An introduction to the benefits of building a defined product roadmap

Key points:

• The goal is to keep you organised and help you communicate
• Keep your audience in mind at all times
• Maintain it often to avoid last minute scrambles

The product roadmap is one of many useful tools in the product management arsenal. It changes regularly. With a solid agile approach we trade off long term certainty for speed to market and the flexibility to react to needs and circumstances.

A good product manager maintains their product roadmap with regular updates. They show progress of execution and adjustments to both timing and content in the future. Amendments are informed by data. The data is gathered through the process of execution as well as in the maintenance of their product plan.

What is a product roadmap

A product roadmap is simply a visual listing of the high level features you intend to deliver over time. The short term deliverables should have dates with a high degree of confidence. The longer term deliverables are both less certain in timing and subject to removal.

A good roadmap is steeped in data and aligned to strategy. A typical strategy will have multiple pillars and your key initiatives will be linked to these. You will have metrics that track your strategy which should line up to your budget. This way you can estimate the impact of an initiative on your business performance. This will be important when we talk about communication later.

Organising your roadmap into these strategic pillars helps you to allocate your resourcing in line with the data supporting the strategy. This helps you to prioritise over time.

There are no real hard and fast rules for roadmap visualisation but typically you will see strategic elements with your initiatives underneath as sub headings on the left or y axis. On the bottom or x axis you will usually denote time.

Time is broken down according to your needs. A 3 year overall timeline shows a longer term direction. A single year or 18 month timeline shows shorter term direction. It is up to you to fit the needs you have. I also like to show shorter increments in the near future (like months or quarters) and then expand to longer periods further out (like halves or years). This helps to reinforce the looser timing of later scheduling.

How should your product roadmap be maintained

There are many tools that can help you to maintain your roadmap. Some people like to integrate their roadmap with their systems for managing their execution. This is all great but I often just rely on simple manual visualisations which are easy to update and produce to simplify setup and maximise flexibility.

Some examples of tools that you can explore include roadmunk and product plan which focus on this task directly. Others like product board and air focus look at aspects or take a broader view of product management. I’ve explored some of these and other tools in my earlier post on keeping productive whilst working from home.

In terms of updating your roadmap I would suggest that at a minimum it is done every change in your shortest visual time increment on the roadmap. This means if your roadmap has months then you update it every month or if quarters then every quarter. Remember this is at a minimum.

Another school of thought is to update it with each release. This works well for a single product roadmap that is predominantly software based in particular.

If you have a regular process to update it then you will have an easy time of it. We all know the pain of last minute requests to see an updated product roadmap.

How should your product roadmap be communicated

Some of the tools we mentioned have great in built communication features. These can be really powerful and efficient to get feedback in one place from your team, peers and management.

When communicating you need to understand the needs of your audience. Executive teams will want to see higher levels detail (rolled up) and perhaps longer timeframes. Your team will need to see lower level detail and more specificity on short term timing. Having a roadmap visual that lends itself to multiple audiences easily is the key.

Other tips to aid your visualisation include colour coding and shape or size indicators.

By coding your elements to align to strategy, alignment with other initiatives/departments, or indeed the type of change you are showing you can convey more information easily. An example of this might include showing how your roadmap is full of maintenance activity and you have insufficient resource for your product changes. Sizes can be useful to convey something like impact or effort.

If you set up regular communications you will help to set expectations rather than responding to requests for information in a reactive way. I suggest doing so by a written communication on a regular timeline and also a presentation to people at a regular event. This affords you an opportunity for feedback and questions which can help you to refine either your planning or your communication. You can also publish a live version of your roadmap and seek feedback electronically.

Like with all things, walk before you can run and remember that the point of this is to keep you organised and to communicate effectively. So keep your audience in mind at all stages and don’t neglect the quality of content or frequency of updates for refined aesthetics.

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