Creating an actionable Product Roadmap: My approach to balance certainty and flexibility and to establish the roadmap as the center for collaboration and communication
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…
- … helps to moderate between stakeholders and the squad (i.e. team of researchers, designers, engineers, etc.)
- … supports the company vision & strategy
- … has one owner and many active contributors
- … is regularly and jointly reviewed
- … is simple at first glance and provides enough detail at second glance
- … provides an unambiguous and…
