Easier-than-ever roadmaps: One roadmap, any use case
The product roadmap is a strategic communications tool, a statement of intent and direction, and, done well, a way of rallying the whole organization around the key problems that must be solved to achieve your product vision.
— Bruce McCarthy, founder at Product Culture
Yet, according to Productboard’s Product Excellence Survey, approximately 50% of product teams feel their roadmaps are outdated and don’t reflect user needs. Many product organizations fail to use roadmaps properly to communicate the context behind them, guide release planning and delivery schedules, and collaborate with stakeholders outside the immediate product team. Done poorly, leads to a lack of cross-functional visibility and alignment on the right priorities. Product teams waste time inefficiently using engineering resources and deliver products that don’t meet customers’ needs.
To empower even more product managers to create excellent roadmaps, Productboard launched easier-than-ever roadmaps, including customizable roadmap templates, swimlanes, and timeline roadmaps. Roadmaps are easier and more flexible than ever before while remaining backed by customer feedback and connected to development tools. Product managers can quickly create and share easy-to-maintain roadmaps for every scenario and stakeholder and even manage complex product portfolios and multiple product teams. Using Productboard, product managers build cross-functional alignment, improve team productivity, and accelerate product planning cycles.
Accelerate product planning cycles with custom roadmaps for every scenario and stakeholders' needs
Different teams need unique information and product roadmap views, including seeing objectives, releases, or features. Productboard offers flexible roadmap views for each stakeholder and scenario, including leadership, company, delivery-focused, and customer-focused roadmaps, while staying connected to a single source of truth.
Productboard’s new roadmap selection screen includes seven roadmap views for all roadmap needs. From high-level product roadmaps to detailed release plans, Productboard’s customized and always up-to-date roadmaps reflect product teams’ product vision and strategy.
Using Productboard, Noah Singer, 1-800-Contacts’ Head of Product, shares, “we don’t spend any time building roadmaps for specific individuals; instead, a few clicks gives them what they need. Having a single source of truth in Productboard creates a clear picture when you backup beyond a single team.”
Drive visibility and transparency into product strategy and roadmap delivery for cross-functional stakeholders
We’ve heard many product teams desire a quick way to clearly communicate critical milestones and feature launch dates to key teams and stakeholders, including executives and GTM teams. Yet, product managers don’t have time to manually recreate the same roadmap to communicate product strategy in 10 different ways for 10 different internal stakeholders.
Productboard’s new timeline roadmaps help product managers visually plan, communicate, and track against specific deadlines and important date-based milestones. Your whole company remains up-to-date about your product strategy and key deliverable dates, reducing the number of times daily your stakeholders ask you, “when will this new feature launch?”
According to Mike Ottavi-Brannon, Principal Product Manager at Amplitude, “Productboard's Roadmaps, including their timeline and objective-based roadmaps, have allowed us to asynchronously communicate our roadmap with stakeholders across the organization, giving them visibility into our future and the confidence to share it with our Customers and Prospects."
With three different timeline roadmap views (features, releases, and objectives), product managers empower every audience—including executives and development teams—with critical information, transparency, and alignment. Product managers can quickly adjust the timeframe and position of each feature, objective, or release. Product managers can also customize the roadmap’s time granularity and quarterly start dates to align with company standards. Through closer collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders, product teams drive visibility into product strategy and roadmap delivery.
Use features timeline roadmaps to track progress against specific deadlines and milestones and releases timeline roadmaps to plan and communicate when they’ll work on releases. With an objectives timeline roadmap, product managers communicate a high-level plan of measurable, time-bound goals across teams over time, informing GTM activities. Product managers can create custom swimlanes to organize roadmaps by product, team, or theme. Ultimately, timeline roadmaps ensure streamlined and on-time execution and effective communication through optimal planning and prioritization with a holistic view of all projects aligned to company objectives.
Objectives timeline roadmaps are available on the Scale and Enterprise plans.
Increase productivity, focus, and alignment by connecting roadmaps to product development
Creating product roadmaps is just one part of the entire product management planning lifecycle. Building excellent product roadmaps and prioritizing the right features starts with effectively analyzing and understanding your customers’ needs and feedback. Then product managers can display prioritized features created in Productboard or add new features directly to their roadmaps. As stakeholders review the product roadmap, they seamlessly view each feature’s relevant customer insights, providing them context, clarity, and confidence around product strategy.
After executing product discovery and planning in Productboard, product managers push prioritized features directly from Productboard’s roadmaps into development tools, including Jira and Azure DevOps. Connecting product discovery and development, ensures superb visibility with development teams and eliminates duplicating content in multiple systems. Ultimately, Productboard’s roadmaps ensure stakeholder alignment, increased productivity, and transparency for roadmap delivery with a consistent, single source of truth.
“With a simplified way to create product roadmaps, Productboard was the most comprehensive solution to meet our criteria. Productboard is now the source of truth for all of our roadmaps.”
Ready to get the right products to market, faster?
Start your free trial now to try Productboard’s easier-than-ever roadmaps, empowering cross-functional alignment and revenue while helping product managers build excellent products customers want, faster.
Try Productboard roadmapping now
Current customers can access all these new features on all plans in their Productboard workspace.
If you’re looking for more guidance and best practices from our customers and leading product teams on how they built effective roadmaps, check out Productboard's Charting Your Course: The Building Blocks of Excellent Roadmaps ebook.
Creating better roadmaps is why many product managers come to Productboard
In fact, Product School awarded Productboard for the Best Roadmap Product via the 2020 Proddy Awards, annual awards honoring the world's best digital products. Also, Products That Count awarded Productboard the Best Product For Building A Roadmap based on thousands of votes from global product managers.
Productboard’s new Essentials plan allows product teams to master building beautiful roadmaps before introducing customer-led insights, broader collaboration, and strategic prioritization into roadmapping.
