How Successful Product Managers Plan and Build Product Roadmaps

Brett Truka
Nov 5 · 4 min read

As a product manager, you’ll likely be tasked with building and presenting a product roadmap to stakeholders to explain the product’s vision and strategy for execution. This builds consensus among your stakeholders, helping ensure a simpler and less-stressful product development process. A product roadmap also takes into consideration various options, challenging stakeholders to make decisions that guide development.

Even in organizations that use agile methodologies or other dynamic development workflows that reduce the need for a preliminary roadmap (since you’re basically building the roadmap as you go), you’ll still likely need some kind of product roadmap in the beginning to communicate how you plan to develop the product, even if it’s likely to change and adapt.

Think of it like an actual map. If you were planning a road trip, you’d probably look up a route before you left to get an idea of where you’d be going, but you wouldn’t necessarily feel beholden to that route as you drove. You’d make pit stops, take shortcuts if you could, and deal with roadblocks when they came up.

Given its importance, a product roadmap can be stressful to plan and build, particularly if you’ll be presenting it to your company’s executives. You only get one chance to get it right!

So when you’re building your preliminary product roadmap to get consensus from your stakeholders (the passengers in your car, as it were), here’s a list of the best practices I believe in, based on my company’s experience building products and working with product managers across industries.

Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash

Identify the Company’s Goal

Everything within your product roadmap should ladder up to the company’s primary goals, since the product should be rooted in solving a problem that your company is invested in. As you plan and build your product roadmap, keep your company’s primary goal in mind, and don’t be afraid to use it throughout your presentations to stakeholders. It’s what they’ll be thinking about as they view your presentation, so it’s great to let them know you’re thinking about it too. If you really put yourself in their shoes, you may be able to anticipate some of their questions and/or objections, and your presentation will go even more smoothly.

Consider Goals and Metrics

Every goal you create throughout the product roadmap should be trackable in some way. Connect them to a KPI or metric so that success is easy to identify and, whenever possible, make them SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Let your stakeholders know how you plan to hold yourself and your team accountable to your goals.

Do Your Research

Explore your own data (if you have it) and take a look at what your competitors are doing when you build your list of features. You never know where’ll find some golden nugget, or even just the beginning of a thread that leads to a grander idea. Plus, stakeholders may want to know why you’ve set the goals you have, and backing up those decisions with data will help you get their buy-in.

Gather Suggestions

As brilliant as you might be, you can’t think of every little thing. Request feedback from customers and/or internal team members regarding possible features. Consider human-centered design sessions to make sure you’re gathering insights that drive the user experience — features that matter to your users are the most important. And even if you choose not to include certain suggested features, you’ll be able to explain why, and that helps make your product roadmap even more strategic.

Prioritize

Regardless of your organization’s size, you inevitably have limited resources. One of your most important tasks as a product manager is to prioritize features to reduce wasted time and money. Get buy-in for your priorities, though — something that seems important to you might not seem important to your users, or you may discover that something you prioritized later may need to be developed before an earlier feature in order to make it work. There are many ways to assign priorities, so research them and choose the one that works best for your specific industry and/or product. Be transparent with your stakeholders and your developers so they know how and why you’re prioritizing tasks.

Build It!

There are several best-practices for building the roadmap itself, like “use visuals over chunks of text.” Ultimately, keep in mind that it’ll be your job to present the roadmap but that presentation should really be about guiding dialogue. As great as it would be if everybody signed off on your product exactly as you’ve planned it, it’s rare for that to happen. Better to use your roadmap as a means of discovering what matters most to your stakeholders and identifying areas of potential conflict and disagreement. That way, you can take them into consideration when you build your product development roadmap and plan out your communication strategy.

Finally, Keep It Flexible

Your roadmap’s objective is to help you determine the quickest and most efficient way to reach your goal, taking into consideration all the detours, roadblocks, and expresslanes that you know of, but also those you might unexpectedly come across during your trip. As good as your map is, it’s unlikely that you’ll take the exact path you mapped out at the beginning of the trip. It’s up to you and your team to make sure the features under development continue to resonate with the end user. After all, you wouldn’t want to stick with an out-of-date, printed map if you knew that there were updated, modern ones that would make it easier and faster to reach your destination.