Product Strategy & Roadmapping

Establish a vision aligned with your company mission and values by comparing current and future states, clarifying the value proposition, and identifying target customers and stakeholders.

Empathize with stakeholders to align the strategic roadmap with the company mission and customer needs. Interview clients, gather input from product, engineering, and account teams, and develop user personas.

Explore how user personas help empathize with customers, inform tactical decisions on a strategic roadmap, and guide writing user stories, defining features, and jobs to be done.

Explore how jobs to be done and user personas complement each other, identifying customer problems and needs; interview 5–10 customers and define functional and emotional criteria.

Identify buyer personas to understand purchasing motivations and decision making; tailor messaging, product positioning, and an out-of-the-box SaaS solution for buyers like Ramona and end users like Derek.

Research the industry to gain a view of dynamics, startups, and firms; work with sales and marketing, gather insights from Forrester or Gartner, and track competitors to build battle cards.

Create a list of direct and indirect competitors for a product like ABC Pets, visualize logos, categorize into verticals, and capture details in a slide or Excel to guide roadmapping.

Conduct a competitive analysis by researching your top 3 to 5 competitors and comparing them to your organization to identify differentiators that shape your strategic product roadmap.

Analyze competitors to identify differentiating features and compare key capabilities—such as in-app purchases, social media, buyer incentives, business-to-consumer mobile dashboards, and advanced reporting—using a spreadsheet to inform the strategic roadmap.

Create competitive battle cards for your company and three competitors, detailing company summary, value prop, target vertical, differentiators, strengths, weaknesses, and risks to steer product strategy and roadmap.

Learn how to build a strategic ecosystem map by researching growth opportunities and mapping partnerships, integrations, competitors, and prospects around your product or organization.

Explore how to build a strategic ecosystem map by mapping partners, integrations, competitors, and clients using text or logos, with templates and research resources to identify opportunities.

Create a summary page for the top three companies in each area of the ecosystem map, with research on funding, clients, integrations, and partnerships to inform product and strategy discussions.

Brainstorm roadmap ideas by prioritizing features that solve customer problems and drive growth; map integrations and acquisition opportunities. Organize ideas in Excel, PowerPoint, or Figjam.

Document your ideas using a familiar tool to ideate on long-term growth, outlining strategic roadmap areas and pitching top ideas in an ideation session.

Validate priorities with stakeholders by reviewing concepts and your vision to assess need and gather feedback. Use design sprints to quickly validate ideas, gain buy-in, and estimate effort and impact.

Learn to run a two hour design sprint that accelerates concept development with design thinking and sprint methods, ideal for small to medium problems and rapid roadmapping.

Use the two hour design sprint method, in three stages over 120 minutes, to empathize with customers, explore the problem, and sketch and vote on high-value solutions.

Unlock stakeholder buy-in with a two-hour design sprint to align diverse opinions on high-value features for your strategic roadmap, saving time and money with quick, in-room decisions.

Use a free two hour design sprint template to guide pre-work, execution, and post-sprint steps, outlining target personas, jobs to be done, and alignment with strategic roadmap and stakeholder buy-in.

Create a strategic roadmap as an investment, allocating features to enrich the business, close competitive gaps, expand into new verticals, drive innovation, integrations, and partnerships.

Break down the roadmap into five categories—enriching your business, competitive gaps, expanding into verticals, innovation, integrations—and allocate 30%, 25%, 20%, and 15% to client requests/technical debt, gaps, verticals, and innovation.

Learn to craft strategic roadmaps in PowerPoint that outline 3-year and 5-year plans, aligning high-level features with investment, enrichment, integrations, and expansion across teams.

Demonstrates a strategic roadmap in Figma FigJam, a collaborative tool for a live, updatable roadmap visible on the website; compare to PowerPoint, and share with stakeholders for comments.

Sell your vision to stakeholders using the roadmap; tell a compelling story with visuals, share research and competitor analysis, and outline clear objectives to gain buy-in.

Craft a slide deck that sells vision to stakeholders by telling a story that links goals, opportunity, and mission with personas, competitive analysis, and a strategic ecosystem to secure buy-in.

Accept stakeholder feedback, including tough conversations, revisit ideas with research, and align with the vision to refine and prune the roadmap for the next 1–5 years.

Update the strategic roadmap by integrating ongoing research and new ideas, review with stakeholders quarterly, and execute with product, engineering, and design sprints while tracking market shifts, economy, and competition.

Create a strategic roadmap by applying ten steps: establish vision, empathize with stakeholders, research the industry, build an ecosystem, ideate, validate priorities, and execute.