A product roadmap is a high-level, strategic plan that presents the product vision and direction. It visually shows the steps to take toward achieving a desired outcome or goal. The document gives a hint of the planned evolution of a product over time.
This strategic plan is a useful communication tool for product managers. It helps them to explain the “What” and “Why” of a product to stakeholders. The roadmap gives a clearer idea of how you plan to execute the product strategy. It guides your communication with customers, company management, and investors, among others.
A good product roadmap highlights the thinking behind every feature or epic on it. You’d need to justify the inclusion of each one taking into account your strategy.
What a Product Roadmap Isn’t
People at times have misconceptions about what a roadmap is. It is not any of the following, which some persons appear to take it for:
Not Release Plan – A roadmap is not a project tracker, not does should it communicate delivery dates. Rather, it is intended to be a high-level strategic plan describing high-level themes and when the team will address them. When using a timeline-based roadmap, this can be confused by stakeholders since it looks like a traditional project plan Gantt chart. The key is to keep it broad-stroke and not blur those lines.
Not A Backlog – A roadmap is also not a list of tasks to carry out. The high-level strategic components on a product roadmap give rise to lists of tasks to complete.
Not A List of Features – Product roadmaps are more than just a collection of feature requests. They include more than features. They show how these along with epics and themes come together for a product that supports certain company goals. This is a subtle but important point so that Product Mgmt is pursuing and conveying a streategy, not slipping into ‘feature factory’ mode.
Planning a Product Roadmap
Before creating a roadmap, there are a few things that you need to define to enhance its usefulness:
Product vision – This is a key starting point when planning a high-level, strategic document. It establishes the direction where your team needs to head toward. You should identify who your target customers are, their needs, and indicate your go-to-market strategy.
Business goals – The goals of your company must also come into play when planning your roadmap. The achievement of these typically takes the efforts of different teams in an organization. An example of a business goal can be increasing conversion rate, say, by 30 percent.
Themes – There is also a need to group similar initiatives, epics, or features together. Themes provide an overview of problem areas and help you to know which problems or initiatives to focus on first. For instance, initiatives that can help to promote improved reporting may be grouped under a “Better Reporting” theme.
Projects – A project is a unit of work that has a specific deliverable and usually lasts less than three months to complete. It adds extra value to the product. Projects should reflect opportunities that you have identified during Opportunity Discovery and that help you to achieve your strategy. Identify all projects that could play a part in incrementally achieving your objectives.
After defining the foregoing, you can then start to prioritize what tasks to tackle first. Arrange your themes and projects according to their importance in relation to your product vision and business goals. There are diverse prioritization methods that you can use to rank initiatives. Among these are Opportunity Scoring, Kano Model, RICE Method, and ROI Scoring.
Creating a Roadmap
The product manager is typically responsible for creating and maintaining the roadmap, but as a shepherd, not a dictator or hermetic artist. Ideas can come from anywhere such as stakeholders, sales, or your customers. And priorities should be a reflection of the business you’re a part of.
There are different types of roadmaps but most notably the timeline-based and Kanban style roadmaps. A timeline is typically used for mature products that require complex stakeholders need visibility to coordinate their own activities (ex: marketing, sales, customer support, etc). Startups and newer products have less complexity to manage but require more agility to respond to market learnings, and so a simplex Kanban-style roadmap (now, next, later) is often appropriate in those cases.
Whichever type of roadmap makes the most sense for your team, there are a myriad of tools that can be used. Most Product teams though prefer a more sophisticated tool for managing all of the prioritization, scoring, and roadmapping in one place. Productfolio is on such tool and we encourage you to check out what we have to offer, if you’re looking for a tool that covers all of these activities.
