The Product Staircase Exercise
Roadmap Visualization Approach for Competitive Edge
As a product manager, especially in your early years, it's easy to get overwhelmed with roadmap planning.
With so many features, customer needs, and technical complexities, how do you ensure you're working towards both a competitive edge and delivering value to your users?
The Product Staircase Exercise is a practical, step-by-step approach that helps you align your roadmap by analyzing both your current product and the competitive landscape.
It also provides a clear ( & fun) way to prioritize and communicate your strategy with your team.
This method can be visualized on a whiteboard, Miro board, or any digital workspace, helping you break down complex experiences and chart the steps to achieve your product goals.
Let’s dive in…
Step 1: Break Down the Experiences
Start by listing the key digital experiences within your product.
Think of your product's main functionalities, like Search, Checkout, or even specific areas like the Product List Page or Onsite Search Bar. Group these into capabilities or individual features that drive the customer experience.
For example, Amazon's Onsite Search is world-class because it integrates powerful features like:
Typeahead with just 2 characters (reducing friction)
Recently Searched Terms alongside personalized suggestions
Voice Search and Image Search options, all with lightning-fast response times.
How you can start: Get your team in front of a whiteboard (or virtual board) and break your digital experience into these manageable categories:
Search Experience (or dive deeper: Search Bar, Sort and Filter, Search Engine)
Checkout Experience (or specifics: Cart Layout, Order Confirmation, etc.)
The goal is to understand what components make up your overall experience.
Step 2: Assess the Current State
Next, analyze each part of the experience you identified.
What features do you currently have, and how effective are they? Keep your descriptions short, but be specific about what's working and what's not. Then, rate them on a 1-5 scale, where 5 is a best-in-class experience and 1 is far from ideal.
For example:
Search Engine (Current rating: 1): Basic search capabilities with limited handling of vague terms, resulting in poor NPS and a frustrating null search experience.
Product List Page (Current rating: 4): Product tiles show pricing, availability, and a "quick view" option, but missing deeper personalization like previously purchased or personalized content suggestions, which platforms like Shopify leverage to boost engagement.
Action step: Rate each feature from 1-5 and note key issues or strengths. This will help you visualize your areas of opportunity at a glance.
Step 3: Visualize the Ideal Experience
Now that you understand where you are today, it’s time to better understand your market, competitors, and what ideal looks like! Consider what your customers have said after the words “I wish y’all could do the following for me on the site…”
Look at what the best in the market are doing. How are Amazon, Shopify, or even niche competitors creating amazing customer experiences? This stage is about imagining what an ideal experience could look like for your users, using competitor analysis to fuel your ideas.
Onsite Search (Ideal Top-Tier Experience):
2-character typeahead with real-time suggestions
Voice search that integrates with natural language processing
Image Search that lets users upload photos of products for instant matches
By drawing inspiration from best-in-class products, you can define your target for each feature. It’s not just about copying competitors but understanding how they address customer pain points.
A Harvey ball analysis is a really great choice for this to tactically tease out the capabilities of your competitors and be able to rank them quantitatively.
Step 4: Build the Staircase
Once you’ve defined where you are and where you want to be, it’s time to map out the steps that take you from point A to point B.
Visualize this as a staircase, where each step represents a feature improvement or iteration.
For example:
Onsite Search Bar (Step 1): Implement 2-character typeahead
Onsite Search Bar (Step 2): Add Recently Searched + Recently Viewed products
Onsite Search Bar (Step 3): Integrate Voice Search
Onsite Search Bar (Step 4): Build out Image Search
It’s important to not only list the steps but to also identify risks and signals along the way:
Risk: “Adding voice search will require integration with third-party services like Google’s Voice API, which could slow down initial deployment.”
Signal: “If our user engagement with typeahead increases by 10% within the first month of implementation, we know it’s time to proceed to Step 2.”
Step 5: Collaborate and Prioritize
Remember, as a product manager, your role is to define what needs to be built and why.
But you’re not alone—work closely with your development team to understand how these features will be built and the technical dependencies involved. Your developers will help you see if certain steps can be tackled in parallel or if some tasks depend on earlier work being completed first.
For instance, before launching a sophisticated search algorithm, you might need to resolve data quality issues in your current search engine—this would be an early step on your staircase.
Real-world example: Amazon didn't launch image search from the start. They built their foundational search capabilities and then, step by step, added features like image upload. Shopify similarly introduced a "buy again" option only after solidifying their order history functionality.
Step 6: Keep it Flexible and Iterative
While the staircase helps create structure, it's important to remain flexible.
Depending on your team size, resources, and time constraints, you may need to adjust the depth and breadth of your staircase. Some steps might take longer than others, and that's okay! The key is to continuously prioritize based on what's most valuable for your users and your business.
Also, remember that product management is iterative.
Even after reaching a top-tier experience, the work doesn’t stop.
Continue gathering user feedback and refining features as needed.
Revisiting earlier steps can uncover opportunities to enhance the user experience further.
Step 7: Document Your Progress
Throughout this process, it’s helpful to document your progress.
Keep a log of each step, feature improvement, and user feedback you gather. This will serve as a roadmap for future iterations and help in retrospectives. Having a record of your decision-making process also provides valuable insights that can guide you in future projects.
Before moving on to the next steps in your product journey, take a moment to reflect on what you've learned:
What did I learn about our product through this exercise?
What insights did I gain from comparing our features to our competitors’?
How can this staircase framework be adapted to other product areas?
Use these reflections to refine your approach, keeping continuous improvement at the forefront of your strategy.
Start Building Your Staircase Today!
Now it’s your turn!
Grab a whiteboard, gather your team, and start building your product staircase today.
By analyzing your product, understanding your competition, and mapping out the steps to improve, you’re well on your way to creating best-in-class experiences.
Don’t forget to share your progress with your team and iterate as you go—product management is all about continuous learning and refinement.
Until next week!