Creating an actionable Product Roadmap: My approach to balance certainty and flexibility and to establish the roadmap as the center for collaboration and communication

Jan-Henrik Stocker
Homeday
Published in
8 min readFeb 15, 2021

--

Here we go! 🚀 My first post on medium. It’s quite a bit but hopefully worth it, especially if you’re a PM. Looking forward to your honest feedback.

Why I developed my own roadmap format

There are tons of roadmap formats which vary from feature lists over release plans in the form of timeline-focused GANTT charts to high-level Kanban boards with only problems and opportunities. Each of them has its benefits. However, for me none of them nailed it. Thus, I developed my own hybrid version that tries to combine most benefits of the different approaches.

Disclaimer: I don’t refer to a public product roadmap which you wanna put on your website but to one I use daily as a product manager at Homeday.

For me, a good product roadmap…

  1. … helps to moderate between stakeholders and the squad (i.e. team of researchers, designers, engineers, etc.)
  2. … supports the company vision & strategy
  3. … has one owner and many active contributors
  4. … is regularly and jointly reviewed
  5. … is simple at first glance and provides enough detail at second glance
  6. … provides an unambiguous and

--

--

Jan-Henrik Stocker
Homeday

Lead Product Manager & Coach, Angel Investor, Customer Support Consultant, Mentor & Strategy Enthusiast