Creating Roadmap for Products

Creating Roadmap for Products

Product Roadmaps acts as crucial elements in deciding the success and failures when delivering and marketing the products. But, most of the time these Roadmaps are created ONLY when the Sales team makes the request. Hence, they do not create lot of impact which they should have if these roadmaps are created with lot of understanding.

Its important for the Product leader who is responsible for overall success of the product to create a Product Roadmap which projects a clear idea of where the product is headed towards for future.

At the most basic level, a Product Roadmap should answer the below questions:

• For whom?
• Why are we building this product?
• When are we starting and finishing building the product?
• What exactly are we building?
• Key benefits and reason to buy?

Product Roadmaps are required mainly for the Sales teams to assure prospects/customers of the products future directions. An internal roadmap might be required for the engineering teams or to get funding’s.

Factors to be considered while creating compelling Product roadmaps are:

• Product Vision
• Targeted Market
• Strategic Initiatives and plans
• Technology
• Platform
• Customer feedback- Net Promoter score(NPS)
• Prioritize and Organize features

Product leaders have to build a strong Internal Roadmaps since it helps to plan development tasks which align with the company strategy. External Roadmaps are created based on the internal roadmaps.

Product Roadmaps should be connected with Strategical goals- both Business Oriented metrics and Customer metrics.

Prioritization of Features is one of the most important elements to be considered while designing the Product Roadmaps.

Different ways to prioritize and plan the roadmap are:

1) The Priority Buckets –

• Now
• Next
• Later

2) Cluster

• Current Quarter
• Next Quarter
• In the Next 12 Months
• For Future

3) Three Feature Buckets

• Metrics Enhancers
• Customer Requests
• Customer delight

Product Roadmap is not an activity that needs to be done in isolation by a Product leader/manager. It is the end result of Product planning process. The Product roadmap needs regular modifications when the strategy and directions are changing as per the business context.