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The Fine Art of Roadmapping

Dave Rohrl • Nov 11, 2020

The Fine Art of Roadmapping

Dave Rohrl • Nov 11, 2020

We were recently approached by one of our existing clients about writing some design documents and doing some game balance for upcoming high-priority features in one of their games.  Being a design agency owner, I replied “Of course.  And what features are those?”  Each member of the client’s management team then began to list off different features, meanwhile arguing with the other managers on the phone about why their choices didn’t make sense.  As politely as I could, I told the customer that it would be impossible for us to work on their high priority features until we all agreed on which features were actually high priority.  

I set up an in-person meeting with the team to walk them through a set of exercises I use to help prioritize features and plan development.  The client emerged from the meeting with a solid roadmap, a repeatable process, and a strong sense of gratitude.  I will walk you through that same set of exercises and tools, and hope that you will find it valuable and useful too.


Roadmap

There are four key pieces to the process, and they need to be performed in a very particular order:


  1. Understanding your goals
  2. Generating ideas
  3. Evaluating ideas
  4. Prioritizing ideas


There is a right way and wrong way to do each of these pieces.  Here’s the way that has worked best for us and our customers.


1. Understanding Your Goals


Check Icon

Without a clear goals and a strong prioritization system in place, it’s easy to get caught up in pointless battles of opinion over what the team should be doing. This slows everything down and increases risk enormously. 


Your designers think that you should be adding new mini-games because they sound like fun.  Community thinks you should add pets because three people said so on the forum yesterday.  Your product manager thinks you should add a daily login bonus roulette because two of your biggest competitors already have one.  And your artists want to add a player avatar system because they just know they can make it look incredible.  

Who is right here and who is wrong?  This battle is typically decided for all the wrong reasons – things like who is the most persuasive, who has the most political power in the company, or who shares the most genes with the founder.  But there is a right way to settle this dispute, and is by forging a common understanding of what you are trying to achieve by these new features.  For live free-to-play games, that means a focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs for short).

What are KPIs, you ask?  KPIs are simple quantitative measurements of how the players in your game behave in the aggregate.  For better or worse, free-to-plays are businesses.  You’re hoping that players will like your game enough to try it out, return to it day after day, play it frequently, and pay for your various add-ons.  And this means that your game lives or dies on the strength of its KPIs.  And that means that it’s not only your product managers that need to understand what your KPIs are and why they matter, but your game designers as well.

I could (and perhaps will someday) write a book about KPIs for gaming, but for the moment I’ll just list out a few of the most important:

  • D1, D7, and D30 retention
  • ARPDAU
  • Daily conversion and lifetime conversion
  • ARPPU
  • Sessions/Player/Day
  • Minutes Played/Player/Day

Depending on how your game is structured, there may be other KPIs that are at least as important, but these numbers are pretty critical for just about every free-to-play game.

When thinking about how to prioritize features for your game, it’s important to know three things about each of these numbers:

  • What is that number currently?
  • How is it trending?
  • How does it stack to to our goals (or industry averages)?

Take a look at each key number that is below the target or is trending significantly downward.  This lets you pinpoint the KPIs that you need to increase in order for your game to be successful and profitable. And if all your numbers are looking good, look at those you’ve been most consistently able to increase in the past or those that would make the most difference in your profitability and long-term health.  These are the numbers that you will target through the items in your roadmap.

Now that you have your target KPIs, it’s important to prioritize them.  Is it more important to get more players to convert to payers?  Or to get more players to stick around past D7?  The answer will vary from game to game and situation to situation, but thinking it through clearly and precisely is critical to the success of your roadmapping process and your game. 

I strongly advise building a stacked rank list of the KPIs you think it’s critical to move in the next few weeks or months.


2. Generating Ideas


Ideas Icon

There is definitely a right way (and many wrong ways) to run a brainstorm.  For more information on running a productive brainstorming session see my follow-up article – The Proper Conduct of Brainstorming.


For now, let’s just say this is the part of the process where the whole team (or whatever part of it you choose to involve in the process) gets to have some fun generating ideas.  Let your artists build ideas ideas for what would look cool.  Let your game designers think about maximizing fun.  Let your product managers think about incremental payment conversions.  Hell, go wild and let your product managers think about fun (but keep your expectations in the right place).

At this point in the process, the more ideas the merrier. The goal of the brainstorming phase (or any proper brainstorm) is to generate the widest possible variety of ideas so you can winnow them down later.  Brainstorm and keep brainstorming until your team is exhausted and ideas have stopped flowing. 

Make sure that all the ideas are written down (albeit tersely) and that all key stakeholders understand at least the basic thrust of each idea.


3. Evaluating Ideas


Now that we have some clear goals and a big list of ideas that might possibly address them, we need a way of meaningfully connecting them.  And that’s where the evaluation matrix comes into play.  The evaluation matrix allows us to get a good look at which ideas best support which goals, along with other important criteria that will help us prioritize work.

