Your Product Roadmap Shouldn’t Look Like A Release Plan

Product managers aren’t project managers too.

There seems to be a lot of confusion between product roadmaps and release plans.

As a product manager, you are not in charge of development, so stop worrying about dates and when things are going live. What you are in charge of is mapping out the steps that your team is going to take to fulfill your product vision. A release plan is what comes after you’ve gone through the spec’ing and approval stage of your ideas.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself — but why can’t I do both with a roadmap? Here’s why:

Your roadmap is about priorities

A roadmap is a visual representation of the problems you are trying to solve. Yes, I used the word visual. Dates aren’t part of a visual. They’re part of a spreadsheet. So let your roadmap be the communication tool it’s meant to be.

Leave the dates for your spreadsheet or PowerPoint. Use the roadmap to present a clean, theme-based structure of your current, near-term, and future plans. We like to call these time horizons.