Product Roadmap: An Introduction
What is your vision and the direction that you need your product to offer over a period of time? Well, don’t worry, this question might have baffled you, but what if we say that with the help of a high-level visual summary, you get to know the why and the what behind what you’re building? A roadmap is a guiding strategic document as well as a plan for executing the product strategy.
The product development roadmap has several ultimate goals:
- To describe the vision and strategy
- Provide an outline document for executing the strategy
- Get internal stakeholders in alignment
- Facilitate discussion of options and scenario planning
- Help communicate with external stakeholders, including customers
Ideally, your product should convey the strategic direction for your product roadmap in business, and tie it back to the strategy for the company.
Clearly articulating the product vision and strategy can make it easier to secure executive buy-in. It also ensures that everyone is working toward a common goal.
Note that roadmaps aren’t limited to products. Instead, these objectives are similar to other types of roadmaps, such as marketing roadmaps and IT roadmaps.
Why is it crucial to have a product roadmap?
Product roadmaps offer a unique perspective on software development, making the product plan both appealing and achievable.
This considers various conflicting goals and reduces them to their most basic form, relegating shiny items to the margins in favour of work that truly affects the needles stakeholders care about.
All the effort individual contributors perform often makes sense inside the framework of the product roadmap, and knowing that strategy and what the company intends to provide will help to get critics on board. This offers shared ownership of the product and its achievements, inspiration, and drive.
Product roadmaps help businesses avoid pet projects from slinking into the implementation queue, confusion from prevailing, and waste of resources on less important activities. From sales presentations, marketing plans, to finances, everything is normally held closer to the vest; nearly everyone in the organization will come across product roadmaps in one form or another.
Roadmaps support outcome-driven planning
After sorting and ranking everything, the product team has to concentrate on scheduling tasks, regularly checking in with the implementation team, and making sure the roadmap’s priority goals and themes are in line, doable, and worthwhile. Before doing a prioritizing process with different internal (and possibly external) stakeholders to determine what will have the most impact or greatest ROI, the next step is to delve into the backlog and identify which things fit up with those wider themes.
The product roadmap is under whose purview?
While the formulation and maintenance of a product roadmap should be a team effort, the product management team is the ultimate accountable group for this. This special mix of information and free-for-all cooperation with distinct ownership gets stakeholders on board.
Product roadmaps offer a unique perspective on software development, making the product plan both appealing and achievable. Product management can develop the main themes for this stage of the product’s life, keeping in mind the desired results.
Building Product Roadmaps
This is the ideal procedure to establish a product roadmap
A strong gatekeeper works the door in an ideal manner. The riff-raff must be kept at bay so that only things worthy of a slot can be selected to preserve credibility with stakeholders.
Utilize these criteria to ensure that the roadmap is free of any additions that aren’t deserving of them:
- Is it fitting? Many excellent concepts are present. However, priority and scheduling realities come together to form roadmaps. It is not a feasible alternative to cram in an additional one.
- Does the user actually find value in it? If not, reserve that area for something that is more useful.
Does it have an owner? Every request needs an ally who will keep pushing for it and who is aware of its subtleties.
- Is there proof for that worth? Hirsute intuition and instincts are for beginners. Metrics should be used to guide feature decisions, and this assertion should be supported by well-documented facts.
How Your Product Development Roadmap Will Evolve
Products invariably grow deeper as they advance. They must perform more, assist more people, and integrate with other goods and services. Product roadmaps undergo their own change as well.
A roadmap for a recently launched MVP is very different from one for an established product in numerous ways:
Goals
The objectives of a start-up differ greatly from those of an enterprise product. The first is merely attempting to establish its feasibility, acquire some traction, and expand. The latter will have a wider range of targets and more complex strategic goals.
Timelines
It’s considerably more difficult for start-ups to forecast the needs and prospects for their products in the future. As such, it is likely that their roadmaps won’t reach too far in the future. Firmer longer-term strategies can be made with established products. They comprehend the market and their clients better.
Frequency
You have to “always be shipping” while you’re young and tenacious. Products that are more developed can release more slowly and with less hurry.
Dependencies
New businesses often move swiftly and do damage. Regression problems, third-party integrations, and legacy products are all concerns for mature products.
How should your road map be planned with regard to technicality and financial limitations?
New functionality and integrations are among the elements of any plan that inspire the audience. Still, there has to be somewhere for the less interesting need-to-do chores as well.
Ignoring important subjects including technical debt, scalability, and cybersecurity is pennywise and pounds foolish. Eventually the product will have to cover those subjects. Should time not be allowed in the roadmap ahead for these activities, it will seem more like an unanticipated delay, lapse, or inadequate planning than simply realizing you have to eat your vegetables upfront.
