Product roadmap: Plan your product’s vision and timeline

Product development is a dynamic journey. You’ll need a roadmap to reach your destination.

A product’s roadmap charts a high-level, strategic view of its evolution, allowing managers to establish a cohesive plan that supports its development and expansion within the marketplace. For stakeholders, the product roadmap provides a rallying point, building alignment, trust, and confidence in the development plan.

Here’s everything you need to know about product roadmapping and its role as a strategy, prioritization, and communication tool.

What is a product roadmap?

A product’s roadmap is a document outlining the features and technical considerations that mark its evolution. Product managers use the roadmap to communicate the high-level vision and strategy guiding the product plan throughout development. 

For teams and stakeholders, roadmapping outlines how the product objectives address customer needs and business outcomes. This valuable tool helps them pursue goals and priorities that align with scope and resource allocation.

Roadmaps are often confused with product backlogs because they both outline product development items. However, they are very different tools. When comparing product roadmaps vs. product backlogs, remember that roadmapping provides a strategic overview of goals and objectives. Product backlogs are more granular. They provide a prioritized, tactical list of specific features, tasks, and bug fixes in the development pipeline.

A product roadmap is a living document that adapts to changing customer needs and marketplace conditions, especially for agile teams. Stakeholders should consider the roadmap a statement of intent reflecting the product vision within the current business environment – not a definitive outline.

How to create a product roadmap

Whether managers work from scratch or use a product roadmap template, they execute a precise roadmapping process to yield accurate and comprehensive results. Here’s how it works:

1. Define vision and strategy

Roadmapping begins with a defined vision that helps product management establish business goals and strategies. Because roadmaps are subject to change, they should lay out short-term product development objectives while offering wiggle room for long-term plans. Although some elements must remain flexible, the roadmap encourages alignment by establishing quantitative measurements for success.

2. Gather inputs

After outlining essential business goals and strategies and establishing relevant success metrics, the product team enters the problem discovery phase. Here, they uncover customer needs they can address within the allocated timeline. To inform the roadmap, they review direct and indirect feedback alongside insights from the sales and customer service teams.

This process typically leverages the following resources:

• Usage data: Determine how users interact with the product to identify barriers, issues, and common behavioral trends.

• Product competitive analysis: Examine the competition to establish the product’s current market position. Conduct in-depth analyses of features and user experience. Then, benchmark these measures against the product plan.

This step in the product roadmapping process guarantees the team targets problems that drive value. These insights also allow product management to validate plans and communicate the prioritization of features and initiatives to stakeholders.

3. Establish clear metrics for strategic goals

Quantify roadmap goals by connecting each objective with well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs consider the following questions:

• What’s the desired long-term impact of product development?

• How will the product manager measure impact?

• How will the product manager communicate progress to stakeholders?

Objectives and key results (OKRs) summarize these answers, helping managers break the high-level product vision into actionable tasks. An OKR has two components:

• Objective: A concrete, time-bound statement of a desired outcome.

• Key results: Several measurable milestones that contribute to the objective.

For example, an objective for an app developer might be “Generate a 30% increase in average daily app sessions by the end of the third quarter.” The related key results may include:

• Conduct quality assessment on all mobile functions

• Decrease app loading time by 20%

• Add one new feature to the application

4. Identify high-priority initiatives

Prioritize the product roadmap by asking these questions:

• Which updates generate significant value and impact?

• Which are the most urgent updates or bug fixes?

• What is the scope of the team’s resources (e.g., time, effort, technology)?

If the product team is still on the fence, they can use one of the following weighted-score prioritization methods to determine urgency:

• RICE: The Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort score quantifies the potential value of road-mapped features or ideas.

• Value vs. effort: This framework compares the value gained against the work required to complete a feature. It uses a ranking scale from 1 to 5 to help product managers establish priorities.

5. Choose a format for the product roadmap

There are three primary types of product roadmaps:

• No-date product roadmap: This approach to roadmapping doesn’t use deadlines or timelines. It’s ideal for product managers with flexible priorities.

• Timeline product roadmap: Useful for complex project development, a timeline product roadmap allows project managers to juggle multiple departments, dependencies, and deadlines. It provides a visual structure for the long-term activities and dependencies, allowing teams to plan a year or more ahead.