So what do we need to know to figure out whether and when an idea is worth pursuing?  There are four key criteria: Relevance, Benefit, Cost, and Risk, which we will ultimately put into a matrix.  Let’s take a quick look at each of these items.

Relevance

Target Arrow Illustration

Relevance is a measure of how well the idea addresses our current stated goals.  Focusing on relevance first keeps us from getting random ideas on the plan because they sound cool or fun or competitive.  Since we began this exercise by focusing on the KPIs we want to move, we will use those KPIs as a measure of the idea’s relevant to our business. 


For my relevance measure, I like to look at each idea and figure which of our top priority KPIs it might reasonably be able to move.  Is this an idea intended to help people get hooked on their first day?  To keep long term players around?  To persuade more people to spend money?  To get spenders to spend more?  Just building a quick list of the KPIs targeted by this feature will really help you understand whether the idea can possibly have a meaningful impact on your business.  And you can winnow down your list of ideas by quickly removing any that aren’t likely to have an impact on your most important target KPIs.

So, after completing this exercise, your matrix might look something like this:

Idea Relevance Benefit Cost Risk
Weekly Events Engagement, ARPPU, D7+
Improve New User Exp. D1
Custom Avatar N/A

Benefit

KPIs Illustration

Benefit is a very rough quantitative measure of how much you think the surviving ideas will impact those target KPIs – basically whether the feature will have a little impact or a lot on the KPIs you using it to move. 


Unless I have close real-world analogs with well-documented results I’m generally uncomfortable estimating an exact numerical impact that any feature will have on a specific KPI, but I’m generally comfortably sorting ideas into High, Medium, and Low Impact buckets based on the general concept and my experience launching similar features.

After performing this step on each of your ideas, your matrix might look something like this:

Idea Relevance Benefit Cost Risk
Weekly Events Engagement, ARPPU, D7+ Medium
Improve New User Exp. D1 High
Custom Avatar N/A

Cost

Money Icon

Cost is a measure of what it would take to actually make this feature a reality.  It’s a rough measure of how much time and effort (or non-salary cash expenditures) it would take to get the feature out the door. 


Since are still basically at the brainstorming stage of the implementation process, it doesn’t make sense to halt the process for a week so every department can go through a detailed planning process of huddling up, creating a detailed estimate of hours, and assigning work out to individuals, so instead we will once again put our ideas into High, Medium, and Low buckets.

So after estimating this for each idea, your matrix might look something like this:

Idea Relevance Benefit Cost Risk
Weekly Events Engagement, ARPPU, D7+ Medium High
Improve New User Exp. D1 High Low
Custom Avatar None N/A N/A

Risk

Risk Icon

There are two main risks when adding new features to a game (or changing existing ones) – first that the change may screw up some critical existing piece of the design and second that the community may react poorly to the change. 


Game designs are tightly interlocked sets of systems where changing something in one place can result in dramatic upheavals elsewhere, like the mythical butterfly wings.  Your system designers need to be able to offer a quick, intelligent take on whether the change at hand is likely to have negative repercussions elsewhere – preferably in real time.  Likewise, player communities are finicky beasts; they have very strong opinions about what works and doesn’t work in the game and they are not afraid to let you know.  There are some things that player communities generally react to poorly, like surprise price increases and other heavy-handed monetization tactics.  But there are other subtle nuances for each individual player community, and your community managers should be able to give you insight on how they are likely to react to the ideas on the table.  You may also want to shade your Risk evaluations based on your level of confidence that you can actually execute the feature at a high enough level to get the benefits you anticipate.

Once again, we will bucket the ideas into High, Medium, and Low buckets like this:

Idea Relevance Benefit Cost Risk
Weekly Events Engagement, ARPPU, D7+ Medium High Low
Improve New User Exp. D1 High Low Low
Custom Avatar None N/A N/A N/A

4. Prioritizing ideas


Features Icon

Once you’ve been gone through the exercise of building your matrix, the building of the actual prioritized list of features is pretty straightforward. 


Ideally, you’re looking for easy, low-risk, high-reward features to implement.  But even absent those, at least you can quickly figure out intelligent tradeoffs between benefit, effort, and risks, and quickly eliminate cool-sounding but irrelevant ideas.


Putting this system to work will help you create better roadmaps, focus your team more, and get significantly better yield from your development efforts.  Give it a try in your next roadmapping session; you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to implement and how well it leads your team to strong, converged agreement.