The features that go first on the product roadmap?
A great deal of thought, research, and discussion goes into creating a roadmap. Prioritizing features and improvements according to a range of factors is what’s left to do after strategies and goals have been established.
There are countless ways to rank prospective roadmap components in order of importance. There exist numerous frameworks to select from, such as the RICE Scoring Model, MoSCow, and OKRs. Whichever strategy is finally chosen, effective prioritization necessitates that product teams complete their homework. Evaluate the worth, degree of work, and opportunity costs of each item under discussion.
Teams also need to consider the advantages of achieving short-term objectives vs. moving closer to long-term ones. A strong roadmap will include the two elements. This makes sure that little victories are consistently achieved without delaying the effort needed to progress the broader product plan.
What kinds of product roadmaps are there?
We determine the audience we are looping in before beginning to develop a roadmap. This allows you to customize the content, focus, and divert to meet their demands.
Here, we’ll go over four instances of roadmap stakeholders and the main purpose the roadmap fulfils for them.
Executive roadmap
It is imperative that you strive to gain the support and enthusiasm of this audience throughout the product’s development cycle and get buy-in for the product vision.
These roadmaps must provide high-level strategic concepts, like expanding the market, gaining traction in untapped markets, satisfying customers, and maintaining market position.
While CEOs also need their own kind of strategy, investors and board members also have different needs. The proposed work’s ability to boost the product’s (and company’s) value must be highlighted. It ought to demonstrate how improvements impact the key performance indicators that are most important to that group.
Engineers’ roadmap
Feature, release, sprint, and milestone are frequently the focal points of these roadmaps. These roadmaps should still include themes and goals for the product, though. Compared to executive-facing roadmaps, they usually have a more focused scope and a shorter length. These roadmaps are frequently at the epic or feature level for people who use agile development roadmap. Engineering roadmaps ought to be as detailed as feasible.
A Roadmap with an emphasis on sales
A sales roadmap that combines the benefits of the product for the client and its features can aid sales teams in understanding how to sell more of the product. Pay attention to both the direct benefits of the product for reps and the user benefits that they can convey to their clients and potential clients. When at all possible, combine related features or products into themes that sales representatives can talk about with potential customers.
A prospect and customer roadmap
A product roadmap for clients and potential clients is created when you fully concentrate on the advantages of the product. Customer roadmaps have eye-catching graphics and simple-to-understand sections because they are external papers.
Caution must be exercised when discussing these types of roadmaps because some outside influences may interfere with the procedures involved in product development.
The Significance Of Product Roadmap Software
Product roadmaps are not a new concept; previously, they were generated using inferior solutions that were designed with other utilities in mind throughout the majority of their existence. It may have been project management tools, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, or other data-intensive software. However, accessibility was frequently a difficulty, and there were few visual indications for the casual reviewer as to what was required.
Every modification necessitated hours of finicky tweaking to ensure that everything lined up and looked as well as it did the first time.
However, as technology advanced, product managers were no longer bound by their limitations. Instead, solutions are currently specifically designed for developing product roadmaps that include features and capabilities that do not exist elsewhere.
These tools enable the creation of visual, theme-based roadmaps that prioritize the conversation over individual features and shift the attention to strategic goals. They also use a cloud-based viewer to prevent outdated versions from circulating and being referenced.
There is a multitude of product road mapping software available that can easily produce personalized versions of the roadmap based on the target audience. They can also communicate with other critical components of the product stack to keep things current and alert stakeholders when changes are made.
The Final Goal – Implementing The Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a vision, strategy, and plan rather than a finalized product. The product roadmap must be successfully executed. To get to that situation, Starting with socializing, ensuring that the product roadmap and its objectives are properly understood by the teams entrusted with bringing it all together. This comprises UI/UX, engineering, architecture/IT, testing, and operations, all of which contribute to the transformation of creative ideas into tangible products.
However, simply getting everyone on the same page and then “throwing it over the wall” does not ensure a finished result. As a result, product management must be involved throughout the design, development, testing, and deployment stages of the process.
Part of this necessitates proactive participation from the product team, with frequent check-ins and conversations to ensure that plans are faithfully carried out and to introduce new learnings and information as they become available. Remember that it all comes down to efficiently synchronizing your internal teams, their execution styles, and determining what your company’s goals are, how they’re measured, and what your product is expected to provide to fulfill them. This manner, you can ensure that your roadmap tells the story of how your product will achieve its objectives and what is genuinely doable.
