Product Roadmaps - a Must-Have for Every Product Team

The role of a product roadmap in the development process

Building a digital product is a complex process with a lot of dependencies. To prioritize product functionalities and react to changing market conditions is a demanding journey. At Boldare, we often compare it to climbing a Himalayan peak. Stakeholders, a product owner, and development teams have to be well-prepared for various scenarios: the weather over the Himalayas can change in seconds, the equipment can get lost or broken, team members can experience physical difficulties - out of the blue, something can go wrong and ruin the original plan.

This is why preparation is key: the team must be in good shape, with sufficient food and water supplies, and the right equipment. Moreover, the climbing team needs a guide. Not just anyone who knows the way, but someone with enough experience to choose the right route and advise on next steps in moments of crisis. In product development, the role of this guide can mostly be covered by a product roadmap. What is it, and how can it benefit your product? Let’s see.

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a visual plan executing the product strategy. It communicates the intention of what you want to achieve with the product in a period of time. It shows the what and why of the product to help you choose the right development direction at each stage of full cycle product development.

In practice, it can be a visual presentation, chart, graph, table, or a list of steps to take. It consists of business aspects, but can also include some technical elements, depending on the product. Aneta Orszewska, one of Boldare’s product strategists, says:

A product roadmap should cover a wide range of aspects. From clear product goals, outcomes, development milestones (product features), through marketing (communication strategy), to user research and product discovery. A product roadmap is an essential part of the product strategy, because it is an action plan with all potential paths.

Product roadmap benefits for business and products

The product development roadmap means the team is well-prepared during the development process and can predict business growth and investment needs. It shows the exact route to follow (particular initiatives) and gives direction when a pivot is necessary. It’s important that in such situations, all team members are familiar with the product goals and are headed in the same direction. A roadmap ensures that.

Let’s look into some more benefits of the product roadmap:

• Having a product development roadmap helps to identify product dependencies in advance, which enables good prioritizing (this is especially important for mature and complex products). It also supports the process of making key business decisions.
• A product development roadmap helps stakeholders and development teams to monitor development progress. It should include KPIs or active metrics, so you can measure the outcomes of your initiatives.
• A roadmap guides teams in choosing the most valuable product features, so they can prioritize work in the way that is most beneficial for your business.
• A roadmap helps to manage resource usage efficiently and revise the budget whenever required.
• With a product roadmap, you and your team are always on the same page. You can see what has already been done and what is left to be done before hitting the next milestone. This greatly increases development efficiency.

Having a product roadmap can significantly contribute to the product’s market success. We have been there many times. With a roadmap, our development teams don’t get lost in action, they follow a timeline or a list of expected outcomes, so they can easily create a product backlog for each sprint. That’s why we recommend building a digital product roadmap every time you start the development of a new or existing digital product. Here is a little guide with the first steps towards creating a map.

How to create a product roadmap?

Now that you know how a product roadmap can benefit your team, the product, and your whole business - let’s talk about how to develop a product roadmap.

Step 1 - Choice of tools

You can build the digital product roadmap using online tools like MURAL, Miro, Jira, Trello, or ProductPlan, but you can also use a physical whiteboard, create a simple PowerPoint presentation or an Excel document. It depends on which format will be the most convenient for your team to work with.

Don’t limit yourself, but choose the format that will help you keep your roadmap accessible, adjustable, and clear for everybody who needs it. Consider the various people from your company who will have to read and understand the roadmap: sales and marketing specialists, customer service specialists, and so on.

Step 2 - Gathering information

The person responsible for gathering all the information and putting it together into a roadmap is usually the product manager. But in general, the process should involve as many people as possible in order to draw on the full context and include the various product aspects in the roadmap. This is why when creating a roadmap, product managers or product owners usually collaborate with stakeholders, product strategists, and the whole product team (developers, designers, scrum masters, etc.) It prevents missing out important information from the roadmap and makes it understandable for everyone involved in building and marketing the product.

Step 3 - Creating a good product roadmap

There are many ways and approaches towards building a digital product roadmap. But whatever way you choose, it’s still demanding to draw it well. Here are some things you need to remember if you want your roadmap to serve you, your team, and your product:

• A good product roadmap should reflect a product strategy,
• It should be transparent and available to everyone involved in the development process,
• It should be like a living organism that needs to get fed and taken care of frequently; it should also evolve with time, parallel to the product,
• It should be concise and understandable (avoid over-engineering it),
• It should describe product goals, resources to be used to achieve them, and metrics to measure progress.

A common mistake when creating a product roadmap is to list product features but not product goals. These kinds of maps generate more harm than support. It can simply mislead your product team, causing delays in development. The team may lose strategic direction and waste time building product features that users don’t need.

Step 4 - Updating the product roadmap

This step is actually an ongoing action. You should regularly review the product roadmap and keep it always up to date, especially when major pivots take place.

In practice, a product roadmap should get updates as frequently as required by the product development progress. It depends on the product’s needs and development specifics. It’s also up to product releases and incoming user feedback.

A product roadmap should exist as a living organism that interacts with the environment and reacts to appearing circumstances. But it won’t happen automatically. It’s the product team, the PO or PM who has to remember about it and implement any necessary adjustments when needed.

Alternative product roadmapping

The product roadmap is not a static document. Many companies modify it to fit their needs. This is how innovative agile product roadmaps came into existence. These leave more space for continuous updates. Roadmapping should include a product discovery process in which the team tests assumptions to make better decisions when choosing ideas for implementation.

Sometimes roadmaps are replaced with other tools, for example an opportunity solution tree (OST), which strongly supports the product discovery process and helps to keep the product within a continuous discovery journey. An OST is more flexible than a traditional roadmap (because it’s non-linear) and has more space to include various product scenarios.

A product roadmap as a guide and source of truth

You can choose traditional or unconventional product roadmapping - it’s all up to the product’s specifics and the needs of your product team. But it’s good to remember that the product roadmap will be your first source of truth when discussing development steps and the product itself.

Also, you don’t want your product team to get lost on their way to one of the highest Himalayan peaks. You want them to get there safe and sound (and successful). Equip them with a good product roadmap - a tool that is capable of leading them towards that success.