A Guide To Product Roadmapping

Introduction

Product roadmaps are an essential part of product management, providing a comprehensive overview of the product's development and a plan for its future. A successful product manager must understand the fundamentals of creating a product roadmap in order to ensure the success of the product.

What Is A Product Roadmap?

According to the IIBA:

Product Road Map is used to communicate direction and progress towards the vision for a solution or initiative, and it measures progress against that vision through achieving the stakeholders’ desired outcome.

A product roadmap serves as a plan for the product's future and a guide for product managers to use to ensure the product's success. It contains important information about the product's features and timeline, as well as short-term and long-term objectives.

Basics Of A Roadmap

The creation of a product roadmap requires gathering customer insights, analyzing market trends, and performing competitive analysis in order to ensure the product's success. It should also provide a clear view of the product's features and timeline, taking into account customer needs, market opportunities, and the competitive landscape.

• Each roadmap should have a timeframe
• Stories, features, requirements, or initiatives
• Path to deliver them in the timeframe
• Collect specifications from a variety of sources

High-Level Steps In Creating A Product Roadmap

Creating a product roadmap requires a thorough understanding of the product, including its features, customer needs, and potential market. Additionally, it should be regularly updated to ensure that the product is meeting customer and market needs. To create a successful product roadmap, product managers must be familiar with the product, its objectives, and its audience. They must also be aware of the competitive landscape and trends in the market in order to create a roadmap that meets customer needs and market opportunities.

Determine The Vision & Strategy

Determine what value you will be delivering and what are the project’s main priorities, goals and key objectives. Strategy articulates the problem you are solving, while goals define what you plan to achieve over a period of time.

Product Management Team

Planning for your product roadmap should assess your available resources and their constraints. Make the product roadmap planning a team effort with the whole product team involved. This is an opportunity to have everyone understand your use cases, discovery work and objectives before making any roadmap investments.

Themes

The list of problems and issues you are trying to solve become the main themes around which you organize your product roadmap. These become stepping stones to maximize your chances of hitting your goals and visions outlined in the previous step.

Once you’ve defined your themes, you’ll want to break them down into features and user stories. Features represent the new functionality that you will continuously deliver.

Other Considerations

A product roadmap is an evolving document and thus should be updated regularly. Share the product roadmap. When done correctly, the product roadmap communicates a high-level strategy and the varying levels of certainty around each of its parts. This provides transparency into the project, the product and what parts of the product roadmap are likely to change.

Try to keep your product roadmap simple and easy to understand. A clear and concise product roadmap is the key to keeping the product team focused and motivated towards the same goal.

Strengths Of Product Roadmap

• Enables stakeholders’ focus to be shared on achieving the vision
• Opens for discussion
• Solicits different views
• Presents a unified view of the solution direction

Limitations Of Product Roadmap

• Can be ineffective in a frequently changing environment
• Time-consuming to maintain

Conclusion

Product roadmaps are essential components of product management, providing a clear outline of the product’s development and a plan for its future. Understanding the basics of product roadmap creation is essential for product managers looking to ensure success. Product roadmaps provide the basis for product development and help product managers understand customer needs, market trends, and competitive analysis in order to ensure the product's success.