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social systems in monopoly go by patricia pizer
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Mobile Game Doctor and AppMagic’s partnership goes back to 2016 and we have been extremely fortunate to have access to the depth of market intelligence data that AppMagic provides for the Mobile App/Game market during that time. So, I was certainly thrilled when they asked me to review their most recent Casual Mobile Gaming whitepaper for H1 2023 and provide additional insights. The first thing I would point out for context on Casual Mobile Gaming whitepaper for H1 2023 is that is a historical analysis. In 1948, Winston Churchill paraphrased philosopher George Santayana when he said - “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. –Winston Churchill” I point this out because while there are certainly lessons learned from history, past success or failure is not a particularly accurate predictor of future success or failure. 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A fun game that is accessible, compelling, well-designed, with a strong live operations execution is “table stakes” for entry into the market, but many, many games with all those attributes have failed predominantly because the publisher (the entity driving the game business, which might be a separate company or might be the actual game developer), failed to execute a viable marketing plan. Here is an example conversation I’ve had with a number of developer/publishers over the past few years: Developer - “Hi, Mobile Game Doctor? We need better monetization in our game.” Me - “Ok. How do you know?” Developer - “What do you mean? We don’t make enough money!” Me - “Enough money for what?” Developer - “Enough money to market the game profitably so we can grow!” Me - “Ok. What is your ARPDAU?” Developer - “$0.60” Me - “What is your D1, D7, and D30 retention? Developer - “52%, 21%, 9%” Me - “Those numbers are pretty good, actually…why do you think you have a monetization problem?” Developer - Because we can’t get a CPI under $25!” Me - “...sounds like a marketing problem.” The above is a bit of a dramatization, but the point is that I’ve worked on a number of projects where the developer is under the impression that they have a systemic product-design-related problem, when in reality the issue is that they have a flawed marketing/distribution plan. Today’s game performance marketing ecosystem is: Complex Crowded Competitive Overpriced Under-optimized (and difficult to optimize) Designed to maximize margin for the marketplaces Mostly misunderstood Couple these factors with a relatively low barrier to entry into the market, and you end up with a pretty voracious mix of factors that effectively make it IMPOSSIBLE for any new game to succeed in the market without some kind of true marketing competitive advantage. “The developers are still launching new projects at an insane rate: 258 in the past six months (compared to 80 in the Match-3 market). So, naturally, we see success rates plummeting from 3% in 2022 down to 0.8% in H1 2023; the market simply cannot cope with the sheer volume of games. 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Knowing our place within the screens or the flow of a game we play regularly is very similar to our ability to recall the layout and arrangement of physical spaces, known as Spatial Memory and is drawn from our long-term memory. Combining our spatial memory and our present “location” within a flow or virtual space results in Situational Awareness and is how we know which way to go, or which UI element will take us to which feature or system within the game. Using an interface is a form of spatial navigation in short-term memory based on our processing of stimuli or an event intentionally constructed to carry information. How we use the space around us to work (the Promise) Recalling ideas or concepts stored in long-term memory requires enough memory traces to be reactivated through recognition (pattern completion) of any one of the stored patterns from a fragment (Smith & Kosslyn 2013). Therefore our ability to recall what functionality or feature sits behind the click of a button or which information is in what file relies on cues and on context of the user’s immediate spatio-temporal environment. It’s highly associative. Looking around your office, people are constantly using the walls for work spaces. Using the wall for a brainstorming session with Post-Its? Perhaps there’s a mood board of images on another wall of your workspace. That rolling dry-erase board makes a fantastic post-meeting reminder of discussions recently or even long past. Why is that? And how do we design digital interfaces and products now that have this recall capability and support multiple users just like people used to do in an office? An author once described a shared, networked visual workspace as “Unthinkable complexity … ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.” The “shared” portion of that quote has been realized by wi-fi, fiber and cellular networks. The non-space of the mind can be thought of as our cognition, and our situational awareness.  Any interface is a reference point for the user to their long-term and short-term memory. A reminder of the cluster of data and the constellation (connection to other information or decisions) in which it resides. Existing 2D and 3D GUI’s use spatial layout and information hierarchy as well as temporal sequencing and progressive refinement to give users a way to segment and compartmentalize ideas, concepts & memories. For example: you need a flashlight. Where is your backpack? Tap an icon or reach with an arm & finger gesture towards your shoulder. A visual representation of the backpack opens and items are displayed, you open a side pocket to reveal more items and the view of the backpack visually shifts to focus on the pocket and it’s contents, following your attention and focus.This is the same thing as clicking your way through folders to get to a file. In terms of UI, the Treeview model can be employed in spatial and volume-centric environments as progressive refinement, but it’s still all progressive refinement & disclosure in the end. 2D UX to a 3D space Current head mounted display products (battery powered headsets using Quallcomm’s chips) already allow for gaze-based interactions as well as hand and finger gesture recognition. Think of a user's gaze and head movement like a mouse pointer. This gives you mouseOver / mouseOut events where the scene can react to your gaze. The mouse interaction model that items