Creating an Ambitious and Achievable Product Roadmap

Simple techniques to turn a Product Vision into a deliverable Product Roadmap

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a list of potential future releases that will contribute towards the delivery of your product vision.

Each release should contain coordinated features and functionality, as this will make it easier for customers to understand the value of what you’re delivering.

With a clear product vision in place, an up-to-date product roadmap is a useful tool for all sizes of business, from startups looking to establish product/market fit, to established companies delivering innovation through R&D with frequent, incremental releases.

Your product roadmap should:

• Be detailed enough that it can be used to manage expectations from customers and colleagues, without committing to specific features
• Be ambitious enough that it prompts interest, feedback and interaction, whilst remaining achievable
• Indicate the key building blocks as releases that you will be delivering for your Product Vision

Your product roadmap should not:

• Restrict your ability to add or remove features to your product
• Impact the order in which functionality is delivered
• Impose arbitrary dates or deadlines

In the same way that a traditional driving roadmap helps you to get to your destination without restricting you to one fixed route, a product roadmap should indicate the key steps you will take to deliver your product vision, without restricting your ability to pivot and change decisions in the future

Focus on high-level value, rather than specific features

An effective product roadmap should have a list of potential releases with broad, simple descriptions, with a single line summary sentence for each to describe the core aims. For example:

“Improved ways for customers to provide information to the portal”

Avoid restrictive, feature-based release titles, such as:

“Support CSV and Excel file uploads to the portal”

A broader release title has multiple benefits:

• It is non-technical, and can be easily understood by colleagues and customers
• It doesn’t commit you to specific features, as it may turn out that there is little demand for Excel uploads, or it could be out of date by the time the roadmap has been published
• It provokes discussion — is uploading files actually the best way for users to enter their information? Are there alternatives?
• It can be easily broken down into smaller releases should it become apparent that this release is too large

Maintain flexibility by delaying irreversible decisions

It’s important to maintain flexibility for as long as possible, so that you are able to respond quickly to demand, and to ensure that you’re always working on the most valuable tasks.

Your product roadmap should aid the delivery of your product vision, not be a burden

Customers and colleagues will want to understand your product roadmap, and how it will enable you to deliver your product vision. It’s important to share this information openly to manage expectations and ensure that everyone remains engaged, but avoid prematurely committing to the finer details to retain as much flexibility as possible.

A product roadmap is more than a restrictive to-do list

Delivering a product roadmap is not like following a cookery recipe.

A recipe tells you what to do, for how long, in what order.

As much as it would be great to be able to follow a set list of instructions to deliver a product vision, it isn’t possible due to the complexity and unpredictability of what you’re trying to achieve.

Business priorities and customer needs often change, making it impossible to accurately estimate the duration of your releases, or predict the new opportunities that will arise as the adoption of your product increases.

Rather than using a product roadmap like a recipe, I prefer to treat it like a delivery driver’s schedule:

• We have some parcels (releases) to deliver, but the optimal order to deliver them is changeable
• We need the flexibility to deliver more parcels (releases) than expected due to demand, or skip some deliveries where the parcels are no longer required (requirements have changed)
• We need to react to current traffic and change the order that we deliver to make the best use of our time (reacting to feedback)
• Committing to timeslots (dates / durations) will affect the optimal order of delivery, potentially delaying valuable items from being delivered

With this in mind, you can craft your product roadmap to satisfy both the development team, and your colleagues and customers.

Don’t miss opportunities when delivering your product vision by sticking to a restrictive to-do list

Summary

Treat your product roadmap as an unordered list of incremental releases that move you towards delivering your product vision. Keep it up to date, maintain flexibility and avoid committing to irreversible decisions before you have considered all of the available information.

Keep everyone informed so that they remain engaged and can see how your releases will keep you on the road to delivering your product vision.

Next post

I’ve now published the next part of this post, which explains why it’s important to focus on working on the right tasks to deliver an innovative roadmap.

I’m the founder of tech startup Swiftcomplete.

If you’d like to have a chat about product management, startups or a demo of our innovative search technology, head over to swiftcomplete.com or message me on Twitter @chriswinfielduk or LinkedIn

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