimately achieve.
Prior to GIST, organizations usually planned towards product solutions, and often on this route got distracted to keep it aligned with organizational vision and goals. Solutions may come and go based on the situation in the field, but the objectives stay the same. Goals answer WHYs and WHEREs of strategy, and Solutions answer WHATs and HOWs. Accordingly, Solutions/Ideas/Steps should follow Goals. Whenever anyone in the company is wondering “Why are we doing this project?”, a Goal should answer the question.
Ideas:
When the goals are defined in the corporate goal setting exercise, the teams need to decide on the potential ways to achieve them. This is where ideas jump in. Ideas can be generated at any time and deposited into the Idea Bank for future consideration and prioritization. All ideas remain valid contestants to eventually be implemented, until tested with evidence. Many teams conduct an initial brainstorming session or focussed groups to collect ideas.
To determine which ideas should be worked on first, organizations can employ one of the many Prioritization techniques (such as ICE, Opportunity, Weighted etc.). Prioritization ranks the ideas and it is used as the order for deciding which ideas should be tested out first.
Steps-Projects:
This is not viable for the survival of most of the organizations to pick an eye-catchy (yet not proven) idea and spend huge resources and investment on it for years.
According to GIST, the better approach is to break down large scale initiatives into smaller more manageable step-projects (ideally, not more than 2-3 months long). Each step-project is like an experiment that tests the idea using the following workflow:
Mockup → Prototype → MVP → Dogfood → Beta → Launch
There must be clear and measurable goals (SMARTs) for each step-project that indicate whether the company is on the right direction for the idea under consideration. Ideas that work out get more investment. However, those that do not work get dropped early, and instead of continuing to invest on something not generating expected results, the team can return to the Idea Bank and select another approach to meeting the product’s goals.
With step-projects, the team makes incremental progress toward achieving those goals.
Tasks:
In the final step, the team takes those Step-projects and breaks them down to granular activities termed as Tasks that the team will prioritize. Now the team is adaptive (i.e. Agile) and ready to deliver in iterations. This part of the system is well covered by Agile planning tools such as Jira, Trello, Kanban boards, and other modern project management techniques.
The GIST of it:
GIST is not altogether a new idea. It has been around for a long time, unless Itamar explicitly called it out. GIST is mostly Agile in nature starting with the “what”, and proceeding towards the “how”. It tries to provide a more fluid approach to prioritization of product features, assuming new ideas and step-projects emerge along the way. This keeps the GIST planning document live for change. Due to Agility, the process helps prevent the need for heavy procurement and allocation of resources from the beginning, and let the team move forward with ideas only that prove positive.
Product Roadmaps and GIST planning techniques are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though GIST often is used in exclusion of a roadmap. However, GIST Planning does not override the need for a proper product roadmap for larger-scale products.
| GIST Planning vs Product Roadmap | ||
| GIST Planning | Product Roadmaps | |
| Planning | Happening concurrently all the time | Organizational Planning is one-time or less frequent exercise per year |
| Strategy | Goal-centric | Solution-centric |
| Approach | 360 degree | Top-down (usually) |
| Ideas | Idea Bank | Product Backlog |
| Projects | Short step-projects | Long complex multi-quarter / multi-year projects |
| Task Management | revisit plans regularly and systematically | distant health-check points |
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