8 minute read
A product roadmap is a vital tool for product teams to document and communicate upcoming launches and releases. Learn what makes a good roadmap and how to build one for your team.
Imagine planning a road trip across the country – you’ll visit old friends, discover new places, and mark your progress at famous landmarks. Now, imagine planning that road trip without a map.
In product management, just like in travel, you’re lost without a roadmap. Product roadmaps are essential to the release and launch process for any product. They help product managers and product owners collaborate and communicate with internal and external stakeholders, chart their progress, and document and communicate changes over time.
But what is a product roadmap, and why is it so important? In this article, we explore who should be responsible for creating roadmaps and provide insights on how to build a roadmap that works for your needs.
- What is a product roadmap?
- Why are product roadmaps important?
- Who uses product roadmaps?
- How to build a product roadmap
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a visual summary that outlines a product’s vision, direction, and priorities over time. It outlines future functionalities, maps new features, and documents upcoming releases. Roadmaps help different internal and external teams align around the product’s short-term and long-term goals, the path to achieving them, the contingencies, and the timeline for achieving them. They shed light on the moving parts and pieces that go into product development.
Many types of product roadmaps are suited to the team’s specific needs. These might include product strategy, release, and feature roadmaps. Product roadmaps can take different formats, including Gantt charts, Kanban boards, or other visualizations.
Ultimately, a product roadmap aims to help teams visualize their plans and progress and see how their work contributes to broader goals.
Why are product roadmaps important?
Product roadmaps are important because they don’t just show what you’re building—they show why you’re building it. They should link back to your product strategy, which ultimately ties back to your business strategy. These documents clearly connect your product priorities with strategic goals that support your business’s goals.
More broadly, product managers and product owners use roadmaps to communicate and collaborate with different teams and provide visibility into priorities and timelines. Furthermore, they help establish a common understanding of how a product will grow and evolve. They can also help with risk management. By visualizing short- and long-term plans, teams can identify potential pitfalls in their workflows and plan contingencies for addressing them. This is particularly important when different teams need to complete interdependent tasks. For example, if a feature is delayed, it could impact the release date, and the roadmap can help teams plan for such scenarios.
Difference between product roadmaps and product backlogs
Although product roadmaps and backlogs are similar, they differ in important ways. Product roadmaps help diverse teams visualize priorities at a high level and illustrate how upcoming tasks tie to bigger business strategies. Product backlogs outline the individual tasks that must be completed for a product and include granular details. Think of a product roadmap as a restaurant menu – it includes all the great things you plan to offer. The product backlog is a recipe book detailing how to prepare everything on the menu. Both are important, but the product roadmap is at a higher level.
Who uses product roadmaps?
Product roadmaps can look different and present different levels of detail for various audiences. They can take different shapes when customized for internal vs. external stakeholder audiences.
Roadmaps for Internal stakeholders
When presented to internal teams and stakeholders, product roadmaps can contain more detailed data. However, the person responsible for the product roadmap should tailor the level of detail to suit the internal audience. You don’t have to create completely unique roadmaps for each audience. There will be an overlap in the information you include for each audience. However, by tailoring your roadmaps to the audience, you can make sure to include the most relevant information for that audience.
Product, Engineering, and Development: These audiences are most interested in the nitty-gritty details: features, releases, sprints, and milestones. Roadmaps can contain granular data, including dates, product goals, the value the product delivers, and connections back to strategy. Granular information is essential for engineering and development teams because they need visibility into dependencies or contingencies for releases and specific requirements or deadlines.
Sales: Sales need information to help them achieve their primary goal: selling the product. Roadmaps for sales teams should contain information about features and their benefits to customers, and grouping features or items into themes can help enable sales to discuss upcoming features with prospects or current customers. This audience doesn’t need the level of granularity that engineering and development do, so you can keep dates high-level and avoid including specific release or launch dates.
Leadership: Executive and leadership stakeholders don’t need the details either. At a high level, this audience needs to know the plans for a product and how those plans tie back to company strategy and support business goals (retaining existing customers, growing market share, and driving revenue). Your goal with sharing product roadmaps with leadership is to create buy-in and secure support for product initiatives.
Roadmaps for external stakeholders
Product roadmaps for external stakeholders can be a valuable tool for generating excitement and interest in your products. However, they must be presented with care. These audiences do not need the level of detail you would provide for internal teams, so you may want to avoid including hard launch dates, project dependencies, or technical requirements. External-facing roadmaps are like Pandora’s box – once you share information with outside parties, it’s hard to back-track or change that information. That’s why you should be highly selective about the information you include.
Customers: Roadmaps for customers should highlight how new features fit into existing products or tools. Since your customers have already bought a product for you, roadmaps aimed at this audience should show how improvements will sweeten the deal for them.
