The Best Tips for Building a Product Roadmap from the Experts Themselves
Building a product roadmap is one of the most crucial parts of being a successful product manager. It has managed to ensure that product managers can have their teams aligned and on task throughout the entire process of developing a product customers can enjoy. Product roadmaps have become one of the most vital tools in organizing the product development process.
Knowing how to structure a product roadmap is critical for the overall success of your product development process. To make sure that you have built one of the best product roadmaps, we have gathered some advice from the best experts around. Here are the best tips for creating a product roadmap, according to experts.
Roman Pichler
Roman Pichler is a product management expert specialized in digital products and agile practices. He has more than 15 years experience in teaching product managers and product owners, advising product leaders, and helping companies build successful product management organizations. Roman has played a leading role over the past 10 years in developing new practices that help agile organizations and teams create successful products.
“Whenever you are faced with an agile, dynamic environment—be it that your product is experiencing significant change or that the market is dynamic with new competitors or technologies introducing change, you should work with a goal-oriented product roadmap, sometimes also referred to as outcome-based.
Such a roadmap focuses on product goals, benefits, or outcomes like acquiring customers, increasing engagement, and removing technical debt. Features might still exist, but they should be derived from the goals and used carefully. I like to recommend using no more than three to five features per goal, as a rule of thumb.” - From Roman’s blog
Another important point that Roman mentions is that you should emphasize on validating the product strategy of the roadmap.
“Before you create your roadmap, capture and validate the product strategy. I like to regard the strategy as the path chosen to realise your vision and the roadmap as an actionable product plan that communicates how the strategy is implemented. In other words, I like to derive the roadmap from the strategy.
An effective strategy should describe the product’s value proposition, the target market. standout features, and business goals. Make sure that you can confidently state these, that you have done the necessary product discovery and validation work. Otherwise, you risk creating a product roadmap that is not realistic and actionable.”
Midori Nediger
Midori spreads visual communication tricks and tips as an Information Designer at Venngage. She’s particularly interested in helping people communicate complex information. Connect with her on LinkedIn and on Twitter @MNediger.
“An effective product roadmap can boost communication within an organization, leading to better alignment within and among teams, and leaving more time for real work to get done.”
According to Midori, apply these design tips to ensure your roadmap communicates effectively:
● Use color to categorize tasks by type, status, or priority
● Use bar fill level to indicate task progress
● Use arrows to indicate dependencies
● Use diamonds to represent milestones
● Use bold outlines to highlight critical tasks or paths
Roy Cobby
Roy is a content genius, who goes all-in on research to bring you only the most thorough and accurate insights. A fellow at Caixa, he’s currently researching the impact of platform economics on global development dynamics.
In Roy’s post, Roy mentions some common mistakes that should be avoided when creating your product road map.
“Focusing on useless features. Listen, we have all been there. It all looked so perfect on paper. It is even beautifully designed. But, after user testing and the beta launch, it seems that nobody really cares about this part of your product. Why insist on working on it, wasting precious time that can be spent on your crown jewels?
Feeling too attached to certain features. This is a similar point, but for final features. It can happen that, within a long roadmap, particular services that you offer become obsolete. Your team can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to square this declining feature with the rest of the product. Forget it. Drop it, and move on.
Listening too much to certain teams, especially those down the stream. Well, as you know, you are “the CEO of your product”, but not the CEO. But the actual CEO could chip in, or other teams that are more horizontally related to you. It is possible that those more connected with your final users, marketers, and salespeople, will be more eager to provide advice. When in conflict, simply have a chat over your plan, but don’t be too influenced by them!
Copying the competition. Do not just copy what others are doing because it seems successful. In the world of tech, it so happens that many teams can be working on the same thing at the same time. Who says that your solution will be the losing one? Stick to your principles: you might need to reevaluate your initial plans, but do not just drop them altogether because guys down the road are doing something completely different.
Doing something out of desperation. It could happen that everything seems a disaster, nothing goes according to plan and all your attempts to steer the ship in a different direction are in vain. Don’t panic! Go back to your initial inspiration, check your numbers, review your research and locate the pain points. If you take any action, make it so it is coherent with your plan’s vision.”
He states that this advice only works if you took seriously drafting the roadmap in the first place.
Shrinath V
Shrinath is a Google Developer Expert (Product Strategy) and coaches/consults with startups and large firms on all aspects of product management, product marketing, business strategy and marketing. He has earlier held leadership roles in firms like Nokia, MapmyIndia and Motorola.
He is also a partner at Auspin Ventures, a design thinking in business firm that helps companies look at fresh opportunities and build ways of working that blend creative and analytical methods.
This is what the expert has to say on building a product roadmap:
“A large number of engineers turned product managers look down upon sales as a necessary evil. They’re far more comfortable in the deterministic universe of building a product. Sales seem to be a profession for smooth talkers who care only about their numbers and not about the intrinsic product itself.
