Product Management 101: Roadmaps
3 min readJun 8, 2020
This series is all about turning the hundreds of bookmarks over the years into Medium articles everyone can access. It’s been rather cathartic to declutter the 26 bookmarks I had on roadmaps and to identify any gaps in my knowledge!
How Do You Create A Roadmap?
- ‘Product Roadmaps Relaunched’ Book or this Blog Post summarizing it: this is a complete overview of roadmaps, their history, how to present them, etc.
- ‘Roadmaps are Dead! Long Live Roadmaps! by C. Todd Lombardo’ Mind The Product Video and Article: A couple of years ago there was a bit of a revolution wih roadmaps, with Product Managers finding it very difficult to manage expectations in Agile environments with Gantt Chart-type roadmaps which were better suited to Waterfall environments. This video sums this up and what to do about it.
- ‘Agile Roadmapping: How To Think Big, Ship Fast And Always Keep Moving’ Article: Janna Barstow is heavily involed with Mind The Product, and her article has illustrative examples.
- ‘What does an agile product roadmap look like?’ Article: How to link features to OKRs, and then to long-term strategic themes. It has a picture of what that looks like that is super useful.
- ‘10 Tips For Creating An Agile Product Roadmap’ Blog Post: Roman Pilcher, the creator of the The Product Canvas, wrote this one and it is quite a useful place to start.
- ‘Dear Product Roadmap, I’m Breaking Up with You’ Article: This article shows what happens when a roadmap is poorly done and communicated, and how a roadmap should be instead.
- ‘Roadmap Planning in an Agile Road’ Article: This includes tons of tips, including pitching ideas to each other before deciding on which ones to put on the roadmap as a team.
Roadmap Examples:
- Gov.UK’s one on their website: Some of the team behind the official government Gov.UK website teach Product Management at General Assembly, so they really know what they’re doing over there.
- Monzo’s Business Account Roadmap on Trello: Monzo is well-known in the fintech space for having a public roadmap from the beginnings of the company -they truly are a ‘challenger bank’ at heart.
- Progression’s on Notion: Progression aims to help companies display roles and career progression frameworks in a more centralised/visually pleasing manner than the usual excel file (if there even is one).
Who Creates The Roadmap?
- ‘Creating Good Roadmaps: 6 Practical Steps for Product Leaders’ Mind The Product Article: “A roadmap that is either handed to them, or one where they only feel like a contributor and not the owner, will inevitably lead to poorer solutions. The team will have a more limited understanding of the problem and they might be less motivated because they’re not convinced they are spending their time on the right problems.”
Managing Expectations/Presenting Roadmaps:
- ‘A Roadmap Doesn’t Have to Lead to Broken Promises’ Mind The Product Article: I have seen colleagues avoid sharing roadmaps because they fear that it will lead to Sales or Marketing making false promises to customers and relying on the roadmap to hit their targets, but this article lists the ways you can actually share your roadmaps.
- ‘Sales Teams Close More Deals When You Give Them The Product Roadmap’ Article: More ideas on how to get Sales teams used to Agile roadmaps and selling what you have today.
- ‘Cheat sheet: top 10 tips for getting buy-in from your technical team’ from Atlassian: Tips from a developer-led company, who don’t even have a Sales team.
5 Roadmap Tools You Can Use:
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