What is a Product Roadmap?
A road map is a high level document (be it physical or electronic) that outlines the stages of product development. It’s important to stress that a successful roadmap should be able to satisfy five goals:
- It should be descriptive, giving you details about the product development process
- It should guide the executive bodies in the right direction
- It should align the team members and aim their focus in a single direction
- It should facilitate further product development.
- It should communicate the goals and further steps at any given moment.
You should keep your roadmap as short and simple as possible to avoid too many changes, which can be entered into the specific backlogs.
Product Roadmap Types
- Strategy Roadmap which is a very high level type of roadmap that outlines the basic tenants of a product.
- Market Roadmap which investigates the market and presents a coherent plan on actions to take to develop the market needs.
- Visionary Roadmap which can precede the other two or it can follow them depending on how developed the market is in the niche.
- Technology Roadmap which represents a detailed type of roadmap that takes into consideration more technical aspects of the project at hand.
- External Roadmap which is aimed at either an outside audience or an internal staff but only at the very beginning of the project.
- Internal Roadmap which has a mostly communicative purpose, as it’s seen as a set of rough instructions from the executive part of the team.
Of course there are more product roadmap types, depending on the niche you’re in, you may have a separate roadmap for engineers or the research team. Understanding the function and the contents rather than the form is key to creating a successful product roadmap.
By the way, Trello which is a project management tool also includes product roadmap templates, supports integrations and includes options to let you automate repetitive tasks. Are your team members already familiar with Trello?
How to create a Product Roadmap?
Every Roadmap needs to contain several elements to serve all functions, such as:
- The Goal will clearly outline what and why it is being done.
- An Initiative that represents the team, the funds and resources as well as the obligations and responsibilities of the team working on the product.
- A Feature which is like a semi-prototype of a product
- Deadlines which can be presented as simple time frames within which tasks are to be completed.
- Progress indicators should signal when specific parts of a roadmap have undergone a specific stage in their progress towards finalizing them.
- Customer satisfaction indicators that are not an obligatory part of a product roadmap.
Supporting Documents
- Backlogs: that are very specific sets or lists of tasks to be undertaken so that every single step contained within the roadmap can be realized.
- Release plan: that is a tactical document that observes a group of tasks to be done for a successful release of a new product or service.
- Release road map: that is an executive type of release plan.
Well, road maps are an essential part of doing business nowadays, sometimes they are expensive and time-consuming. However, the benefits and level of organization that’s to be acquired defeat any costs that may arise from them. So, have you already decided to create a roadmap?
This article was prepared by the EZtek team. We help top brands worldwide to innovate and accelerate digital transformation. We share the latest news about tech trends and innovations. So make sure to follow us not to miss a single blog.
