Best Practices to Create a Compelling Product Roadmap

Across various industries, the new wave of innovation is witnessed. There so many varieties of new products are launched every day. One of the main focuses of the companies is to launch the products faster than the market. This helps the company to stand in the competition and also gives more advantage to the company. The company cannot just launch the product without checking the feedback of stakeholders, automation testing, test-driven development, and many more. Road-mapping is at the top of overall these.

What is a product roadmap?

The short and long term both business goals and different ways of achieving these goals are planned by product roadmap. This will help in finding the particular and specific technology solutions for achieving the goals. A product roadmap can be developed for a new as well as the existing product. The owner of the product along with other stakeholders designs a roadmap that includes various planned steps and it helps in achieving the goals of the company. The product teams align the priorities of business goals as well. 

The main purpose of developing the product roadmap is for the stakeholders so that they can work in the right direction, follow the right steps, and progress. “The product roadmap is required at the beginning of the product lifecycle only”. This is usually a myth and not true at all. Road-mapping is a continuous process and it should be needed throughout the product lifecycle and managed by the product management team.

Best practices to build a product roadmap

Simple and effective

Keep the roadmap simple and easy to understand. Try not to add unnecessary details that increase the complexity of the roadmap. The recommendation is of developing a high-level and proper planned roadmap that includes key aspects of the product, expected milestones that you want to achieve, and future as well as current goals of the product. This roadmap is just to keep the focus on achieving the goals.

Leave specific dates

The presentation of the elimination of dates on the roadmap totally depends on the product owner and team. The elimination of dated from roadmap helps the product owner to look at the bigger picture. The prominent solution to leave dates is the planning of short, then medium and at last long term tasks for achieving every goal at a definite time.

Continuous analysis

Most of the product companies continuously change their requirements as they follow Agile methodologies. This is very important for reviewing the success of roadmap at particular time intervals.

Focus on themes not features

The compelling product roadmap is not related to the features of the products at all. It is advised that always while developing the product roadmap keep your focus on the themes and not on features. The themes help in solving the customer issues whereas features in the roadmap do will not show the bigger picture and increase complexity in communicating.

Benefits of building a roadmap

1. Road-mapping helps in planning the complexity of launching products and capabilities as well as resources that the company needs in advance.
2. This helps the product teams to early focus and solve the problem.
3. The investment can be prioritized in advance and the company gets an idea of spending funds.
4. The roadmap helps in achieving the targets of the company and increase performance efficiency.