What is a Product Roadmap and How to Create an Effective Product Roadmap
A product road map is a high-level visual summary that delineates the vision and direction of your product offering over time. It is a powerful tool which describes how a product is likely to grow, how to align the stakeholders, and how to acquire a budget for developing the product. It is a guiding strategic document for executing the strategy.
Since roadmaps are essential for coordinating the product developmental process, it is important to plan a product roadmap for your product. However creating an effective roadmap is not an easy task, particularly in a nimble context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly.
Why product roadmaps are so effective?
The product roadmaps are a staple for any growing business. The advantages of creating a roadmap include:
- Drives organisational consensus for overall product direction.
- Provides a mechanism to decide what level of development investment is required to deliver the features and functionality specified in the roadmap.
- To plan the future of the product, the roadmap provides a framework for the entire organisation.
- In order to capture the customer and market feedback on future product plans roadmaps renders a low cost and low-risk way for its organisation.
The product roadmaps play a superior role in your marketing growth strategy. An efficacious roadmap creation requires constant analysis and hard work.
What should be included in a product roadmap?
In the age of agile development, a roadmap has become much more of a living document with far shorter timeframes. Frequent adjustments are made in roadmaps in order to accommodate changing priorities and market opportunities.
Hence before you set out to build a roadmap, you must identify its audience. The different audience requires different types of roadmaps where each type typically has a unique set of components.
While considering which kind of roadmap to build, it is significant to remember two things, who the roadmap is for and how it will get used.
A better understanding of these two aspects will help you to decide the right structure and information to use for your product map.
For instance, external stakeholders will probably want a high-level view of strategic initiatives. They are more interested in general time horizons like the near term, midterm, and future. on the other hand, internal members of the product team want a more granular form of specific tasks and features. It mainly intends to plan these out over the course of weeks or months, instead of years.
To make a product roadmap a successful one, it must have the following things:
- Initiative Name: Initiatives in a roadmap are used to show how specific releases and features relate to the strategy. It represents high-level efforts or big themes of work.
- Time frame: Product roadmaps should include the dates to show when the new products and updates to the existing ones will be completed and released. Based on the level of details required, the time scale is used in the roadmaps. It can range from weeks to months, quarters and sometimes even years.
- Goals: A goal-oriented roadmap focuses on goals, objectives, and outcomes like acquiring customers, increasing engagement, enhancing the experience, improving conversion and removing technical debt.
- Features: It represents new or improved functionality that delivers value to users. Features give more detailed information about new functionality.
- Metrics: Product metrics are agreed-upon measurements against a goal that helps product managers and marketers to evaluate the success of their product.
- Status: Status highlights the current state of a roadmap. That is, ‘are we on track’, ‘lacking’, or ‘ahead the roadmap created’.
Here is one sample Product Roadmap Template created for reference using excel:
