Every product manager has the crucial task of building roadmaps. Although, some product managers still use outdated tools for road mapping. The good news is that there’s a better way. The best product managers start with a “goal first” approach and work to build consensus before building and sharing their roadmap. For this task to be accomplished, a collaborative roadmap that offers ongoing visibility is essential.
An effective product roadmap gives a broad overview of all aspects of an upcoming product: goals, timeline, features, resources, etc. The roadmap indicates what a development team is building, the problem the technology or software will solve, and the business goals the new product will achieve. An effective roadmap will also serve as a product management tool in two main ways;
- As a strategic tool where you can make forward-looking objectives and rough timelines for your product.
- It can improve communication by providing a place where multiple stakeholders can weigh in on products progress and goals.
The biggest challenge of building an effective product development roadmap is nailing down these core elements that make it effective. These are the six steps for building a product roadmap:
1. Design your product strategy
It is essential to define your strategy by setting product vision goals and initiatives for each product. Since most of the used initiatives drive your goals, link them together. When this step is complete, you can see the relationship between your product lines, product goals or initiatives, and releases all on one screen. This helps you to discover goals or initiatives that can be linked to high-level objectives.
2. Customize your roadmap to suit its viewers
The features to be highlighted needs to be carefully selected along with whether to present internal or external data. The internal release date may be different from your external release date. It can also be rounded to a broader timeframe to be less precise (e.g. show releases on a monthly basis).
For customer’s views, you can show the theme of the release and key features in which they will be interested. Internal stakeholders will want to understand the strategic importance, conveyed through goals and initiatives. You can also create views for specific customers, allowing your audience to see the roadmap that is relevant to their specific business objectives.
3. Gather Requirements
There are three main groups you can gather information from to help you define your requirements:
- Start this process by talking to your sales and computer support teams. These departments know firsthand what the customers feel and how they engage with your company’s existing products, and will likely have customer feedback which can help you prioritize new features. Additionally, their insight can give you ideas on what to consider for future releases.
- Engage directly with your product user community. You’ll gain valuable information from product enthusiasts and experts who have already spent substantial time using your products.
- Finally, tap into your knowledge on the product in view. You undoubtedly have a deep understanding of the products functionality, its features, and its limitations. Think about which components are most vital to your customers. Once you identify these, focus on what you can do to significantly improve any weaknesses.
4. Assign a broad timeframe to your initiatives
The level of detail on your roadmap needs to leave room for innovation and agile responsiveness. It is essential to avoid hard deadlines, to prevent committing your team to promises that they might be unable to deliver. Always bear in mind that a key function of your product roadmap is providing guidance. So, rather than indicating specific dates, many product managers choose to plot initiatives at a monthly or quarterly level. Alternatively, you can choose to omit dates completely.
5. Prioritize features
It is necessary to note that customers’ requests should always be ranked against your strategy. Scoring ideas takes subjectivity out of customer requests. The best way to consider request is to design a goal-first roadmap that ranks these requests against your goals. All ideas should be considered against your strategy and those that will have the biggest impact should be prioritized.
Each product can have a unique scorecard comprised of metrics that reflect your strategy, but make sense at a feature level. You can fully customize the metrics, scale, weighting, and complexity used to add quantification to your features. Build your scorecard in relation to your goal first product vision. This ensures that your scorecard reflects what matters most to your product line.
6. Share your road map
Communication and transparency are essential to building great products. They are also a must for keeping entire organizations aligned with your strategy. When you have the view you want, save it and/or share it with key stakeholders. Some software allows you to take nearly any view and publish it via a PDF or secure web page. Now you can proudly share your products plans and roadmap, easily keeping everyone up to date.
Everyone wants to see the same data – but each team wants to see it their way. Product managers benefit from a focused approach that includes plenty of collaboration and planning to keep everyone on the same page.
Best practices for creating an effective product roadmap
Ultimately, your product roadmap will help developers build the product possible. With this in mind, here is a list of best practices from active, experienced product managers:
- Present a visual product roadmap;
- Have different versions of your product roadmap;
- Create a flexible roadmap;
- Share your product roadmap; and
- Involve your stakeholder community in Regular intervals.
Finally, although a product road map can be created physically, online tools designed to ease the process can also be used. Online tools can save time and increase efficiency in several ways: live shareable documents allow for collaboration, and also make it easier to track history and versioning. Additionally, many programs offer pre-built templates that are useful for getting started. Some of the most popular online road mapping tools include: Aha!, one desk, smartsheet, etc.