• Hybrid product roadmap: This roadmap uses timelines broken down into weeks, months, or quarters without any hard dates. Entries are categorized using Current, Near-Term, or Future time-boxes, creating a practical yet flexible projection.

You can find product roadmap templates for each format online.

6. Identify milestones and dependencies

As a communication tool, product roadmaps coordinate work for maximum productivity. To do so, they must outline dependencies and milestones:

• Dependencies are activities that cannot begin until another is complete. By identifying dependent activities early in the roadmapping process, the product manager can avoid bottlenecks in the schedule.

• Milestones outline goals, releases, events, and achievements on the roadmap, aligning the product team and focussing their effort.

We’ll explain milestones in more detail below. These elements comprise the bulk of the roadmap, which is now ready for finalization.

7. Share and gather feedback

Once the product roadmapping process is complete, the product manager presents the roadmap to various stakeholder groups to secure their buy-in. These stakeholders include:

• Developers

• Sales and customer service teams

• The CEO and the executive team

• Customers

Each group will round out the roadmapping process by providing feedback and recommendations based on their needs and areas of expertise.

8. Update

Roadmaps are not static, so the product manager should review the document regularly and adjust the plan to reflect updates to the corporate vision or product strategy. 

Best practices for product roadmaps

The following best practices make sure the team gets the most out of the product roadmapping process:

Connect product roadmap to product vision

The product vision is the reason for creating the product. It should support long-term business goals and further your company’s mission.

A product roadmap should always organize work and prioritize tasks in a way that upholds this vision. Team members can use the roadmap to guide them toward initiatives that create maximum impact on customers’ lives.

Communicate the prioritization process

Explain to internal stakeholders how product management intends to prioritize initiatives, which framework it’s using, and how the overall vision guides this process. These insights help team members understand why certain features move forward. They also encourage others to prioritize their own work with the same criteria. 

Keep your audience in mind

Tailor the product roadmap for each internal stakeholder group you present it to. Show each department the most relevant info to illustrate how the roadmap serves business goals, overall strategy, and product vision.

Align the product roadmap with customer needs

Product management must center users at the heart of its development strategy – not the company. Leaders can achieve this by aligning their success metrics with customer needs. This alignment ensures the team identifies problems that need solving before they jump to creating solutions.

Update regularly

It bears repeating: A product roadmap is a living document. To serve its purpose, a strategy must evolve with business goals and vision, responding to change while grounding the team’s efforts. Better yet, use a solution that keeps your roadmap live automatically by syncing with the tools your teams use to work.

Find objective measures for qualitative insights

Qualitative feedback is hard to act on. Product managers must find a way to quantify these insights and meaningfully capture them in the roadmap. Analyze feedback for patterns and themes, categorizing them using a frequency count or other numerical representation to produce hard data.

Product roadmap milestones explained

Milestones designate key dates or progress markers on a product roadmap. Product managers use milestones at the macro decision-making level to give initiatives a sense of direction and urgency.

Most roadmapping milestones are set by company leadership. Examples include:

• Product launches

• Feature releases

• Sales kickoffs

However, not every event is determined by the organization. In addition to internal milestones, a product may have external milestones, such as:

• Industry showcases and conferences

• Calendar events (e.g., quarters or fiscal years)

Both types of milestones influence development timelines, so decision-makers should prominently display them on the product roadmap.

In addition to high-level milestones, project managers may include key dates on their roadmaps. These mark item-specific phases, offering granular insight into progress as the product team moves through the roadmap. Typical key dates include task deadlines, hand-offs, and approvals.

How Tempo supports product roadmapping

You’ll find countless product roadmap examples online, but which format is right for your development team? Even if you find the ideal product roadmap template, how do you ensure you’ve correctly filled in all the blanks?

Tempo can help. We have roadmapping tools to suit any organization, regardless of your team’s management framework. Our free product roadmap templates work seamlessly with Strategic Roadmaps, our Jira-integrated roadmapping software.

Strategic Roadmaps pulls data from across your organization to outline product development priorities and objectives. Product roadmapping is fast and easy, thanks to customization features that allow you to switch between roadmap views and personalize for different stakeholders’ needs.