Mastering Product Roadmaps | Product Management Fundamentals

You might be asking yourself why you need a product roadmap at all.

After all, if you work on an agile product development team where you plan one sprint at a time, what's the point of making a long-term plan? And is it even possible to create a roadmap in a dynamic market environment? Through my experience, I've learned that for most organizations, product roadmaps can be extremely valuable, if not critical, to the success of the business, but only if they're built correctly.

To understand why, we need to think beyond the product development team to the larger business that it serves.

Now you might be wondering, what should a good product roadmap actually look like? Before I show you a roadmap, let me start with two caveats.

First, there is no one format that will work perfectly for every organization.
Different organizations have a variety of development processes, sales cycles, and decision making processes.
                  

If you work with an agile product development team, you probably have a product backlog.
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the backlog is a prioritized queue of the next most important product development tasks.
And if you have a product backlog, you might be wondering whether you could use your backlog as your roadmap.
 

There are times when you can't and shouldn't even try to build a product roadmap.
Picture Christopher Columbus in the days leading up to his voyage from Spain to search for a western route to the Orient.
Imagine asking him for an estimate of what he was going to bring back and when.

A product roadmap, no matter how good it may appear to be, has no value if key product stakeholders aren't aligned around it.

I've seen it happen over and over again.
The CEO and the product leader at a startup are preparing for a company presentation, and together, they create an excellent roadmap for the development of the product based on a brilliant strategy for leapfrogging the competition.
 

In order for a product roadmap to be successful, it needs three things.
It must be based on a sound product strategy.
It must be realistic.

Choosing which stakeholders to include in the roadmap creation process is incredibly important.
If you're missing a key person, it can come back to bite you later.
And if you include people who aren't central to the plan's success, it can waste your time or even put a drag on the whole process.
 

People sometimes ask me how to earn respect as a product manager.
The answer is simple.
The more you know about your customer and your market, the more you can speak with authority about the impact of specific product development options.

Suppose I showed you a product roadmap from my company and asked you what you thought of it.
How would you know whether it was a good product roadmap or a bad one? You likely realize that you can't really determine the quality of a roadmap unless you know a bit more about my business.
So what kinds of things would you want to know? Well, who my customers are and what their needs are, what features our product currently has, and how well the product is meeting the needs of our customers today.
 
 

This next step may well be the most creative part of building your product roadmap.
Let's say you've assembled your team of product stakeholders and together have aligned around a specific product strategy.
Now it's time to identify the sequence of product milestones that best implement that product strategy.
 

Now it's time to estimate the level of effort required to complete each of your product milestones.
This will help you put dates on the roadmap that are as realistic as possible.
You'll need to work with your product development leader on this.

Finally, it's time to build the first version of your product roadmap.
I call this version a strawman because it's just a rough first draft, and it's likely to change a bit before it gets approved by the team.
It's a good idea to produce a strawman before meeting with your team, because you're more likely to have a productive discussion when you start with something concrete for people to react to.
 

Once you've created a straw man product roadmap of your own, you're ready to get together your product stakeholders to review and hopefully approve your roadmap.
This is the most crucial step in the whole process.
Remember, the purpose of the product roadmap is not the document itself, but the alignment of the different product stakeholders around the development plan that your roadmap represents.
 

Once you have a roadmap that's been reviewed and approved by your key product stakeholders, it's time to start building alignment for it among all of your product stakeholders including those inside and outside of your organization.
These are the people who weren't in the meeting but who will need to support the roadmap and use it moving forward.
In some cases, this may include your customers and partners especially if you have a close relationship with them.
 

Even though some of your stakeholders might wish otherwise, product roadmaps are dynamic documents.
They have to be.
They represent your organization's development plan at a particular point in time based on the best information available to you at that point in time.
 

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