Unlike a traditional map, product roadmaps aren’t simply navigational guides. They also make clear:
Roadmaps tend to be more conceptual documents that illustrate the steps toward your product vision. They are often grounded with objectives—clear, measurable, inspiring goals aligned with specific outcomes you’re striving to achieve for your customers, product, or business.
In that sense, product roadmaps sit one layer above release plans, which are the execution-level plan of how you’ll deliver the work that you’ve decided to do and the timeframe when that work will be completed.
“A good 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.”
An excellent roadmap is a strategic and tactical communications tool. It states your intent and direction with key priorities. It’s a shared and up-to-date guide to where you’re going, why, and how you’ll achieve your product vision.
An excellent roadmap shows outcomes or product user impact. Focusing on the “why” clearly communicates intent, direction, vision, and success. Teams align on shared goals supporting product strategy.
An excellent roadmap creates functional alignment and collaboration. It rallies everyone around a common product vision and direction. It incorporates stakeholders’ insights and input, reflecting customer needs.
An excellent roadmap reflects customer feedback. It delivers value by supporting customer needs and concerns.
An excellent roadmap is tailored to your specific audience. Different types of roadmaps work best with different stakeholders. You can choose which views best support how you want to communicate and rally your organization around your product vision.
Although the product roadmap will affect everyone in an organization in some way, it needs a central point of ownership in order to remain clear and consistent. This is really the domain of a Chief Product Officer, VP of Product, a product manager, or someone in a de facto product role if formal titles don’t exist in the company.
That doesn’t mean product roadmaps should be managed in a vacuum. The process works best when collaboration is at the forefront. This can mean starting with high-level input from executives and then reaching out to a line of business leaders for regular consultation and communication.
The roadmap owner is not only responsible for being as inclusive as possible, but for filtering all the input so that goals, features and timelines can all be changed as necessary. Then it’s a matter of sharing the roadmap at the appropriate time so that no one is taken by surprise on where a particular release is at.
Now that you have a general sense of what product roadmaps should do, let’s look at the four steps to take to start building your own.
To define a clear product vision and strategy, consider what type of long-term outcome and benefit you want to deliver to your users. This is a collaborative process where product leaders work with executives to translate company vision and strategy into a product vision and strategy.
When creating your product vision & strategy, it’ll be helpful to consider the following:
Once product vision and strategy are set, product teams can break them down into objectives to tackle over the near- to mid-term in relation to key date-based milestones (like when they’ll need to raise money again).
Product objectives should be high level enough to represent a worthy outcome for your customers or product, yet specific enough to help guide your prioritization decisions around which features to build next. They can be derived “top-down” from company objectives or “bottom-up” based on user insights you’ve received, market intelligence you’ve gathered, or your product strategy. Here are a few examples of good product objectives:
Once you align the product team behind a common product vision, strategy, and objectives, it’s time to prioritize the products and/or features that will go on your roadmap. The following inputs are a great place to begin:
This step can become a little overwhelming given the sheer volume of information you’re working with, as well as the competing needs of stakeholders from both in and outside your organization.
Support may want to focus on fixing bugs, for example, while sales is more interested in a new feature requested by a promising prospect. And though your customers are a valuable source of feedback, they tend to voice the solutions they think they need rather than their underlying problem. Despite the challenges, gathering and synthesizing these inputs changes your thinking from “I know what we should put on the roadmap” to “We’re putting this on the roadmap because of XYZ.” A product prioritization framework can help you take a more quantitative approach for assessing inputs. It can also be helpful to have a tool that organizes all of these insights in one place.
Check out The essential guide to prioritization to learn more about this step.
Now it’s time to create a working draft of your roadmap that communicates the products and/or features you are building, when you will be working on them, roughly when they will be released, as well as why they are a priority vs. all of the options that were considered. To make your roadmap informative and easy to understand for your end audience, try including these elements:
Timeline. Even in the agile world, it is important to set expectations around when short-term, medium-term, and long-term features will roll out so other teams can plan around them. We’re not talking about specific dates or deadlines. Instead, show a general time, such as the month.
Solutions. Communicate what features you want to roll out in the above timeline. You can be as high-level or as detailed as you want, just explain why you are including each feature to give context.
Strategic context. Let all teams know where the product is headed and why you’re building these features next. Currently, only 52% of product teams are confident that their roadmaps reflect the strategic context behind what they’re building. If some roadmap decisions are hard for certain stakeholders to swallow, strategic context helps them to understand the rationale behind tough trade-offs, even if they don’t personally agree with it.
The final step is to rally everyone around the roadmap and empower them to get the information they need. For example, you can set up a regular meeting cadence or send emails updating the team about any product roadmap changes. Here at Productboard, we host a weekly product call that is open to the whole company where we look at a roadmap tailored for a large audience.
Provide product roadmap access to all members involved in the product lifecycle—from development to go-to-market. An easy way to do this is through a product roadmapping tool like Productboard, where stakeholders can view and track changes at any time with a consistent, single source of truth.
With Productboard, you can manage access to the roadmap and hide certain features based on roles and permissions—every stakeholder’s roadmap can be tailored to their exact needs. Once stakeholders have access, they can click on features and releases to learn more about the context, like what problem you’re trying to solve and which objectives you’re addressing. They can even see the customer feedback behind each feature or release.
This self-serve approach is much more powerful than a static slide that’s quickly outdated and forgotten. Keep in mind that roadmap needs vary from stakeholder to stakeholder. Using multiple roadmaps tailored to different audiences can be extremely helpful. Here are a few common types you might want to try out.
You can see how this approach benefits all teams—engineering knows what they are accountable for and when. Customer success can thrill and delight customers and be clear about what you are and aren’t working on. Sales can close more deals because they can share with confidence what’s likely to be done and when. Product marketing can communicate new functionalities with great fanfare. And support can let customers know when new features are likely to be launched. All without asking the already overburdened product manager!
The types of roadmaps you explore should be driven by the nature of the products you’re developing, the business outcomes you’re pursuing, and the kinds of stakeholders with whom you’ll be collaborating.
We’ve developed a comprehensive post on 7 types of product roadmaps which is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a quick summary to get your research process started:
With its focus on requirements discovery and iterative work done by self-organizing teams, agile development has transformed organizations where previous approaches like Waterfall were the norm.
Product leaders can achieve similar results with agile roadmaps because they combine rigor around timelines and responsibilities with an ability to change in response to unforeseen factors.
Consider an agile roadmap if your organization is serving a customer segment that is often in flux, when you’re expanding into new markets or use cases, or even if you just want to bring greater clarity about how products are changing, and why.
Though agile roadmaps may look slightly different from one organization to another, some common principles should apply:
Finally, remember that agile is not simply about working quickly, it is meant to reflect what customers are saying they want and need. Think about how you can build feedback mechanisms into the agile roadmaps you create, whether it’s from trusted customers or simply members from cross-functional teams.
