In the product manager’s arsenal, the product roadmap is the strategic communication weapon of choice. This roadmap identifies deliverables and expectations for where the product is headed and why. Product managers engage with internal teams and stakeholders to develop a product roadmap.
Today we will understand the need of creating a roadmap for product managers in order to achieve alignment and develop trust among stakeholders. A strong product roadmap makes you and your team seem good in front of your team. So we developed this guide to help you plan, build, and share a great product roadmap.
What Is A Product Roadmap?
As a visual communication device, a product roadmap helps coordinate a company’s product strategy. If you work for a large business, your product roadmap may incorporate forthcoming features as well as technical considerations. Customer and company results are communicated through a road map over a certain period of time.
As a collaboration tool, the product roadmap offers stakeholders and team members the information they need to focus on their goals and priorities. Product teams rely on roadmaps to keep track of all the changing parts that affect their work, including scope and resource allocation.
In a way that can be understood by every stakeholder, the road map is the key asset that conveys how those components come together to build a plan. The purpose of a product roadmap is to explain the why. If you want to get anywhere, you have to know where you’re going and what you’re going to do to get there.
It should not go into great detail about what and when it will be done. Should stay at the why level, not the what level. Inspire your teams to build a strategy for delivering that goal, whether it’s in the form of a release plan, a delivery plan, or a project plan.
Importance Of Product Roadmaps
There is so much importance of product roadmaps. Let us see them one by one:
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Creates Excitement Around Product Strategy
A product roadmap is a great tool if you want to develop product strategy literacy across your company, and it’s the right instrument for proving to your stakeholders that you have a solid handle on the strategic wheel. Because they have a solid knowledge of what’s important, their internal compass when it comes to making tactical judgments will be guided by this high-level vision.
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Transparent Workflow
Having a clear product roadmap offers executives and other stakeholders a clear picture of what’s occurring, changing, or developing inside the plan. As a result, your stakeholders will feel good about the company’s progress in solving consumer concerns that will have the greatest influence on your bottom line.
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Cross-Functional Team Collaboration
The process of prioritizing products is as difficult as the process of creating a plan. Teams and stakeholders must engage in a continuous, collaborative discussion to achieve this. As a result of having a product roadmap, teams are encouraged to focus on the challenges that can be solved with the available resources.
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Channel Of Communication
A culture of alignment and deep knowledge of product vision and direction is fostered by these constant dialogues about the why, how, and with whom work is to be done.
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How To Build A Product Roadmap?
Now let us see how to build product roadmaps:
Product Roadmap Template
Untold possibilities exist for how you might bring a route plan to life. From post-it notes on a whiteboard to Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, to a flexible roadmap tool, there are a variety of ways to organize your roadmap. When it comes to selecting the proper tool stack for strategic planning, product development is no exception.
We’ve found that product managers tend to construct their roadmaps in one of three ways. At different phases of the product lifecycle, different types of roadmaps perform well. However, how you organize your roadmap relies on the specific features of the product roadmap template.
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The No-Dates Product Roadmap
This is a great product roadmap example. Roadmaps with no dates give greater flexibility than those based on dates. Especially for organizations whose objectives are always changing, they’re a valuable tool. There are times when you’re processing new information on a week-to-week or even day-to-day basis, and this is one of those times.
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The Hybrid Product Roadmap
Deadlines are included in the hybrid product plan, although they are not firm dates. It’s not uncommon for companies to develop a quarterly product plan. You may prepare for the future with this type of roadmap, but you still have flexibility. Current, Near-Term, and Future items are plotted by month. As long as you don’t try to time-box your tasks, you’ll have a fluid estimate that’s helpful but not constricting.
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Timeline Product Roadmap
The roadmap for the timeline product: A roadmap plotted on a timeline, as its name implies. Until you’re managing numerous departments, dependencies, and deadlines, a complicated timetable product roadmap is neither useful nor essential. There are many product roadmap software for creating a timeline product roadmap.
When it comes to a product roadmap, a timeline offers a visual framework to all the moving components that have to work together to achieve a successful product release. Some departments must prepare a year or more ahead. You can build a timeline product roadmap using the following steps:
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Identify Dependencies
In product teams, there is no vacuum, especially between product, engineering, and design departments. In the product management roadmap, it’s vital to identify the relationships between each project, team, and initiative early on.
