Introduction
Roadmaps are a staple of any product management role. As a tool, the purpose of a roadmap is to communicate a product’s vision and strategy to get from today to said vision. There are many variations to roadmaps in use today, but one thing they all have in common is their core purpose to educate a given group of stakeholders on the past, current, and planned efforts for a product’s life.
How do I build a Roadmap?
Before we get into it, know that as your product evolves, so will your roadmap. With that in mind, the more near-term your roadmap’s timeline, the more stable you’ll want it to be as opposed to the further out your timeline is, the less stable it needs to be. Saying that another way, you’ll generally want your roadmap 3-6 months out to be relatively stable and detailed, and your roadmap 6-12 or more months out to be high-level but flexible. This is especially true for industries where the environment and landscape can notably change in relatively short period of time.
The first thing you’ll want to do to build out a roadmap is to know your customer and ideate. At this phase, you’ll want to use tools such as User Persona and Mind Mapping to understand who you’re building for and what you could build.
In addition, you’ll want to understand where your product lies on the competitive landscape using tools such as SWOT Analyses and Porter’s Five Forces.
The next phase is to prioritize your ideas. I personally am a fan of prioritizing ideas in a couple ways: via MoSCoW and RICE. I find having two different approaches to prioritizing ideas helps me to better consider what things I should pursue first as a product manager.
Once you have your ideas prioritized, you now want to lay it out in a way that communicates:
- What are we building next?
- When will it be done?
- What comes after that?
- What comes after all of them?
Basically, help your stakeholders understand where you’re taking your product and how.
At this point, as time goes on, new information will find its way to you. The market will change. Competitors will evolve. Customers will evolve, too. This is where you repeat the steps above periodically to gauge if your current roadmap still makes strategic sense of if you need to update your plan. If you find you do, remember to communicate so to your stakeholders to keep them aligned with where the product is going and to provide opportunity for feedback.
Conclusion
Building roadmaps is one of the most important things a product manager is responsible for. Because product managers own the vision and strategy of a product, they naturally are the owners of how that vision and strategy are executed upon. Fortunately, roadmaps are also one of the simplest things to build (in theory) and really only require you to sit down and do the work. Leverage tools like the ones I’ve laid out above and you’ll have a smooth, straightforward path to building out and maintaining your roadmap.