scale up or expand in size when you look at them, is incredibly powerful in VR, where it appears to move slightly towards you. When using pointing or arm gestures for interaction, thinking of your interfaces and the user’s hand as magnetic objects which can attract or repel each other will yield very natural feeling results as an interface moves slightly toward or away from a use’s hand. While this interaction is simply using the 2d interaction model of scaling up a UI element onMouseOver / onMouseOut it has a fundamentally different feeling when employed in 3d space. Finally, immersion. Polygon count and textures of the uncanny valley are not the only key to User immersion. They are one way to get there but there is a far better method which works well on both the current and previous generation of user-purchasable hardware: Interaction & reaction. Imagine you’re in a cartoony outdoor nature scene. Everywhere you look, birds flutter away when you move your arm suddenly or make a noise. A squirrel wanders towards you then runs away when you shift your weight form one leg to the other, moving your whole upper body. Environmental sounds come from all around you, and you hear a cartoon dog sniffing at your shoes from behind you. There are literally dozens of small, medium and even large ways you can interact with the scene around you. Spend 30 seconds in that environment? Focused attention. Situational awareness. Immersion due to the sheer amount of interactivity of the digital environment you are in. This approach to immersion is buildable now and when displays improve, adding more detailed textures or more 3d audio events to this immersive foundation will pay enormous dividends. Mobile-centric decision chunking FTW Despite the seemingly infinite canvas of an immersive headset experience, displaying limited information to your user in a sequence of chunks, as employed by mobile games, actually works much better.Keeping in mind that Attention is generally both selective and focused, let’s consider the following scenario. A player is refilling their backpack from a storage locker. The backpack stores items in a “tool roll” style interface allowing for 2d UI projection in world space. They run out of room in the pack - how do you allow them to sort or discard items? You can magically ‘unfold’ the tool roll to expand it larger and larger than is possible on a laptop screen, sure. But do you also allow them to see how many of each item they have in storage elsewhere? And how much they could get for selling each item later? Think: what would we do on Mobile? We would show the UI needed for the sorting task the user’s attention is focused on. We might give them a filter view icon to see the same items with different detail information. Mobile design keeps user-actions chucked by context and is far more effective at task competition. Countless design patterns exist for small-screen devices and work well when applied to sequenced tasks in immersive environments. Because letters. Text is still hard to read on the displays in current gen hardware so we use larger fonts. The next-gen hardware with their improved displays will change this however hardware limitations in reading text or UI up close to the user still exist. For the screen door effect to be resolved, a requirement for the long-use sessions of work-related VR, a combination of varifocal and high density displays will likely be needed. Our eyes naturally rotate to bring items in view into correct stereoscopic focus at different distances, but since headsets have a fixed view plane, our natural focusing muscles work against the visual stimuli when focusing ‘up close’ in the headset leading to eye strain and headaches. So for now, experiences designed using distant (2 meter plus) Interfaces with large fonts to make them readable at said distance are best. Foveated rendering is a rendering technique which concentrates resources in the area of the display where the user is looking. This allows for battery-friendly rendering with a noticeable visual improvement. Fixed versions of this concept have existed for some time and render the periphery of a user's vision at lower resolution. Designers can rely on auditory stimuli and use 3d sound to compensate for a lower fidelity visual system. And don’t forget the other senses! Designers can rely on auditory stimuli and use 3d sound to compensate for a lower fidelity visual system. This can be especially useful in providing immersion and directional cues outside the User’s FOV. How to plan for the future (the potential) Shared VR spaces have the potential to engage groups in a shared immersive experience. There can be a temptation to use the technique we know from console or desktop and show high poly and visual detail, and it’s totally beautiful! But visual detail, while it provides an initial reaction in our users, only gets us so far. Interaction is the true key to deeper immersion, where things react to your user’s focused attention or casual action. Building from a foundation of deep and subtle interaction means as the hardware generations get more powerful, you can add layers of additional visual detail to your game that will be both beautiful and performant. All the steps Mobile games use to get performance and battery life from a handset should be employed. The current IDE/engines will do many things for you out of the box: combined draw calls, backface & occlusion culling, dynamic level of detail (billboards) baked lighting, dynamic resizing of UI for consistent size at varying distances, and more! It’s up to us as designers to avoid surfaces with high color variances which create visual hierarchy problems, avoid translucency on current devices due to material or layer compositing overhead & subsequent hit to battery life, avoid exhausting our user’s attention with too much simultaneous information or choice; and to create spaces with low line of sight and multiple object occlusions for a perception of depth and distance for users new to headsets. In the past people have sought to use the promise of VR to provide virtual spaces in a virtual office that embrace real world workspaces and extend them. But in practice this likely results in information display that overwhelms the user’s attention & recognition. Use VR for what it’s good for right now: targeted immersive experiences of limited session time with minimal use of text that employs known interaction patterns and recognizable gestures for input. Don’t try to make it a general purpose laptop solution (yet).
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