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Mark Milestones
You may use product roadmap template PowerPoint to mark milestones on your roadmap if your team uses OKRs to measure the progress of business goals. This is a fantastic method to highlight your organization’s goals, new products, trade exhibitions, and other notable events and activities. Your team will rally around a goal or important outcome if it is shown on a roadmap.
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Track Progress
Tracking progress is important for creating a product roadmap. In what ways do you intend to impact your users’ lives through your work? How soon can you respond? This way, you can see how near you are to solving the consumer concerns that will help you realize your vision.
This was how to create a product roadmap. Now let us see how to plan for a roadmap.
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How To Plan For A Product Roadmap
The planning of the road map begins with those parts. Then you’ll be on the right track toward product roadmapping software. Commit to executing things correctly and discussing them with your colleagues:
1. Generate Goals
Idealerweise, as we mentioned before, you’re working on a road map for the next several months. Planning on a one-year timetable makes little sense since product managers seldom know what will happen a year from now (changes in the market, discovery of new customer demands). Only include the who, what, and how for the month and quarter, concentrating on a high-level goal or two in the product planning software.
2. Identify The Problems
It’s time to proceed onto the problem identification phase after you know what the company goals are. Are there any specific user difficulties that you can fix to have a positive influence on the metrics that you’ve set? Problems that have the greatest influence on the company goals should be the focus. Many of the signals in these channels can be removed.
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Customer Feedback
A customer’s perspective There is a constant need for communication between you and your users. “We can’t say it enough!” You as a product manager need to be thoroughly entrenched in user dialogues.
Feature requests coming from sales, CS/CX communications are valuable, and meeting with those teams may be beneficial toward understanding user concerns. If you’re looking for major challenges that can be handled within the time frame you’ve set for your product development roadmap, look for such.
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Usage Data
Users’ interactions with your product and features are captured in usage data. There are likely to be issues, obstacles, and common tendencies in the behavior that may be addressed.
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Product Competitive Analysis
Even if you’re not aggressively pursuing your rivals, keeping tabs on the problems they’re tackling is crucial. As a result, you’ll be more aware of where your product sits in the market compared to your rivals. You need to do a thorough study of the customer’s experience, quantify it, and compare it to your offering.
In the planning phase of a product roadmap, it’s critical to identify the challenges you’ll commit to tackling over time. In alignment talks, you will utilize the results of this study to explain why particular features and projects should be included on the road map.
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3. Align With Internal Teams
It’s in the product manager’s best interest to show his or her team how they arrived at their decisions based on all this research. This creates faith and trust in us as a product team that we’ve done our homework and considered all the possible factors, data, and feedback that could influence the decision-making process.
During the product roadmap planning phase, the best strategy to develop these connections is to focus on the greatest challenges that can be solved the fastest. As the last point to consider, keep in mind that roadmap alignment should be a continuous process. As early as possible, the roadmap should be drafted and the strategy developed.
4. Define KPIs
OKRs take a vision and break it down into attainable objectives. Time-bound and actionable, OKR objectives are both inspirational and actionable (it inspires the team to “roll up their sleeves” and act independently to execute the objective). These are measurable milestones that quantify a project’s qualitative goals.
5. Prioritize Product Roadmap
Our favorite weighted-score techniques may help you benchmark possible epics or features against your product goals. Here are the two methods we enjoy.
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- RICE: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort (RICE) are the four components of the RICE model. An easy way to assess the potential worth of features, project ideas, and initiatives is to provide a weighted score for each feature or initiative. If a feature or project proposal has a RICE score, it’s simpler to rank them when it’s time to select which ones should be focused on first.
- Value Vs Effort: Prioritizing ideas is made easier by comparing the value received from an idea to the work necessary to accomplish it. By adopting a standard rating system from 1 to 5, product managers or teams may make quick and easy judgments.
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Execute Product Roadmap For Definite Success
“A product roadmap” is an overview of the product’s future. It’s not a finished product, however. To reach this point, the product plan must be effectively implemented and implemented. There are numerous essential phases to this particular procedure. We need to make sure that the product roadmap and its objectives are fully understood by all of the teams who are responsible for making it all work.
We hope this article on the product roadmap helped in evaluating the importance of this process!