Product Roadmap: A Complete Guide for Product Managers

Although very general, roadmaps are often divided into subsections, and each should be limited in terms of time and resources dedicated to it. The now-next-later roadmap is mostly used when communicating with a larger audience https://globalcloudteam.com/ and when communicating broad plans without too many details or deadlines. In some cases, it can happen that this type of roadmap is confused with a simple calendar of events, although the differences are striking.

A well-thought-out tech roadmap will instill confidence and attract investors to your project. And here is a board view of a roadmap, for those times you’re more interested in what crucial tasks the team is performing — now, soon, and in the long run. Mixed roadmaps can offer teams more flexibility, but their lack of commitment to firm timescales and priorities can create issues related to vagueness, and open the door to scope creep. Add your features, projects, initiatives, and ideas manually, or you can import these from any tool you used previously.

What’s the Difference between a Strategy Roadmap and a Plan?

Having a good product roadmap should signal at all times what the current status is and WHERE the future steps should take it. A strategy roadmap shows robust thinking about your startup, which is just what your investors want to see. It identifies what capabilities you should invest in, provides the “science” behind the initiatives that you plan to undertake, and helps you avoid the common pitfall of poor prioritization.

Let’s say you’re a retail company creating a customer web portal. An IT roadmap will describe the software development and testing process, along with the plan for migrating existing data and onboarding employees. After reading all this, you might reasonably ask whether it is necessary to build a product roadmap. First of all, any document on its own requires a lot of effort to create.

Formulate your product strategy

A colorful roadmap with key milestones and sprint schedule for better planning a SaaS product. High-level roadmap with an overview of project, teams, and activities for an e-commerce program. Impact – highlighting how each area of investment ties to a high-level goal, roadmaps easily illustrate the impact of a team’s progress. A thorough guide to effectively building and using a roadmap through definitions, examples, tools and tutorials. Release plans highlight the requirements to enhance the systems to support new capabilities provided by the new technology.

An example of a roadmap template for PowerPoint presentations featuring a road metaphor. The roadmap template with road metaphor includes different milestones and roadmap stages that can be edited in PowerPoint and Google Slides. A roadmap template with a clear message of the forward direction for our goals. Use this Overlapped Sections Roadmap PowerPoint Timeline to explain how each stage of the process takes part as the initial point of a new one. They will evolve depending on the market conditions, internal organizational changes, etc. So you must stay open to adjusting your roadmap based on the new information.

Getting to where you’re going

With Fellow’s meeting agenda, execution, and follow-up tools, all your ideas will become steps on your roadmap before you know it. Whether you’re new to product management or a seasoned vet, making the most precise product roadmap possible can come with some challenges. If anything, with your team at hand, you can overcome your challenges and create a roadmap that starts improving your processes right here and now.

• Things like key dates and milestones can create a linear visualization for stakeholders to keep track of everything that’s going on at the organization.
• Risk factors describe the potential internal or external threats that may prevent successful implementation of new technologies.
• If they can’t listen or don’t have the necessary insight to prioritize crucial features, your project will fail.
• As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog management, stakeholder management and forecasting.
• At a corporate level, executives, customers, teams, and other relevant stakeholders are the audience of any product roadmap.
• Here are some insights from our expertise on how to make a successful product roadmap presentation.

So here we’ll tell you about the three types of technology roadmaps most relevant to our work as a software company. A product roadmap ties the day-to-day work of product teams to the company’s vision for both the product and the wider business. If a roadmap helps you achieve your production goals, go with it.

Formulate your strategy and vision of the product

In this case, changing the support of the documents was a much better solution than changing the entire roadmap. You should keep your roadmap as short and simple as possible to avoid too many changes, which can be entered into the specific backlogs. Governments the world over are looking to transform the way they deliver services to citizens, improving access to services, simplifying processes and reducing costs. This article lays out the results of an intensive roadmapping workshop with 16 public sector leaders. A roadmap helps you stay focused on the right things and keeps you accountable to keep moving forward.

Lastly, appoint a specific team, usually comprised of IT team members, to drive the project and make sure the roadmap is being followed and updated as needed. Modern Project & Portfolio Management Connect projects with organization strategy. Enterprise See how you can align global teams, build and scale business-driven solutions, and enable IT to manage risk and maintain compliance on the platform for dynamic work.

What are some pros and cons of product roadmaps?

Using a template can also save you time by standardizing the roadmapping process. Below, you’ll find several free, downloadable templates in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint formats. It is a commitment to your group and clientele that you will be accountable for the most essential work. However, on the flip side, you don’t want to spend more time updating the roadmap than is necessary to achieve alignment between stakeholders and within your team.

A release roadmap is an example of an external roadmap presented to customers. This type of roadmap represents major releases of app functionality for public consumption, so it doesn’t need many tech or practical details. But the real-world variety of roadmaps is much wider among Agile practitioners and digital technology companies. With the audience as the primary factor in mind, let’s look at some common types of roadmaps. Roadmap Planner is another open-source product management tool for Linux. You might question the difference between product manager and product owner , as they both deal with communicating product details.

Allows different levels of certainty

Create a new board with the project roadmap templateby clicking the link and then clicking the “Use template” button. Remote teams aren’t an excuse for a manager https://globalcloudteam.com/what-is-an-it-roadmap-setting-goals-for-your-product/ or team lead to go rogue when creating a roadmap. Learn more about roadmaps in Jira Software, or get started with our free Jira product discovery template.