Unfortunately, this worldview makes life difficult for all involved, but is like a self-inflicted wound for product managers. You can complain about sales around water coolers all you want, but it’ll help more if you learn to appreciate how sales works.
In most of my product manager trainings, I ask product managers and aspiring product managers if they have worked with sales earlier. Many say that they’ve just accompanied a sales person on a customer visit. Often, they would be briefed by the sales person just before the meeting, and requested to not comment on anything beyond the demo. ‘Leave the relationship part to me,’ the sales person would say. If, during the meeting, they strayed from the brief, the sales person would try gesturing frantically to not say something that puts the deal in jeopardy. They usually walk out thinking that they should just send a junior the next time for the demo.”
He also shares his personal experiences as noted:
“In my experience, I’ve seen that good product managers have a great understanding of the sales process and see themselves as team players in getting customers to choose your product/solution.
But I also find that most product managers have only a vague idea of how sales works. Sales is also a process, and most good sales folks have a keen understanding of how to get started in the market, generate leads, convert leads into conversations and go through the consideration-preference-sale process. Sales, especially enterprise sales, is a lot more strategy & structured approach than just numbers.
My recommendation to product managers who haven’t been through a sales cycle is to get a buddy in sales, and understand how they work. Not only does it make it easier to talk to them when it comes to client asks, it often gives surprising insights about how your product is used and/or what competitors are building.”
Amanda Athuraliya
Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.
Amanda Athuraliya mentions the importance of identifying a roadmap theme.
“Your roadmap should highlight how you intend to deliver value to your customers and stakeholders as you get closer to accomplishing your vision. These values are known as themes and they help group similar features, initiatives, or epics together.
They describe a customer need, problem, or what your customers will receive (the job that your product/ service will help them complete). For example, under the theme improving customer support experience you can group initiatives that support it.
You can derive your product roadmap themes from your company’s long-term strategic initiatives. You can also identify themes for your product roadmap from your Product backlog by grouping the individual backlog feature ideas according to their related areas.
Under the themes, you can add objectives to help evaluate the progress made toward solving the customer problem or epics (you can also add features under each epic as additional detail depending on your requirement). “
Ryan Seamons
Ryan Seamons founded Groove to help leaders actually do something to improve engagement. He also is a partner of Sprintwell and has his own newsletter where he shares high quality content.
Ryan is a big fan of “simple product roadmaps”. Ryan says:
“The main problem here is the product roadmap becomes too complex. There are so many details that teams can’t get through it quickly. Sometimes the roadmap is a 40-page slide deck, and no one can concisely relay the purpose of the product.
This is how I know teams have strayed away from a useful roadmap and created either a run-on sentence of a roadmap or a release plan. They have skipped one of the most important parts – simplicity – and their people can’t digest the information.”
Ryan also added:
“This usually happens because teams don’t have the discipline to say no (which causes run-on product docs), or they center their thinking around solutions too early in the process (and end up with a release plan).
Another mistake I often see is not including clear priorities. The themes and timelines are not well-defined, and communication is poor. People have unrealistic expectations on what can get delivered and when.
I often see vision decks that include dozens of priorities. When asked, “Which of these is most important?” The answer is typically, “Well, they are all important.”
If everything is important, nothing is important.”
Meera Patel
Passionate about optimal product management & efficiency. @Northwestern @SMU grad. Current PO @AmericanAir. Avid puzzler, dog mom, reader.
Your purpose is to deliver a product that furthers your company’s mission and credibility. To do this, you’ll likely need to map out the customer journey to identify milestones that will best implement the strategy. These milestones need to be at the right level of granularity, and you should work with your stakeholders to make sure you’re covering the correct scope.
To expand on this, Meera shares the following:
“In my experience with platform products, sometimes having milestones (Epics) as different features on a singular platform works in the short term, but more often than not it is necessary to break out each of those features into milestones as well. It depends on how complex the products you are working on are; the more complex, the more subcategories you will have. Every company (or department or team) has a different definition of what granularity constitutes an Epic; no matter how many PM articles there are around best practices, every company will change the guidelines to fit what suits their needs best. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer on assigning milestones — but you do need to make sure that each milestone ties into the product strategy.”
Meera also believes heavily in the “design to scale” theory.
“This is why designing to scale is so important to the product roadmap creation process; creating your milestones so that you can stay organized and scale logically is crucial to ensuring long term communication success.
If you create your milestones around features, and you end up scrapping one of those features entirely or merging two features, you need to make sure that your roadmap can adapt without a full rewrite. This will allow you to concisely and clearly explain how the change continues to tie into the long term product strategy without introducing confusion around retired features or subfeatures.”
Conclusion
There you have it, some of the best tips you can have from professionals in the field. If you want to build the best possible product roadmap, check out our platform to see how it can help you today!