Paving a way for your Product: The Product Roadmap

In Product Management, one of the most important documents you will prepare is the Product Roadmap. This piece of information is crucial in identifying how a product will be developed and evaluated.

Working only with intuition is dangerous. So, we need a long-term product development plan that gives all the product stakeholders the information they need to co-ordinate their planning.

Let’s decode this definition. We have three things here, development plan, product stakeholders, and co-ordinating the plan.

Product Development Plan

A product from discovery to launch, goes through several planning, research, and testing. This is the overall developmental cycle which involves evaluation and iteration at every step. A plan in this case must be dynamic and is prone to change with respect to relevance and priorities.

When we say a “long-term” development plan, we are not saying this is “carved in stone”. It is an ever-evolving, dynamic piece of information which streamlines the efforts for the overall product development.

Product Stakeholders

One of the most essential parts of following a product roadmap is that it needs to be accepted and owned by the stakeholders. Let’s identify our stakeholders first and look into what level of ownership they need to hold.

First and foremost, the Most important stakeholder.

The Business Leader (CEO, General Manager, anyone who leads the business functions other than Product development, sales, marketing, and support).

A product manager, although may be the creator, but the business leader, must feel complete ownership of the roadmap.

Why? The business leader needs to be at the top of the roadmap, in order to allocate the resources, the headcount, to remind each of the stakeholders to prioritize tasks necessary for the roadmap success.

When? They must be involved as early and often in the process of roadmap development. So, to say, we create the roadmap, with the business leader.

Then comes, Other Stakeholders:

1. Sales leader: VP of sales, Chief Revenue Officer.
   They have to hit the sales targets based on the roadmap.
2. Product Development Leader: CTO, VP of Engineering.
   They are responsible for organizing and motivating their team to hit developmental milestones.

We can also add other stakeholders if necessary but always remember:

Whomever you choose to include, they must add value to the process, not create distractions.

Now, let’s talk about another most important stakeholder of the product. The customers.

Understanding our customers is the most important and the primary currency of any product manager. Through collaboration with the customer success teams, surveys, and direct communication, we can know a lot about the customers, their pain points, their usage, and their expectations with the product.

Coordinate Planning

Like a map, a product roadmap gives us a predictability on where our product is heading and how we must align our future activities in that direction. It forces leadership to clearly articulate their business goals and make strategies to achieves those outcomes.

Now that we know what a roadmap is, why we need it and who we should include, let’s look at:

How to make it successful?

There are three things, we need to be mindful about if we want our roadmap to be successful.

Sound Strategy

A Product Strategy is a representation of the way we are trying to achieve a business outcome. It is the description of how the business is trying to achieve its goals with the product. A sound product strategy includes:

Business goals, measurement of success, target customers, competitors, and key differentiators.

When we start with a sound product strategy, it becomes easier for us to determine what milestones we need to achieve, and when. The first step is articulating the product strategy as clearly as possible.

Realistic

A product roadmap consists of milestones that the team needs to achieve in each quarter, month, or Sprint. Milestones help us to identify and address the pain points of the customers which can reduce or even prevent churn.

Some milestones may not directly impact our customers, but they would be beneficial in other strategic objective, like optimization of the application, opening new channel for sales, lowering costs, and so on.

We need to think of milestones at the right level of granularity. These are not backlog tasks, these are big features that will impact the business.

Fully supported by key stakeholders

We have identified our stakeholders above. For our roadmap to be successful, the stakeholder at all levels, must take ownership of it. They must align their business tasks, to reinforce and meet the roadmap goals.

We must never create a roadmap, based on “someone’s” intuition and gut feel.

Intuitions can be faulty, and most common mistakes that we make is when leaders are intuitive and persuasive. It can lead to faulty and unrealistic expectations, not fully supported by other stakeholders.

The purpose of the roadmap is not the document itself, but the alignment of the different stakeholders around the development plan that the roadmap represents.

Hands-On

These are the groundwork we just did. Now, let’s create a first draft.

Remember, the first draft is likely to change before it is accepted. Nothing to be disheartened about. It is a living document, prone to change.

Some things to keep in mind while creating the first draft:

1. Roughly sequence your milestones in terms of their value in supporting your product strategy.
2. Prioritize each of them one by one, based on the rationale. It might give you the first mover benefit or might have a major impact on user retention, based on what the business’s goal is, prioritize the milestones.
3. Schedule the milestones into your roadmap. (Basic approach: Highest priority first)
4. Use the effort estimate provided by your product development leader, as well as the development capacity of the team to figure out when you could expect it to be delivered. You can do this collaboratively with the development teams.
5. Pick up the second highest priority milestone and assuming that the first one is completed on time, schedule that one in the same manner.

Let’s take an example of an E-commerce Platform. Let’s say we are building the overall website for the business. The first draft may look something like this:

Product Roadmap for an E-commerce Platform

In the above roadmap, we have the milestones listed for each quarter. Each of these milestones target to meet the Product Strategy of the business to:

1. Be Easily accessible.
2. Provide Frictionless experience.
3. Retain customers.

In any case, we have to be mindful of the development capacity of the team in each quarter or period.

The first draft may go through a number of iterations, and it will change over time. You need to ask yourself, if it implements the product strategy, and if it is feasible from development perspective. If you have doubts, you need to make adjustments so that both these things are well maintained.

End Remarks

There is no fixed format that fits all organizations: Format is less important than the support of the stakeholders. Once you present it to them, they must support and believe in it.

The key to building this alignment is the process you go through, not the final format or even the contents of the product roadmap.