Prospects: Roadmaps for prospects should highlight desirable features or releases that will differentiate your product in the broader market. Prospects are in your market but have not yet bought from you, so roadmaps aimed at this audience should highlight your product’s unique value.
Roadmaps for external stakeholders should under-promise so your team can over-deliver, exceed expectations, and set your customers up for a positive experience. For both customers and prospects, roadmaps should highlight how upcoming releases and launches benefit them and solve their problems. Transparent roadmaps can help build your customer’s trust because they will have an idea of your company’s plans. Showing you are willing to communicate openly can go a long way!
Who is responsible for product roadmaps?
Product management teams, and typically the product manager or product owner, with a big caveat: Creating and adjusting the product roadmap should be a group effort, with contributions from different teams informing the timeline and requirements. It’s essential to get cross-functional input on product roadmaps because there are so many moving pieces for a release or launch, and many teams’ deliverables depend on each other. Having complete visibility into different teams’ timelines, needs, and projections helps make the most accurate roadmap possible and can help prevent revisions and plan changes in the future.
However, the product team, and typically the product manager or product owner, should be responsible for overseeing the creation of the roadmap, soliciting input, and communicating it with broader teams. They are also responsible for maintaining the roadmap, ensuring it reflects the current state of the product and aligns with the business strategy. Having product team representatives coordinate the creation, maintenance, and sharing of the roadmap ensures that stakeholders can contribute while preventing the “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Product owners and managers also serve as cheerleaders for the project and often work to secure buy-in from different teams and leadership.
How to build a product roadmap
Product roadmaps are not just about planning and execution; they are about strategy. They are a tool to guide the product’s journey, make strategic decisions, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Planning
When building a product roadmap, selecting items that align with the product’s vision and strategy is essential, considering factors like market conditions, company goals, and customer feedback. Gathering input from internal teams helps prioritize items and ensure all stakeholders have visibility into the final roadmap. Defining goals, selecting key performance indicators (KPIs), and devising a method of measuring progress are crucial. The roadmap should tie back to the company’s strategic objectives, projecting the long-term impact of roadmap items and clearly communicating how they are measured and considered complete.
Building a Product Roadmap
When building a product roadmap, you have different formatting and prioritizing options, such as dated, undated, and hybrid timeline formats. Dated formats are useful for visualizing dependencies and aligning multiple departments, while undated formats offer flexibility for fast-changing priorities, making them suitable for external stakeholders. Hybrid formats, which map deliverables to broader timeframes like months or quarters, provide a balance by allowing adaptability without rigid dates. Regardless of the chosen format, planning for changes and ensuring the roadmap can adapt quickly is crucial, making hybrid formats ideal for many teams. Additionally, allocate time for critical, less-visible tasks like technical debt and security updates to avoid planning errors and confusion, and customize the roadmap to fit your audience, providing high-level overviews for executive leadership to avoid unnecessary stress.
Communicating
To communicate a product roadmap effectively, start with a detailed master roadmap and tailor versions for specific audiences. Clearly present the roadmap to all relevant teams, tying it back to strategic business goals to create excitement and buy-in. Use various communication methods, including in-person meetings and asynchronous channels, to provide context and allow for questions and feedback. Use narrative and storytelling to engage stakeholders and secure their support for the success of the project.
Maintaining
Maintaining a product roadmap involves seeing it through to completion, planning for changes, and updating it as needed. Diligently update the primary roadmap and cascade changes to secondary roadmaps shared with specific teams. From project kickoff to deployment, ensure teams are aligned and correct any misalignments. Flexibility and proactive communication are key to successful roadmap maintenance.
Best Practices for Product Roadmaps
Tailor roadmaps to different audiences. Customize the level of detail based on the audience. Internal teams contributing to the product require more detail than internal sales or leadership teams. External stakeholders, like customers and prospects, require only high-level information to help them understand the future of the product.
Align roadmaps with strategic business goals. Your product roadmap should connect back to company strategy and business goals. Illustrating this connection helps align different teams to the same purpose and can help key stakeholders understand the “why” behind the project. You can also create different roadmaps for different audiences (just make sure you update them all).
Plan for change and create a flexible roadmap. Choose a format, such as a hybrid roadmap format, that allows for adaptability as plans change (they provable will). This flexibility will help you manage and communicate changing priorities, deadlines, and contingencies.
Solicit cross-functional feedback. If you are responsible for the product roadmap, you should seek input from teams that contribute to the project, such as design and engineering. Getting feedback early and often helps improve planning and ensures team alignment.
Maintain and update your roadmap diligently. Ensure you update all product roadmap versions as the project progresses. If priorities, deadlines, or dependencies change, document them clearly with all stakeholders. Be sure to address any misalignment throughout the process.
