Have you ever watched a film and felt frustrated by the lack of a well-written script or proper direction? Imagine if your product development process was just as chaotic as a poorly made movie, experiencing constant delays and exceeding the planned budget.
The main culprit behind such disarray is often the absence of a well-defined product roadmap. When priorities pull in different directions, and your team’s efforts go helter-skelter, you’re less likely to move closer to your product goals. These are the things that a great product roadmap can help you avoid.
You must be thinking, “Easier said than done!” But not for us.
For over a decade, we’ve helped hundreds of founders avoid these pitfalls and approach product development with much needed clarity. In this article, we bring all the experience we have gained in the last 11 years of our existence and share our learnings with you.
So how does one create a great product roadmap? It starts with understanding the basics.
Product Roadmap – DOs and DON’Ts
A product roadmap is a strategic document for your product team to align with the product priorities, goals, and plans over time. It is an overview of what you intend to achieve with your product and the direction your team must move in to achieve that vision.
In our experience, we’ve seen several founders treat their product roadmap as a forgotten document. It would be best if you always kept in mind that it is a guide that you and your team can go back to at every stage of the development process. To make this possible, you must treat it as a living and breathing document that evolves to reflect changing realities.
Your product roadmap should not be limited to a list of features that you want your product to have. Making it a feature list will shift your focus from solving problems for actual people and distance you from your product goals. Getting into unnecessary details will prevent you from visualizing the path ahead and keep you from meeting your company’s goals.
Now that you’re clear on what a product roadmap is and what it is not, let’s look at how you can make a successful product roadmap that your teams will thank you for.
Five Building Blocks for a Winning Product Roadmap
Here are five essential building blocks you can follow to create a winning product roadmap. By incorporating these elements, you can ensure that your team is aligned with the product vision and mission, enabling them to stay on track and make progress toward your goals.
1. Fall in love with a problem
You don’t want your product to have an existential crisis. Jokes apart, you must be able to clearly define your reasons for building the product, the problem it solves, and how it takes you closer to your business goals.
You can answer these questions and more by attacking the problem from all angles and arriving at a solution that is best suited to it. This helps you get closer to building a successful product and prepares you for communicating product strategy to all stakeholders through the visual medium of the product roadmap.
2. Gather inputs from the right sources
This is a crucial step for getting your priorities from all angles to the forefront and consolidating them into your product roadmap for greater clarity on what you need to build. You can gain the necessary inputs for your roadmap from ideating and planning with your team members and product stakeholders, analyzing metrics you need to register evolving changes, and researching potential users who will interact with your product in the real world.
3. Prioritize
Based on what matters most for your product, list your deliverables for each phase. Customer journey mapping is a great way to find out how you can provide maximum value to your user at every stage by understanding what they need exactly.
4. Work on the phases
Think about timing here. You’ve got your product priorities and now you phase them out into your roadmap based on what you will work on first, how that work sits in with the tasks of the other teams, and how long it should take to complete. This helps you focus on orderly achievable milestones as you progress in your product journey.
5. Embrace change – Adapt, Update, Repeat!
Your product roadmap will need to reflect evolving needs and register them accordingly. Make sure you don’t make it a dead end, considering it’s the foundation for your product. Also, considering the fact that product development does not follow a linear progression, your product roadmap needs to be revisited and modified to register important changes.
Product Roadmapping Essentials: Guide for Founders & Domain Experts
Your domain expertise can meet its true potential only when it reaches its intended audience in a way that provides them with maximum value. Having an app or a tech platform helps here to productize your expertise and sell it as a service.
Let’s prepare you with the essentials of a product roadmap as you escalate from a domain expert to a product founder. Knowledge of these necessities will also be helpful when you venture out and talk to product teams to build your product.
Aligning Vision & Strategy
Your product roadmap will help you communicate your strategy to the relevant stakeholders. For that, you must have your product vision and strategy in place and not confuse either with your roadmap. Think of your strategy as the ‘why’ for your product and your roadmap as the foundation for the ‘how’.
Direction, Guide, and Communication
This is the purpose your roadmap solves for all your stakeholders, customers, and product team members. Being a communication tool, it should guide everyone toward the product vision and keep them aligned as they collectively work toward the common goal.
Go for Realistic Timeframes
In the audacious journey of converting your expertise-rich offering to a digital product, the excitement to get things done quickly can sometimes slow down the process rather than accelerate it. Consider every task and the time it should take to complete. For example, you want to gain more users from a different segment, and mapping their journeys may take longer than onboarding your existing ones.
You Don’t Necessarily Need A Product Roadmapping Tool
When you’re just entering the tech sphere, you’d want to focus on the medium that takes your offering and expertise to your intended user. While creating your product roadmap, you can take it easy by getting an efficient team of product development experts on board. Not only will this help lay a strong groundwork for your product, but it will also make it better from the insights a team can leverage from its experience of massively improving the chances of success for products that go out from their studio.
What happens in the absence of a product roadmap?
Your product roadmap ensures that different stakeholders are aligned with the product vision and strategy over time. It enables different teams to work together on a common goal and keeps the product vision from falling apart. In the absence of a product roadmap, you’re in for:
Individual and collective misalignment
Your teams may keep working relentlessly and yet not be able to deliver the outputs that directly reflect on product success. This will result in a gap in actions, leading to a leakage of efforts.
No scope for course correction
Your product roadmap enables you to analyze existing product metrics against the ones that have already been defined. This allows you to plan contingencies for roadblocks in your product development. Without a product roadmap, this ability to course-correct is not available to you.
Chaos and confusion
Your product roadmap gives visibility and transparency into the process of product development. In the absence of a product roadmap, there is no room for collaboration, and everyone is on different pages with regard to progress in product development.
THE RECIPE FOR AN INFORMED ROADMAP
Just putting items to be ticked off the list in your product roadmap will not lead you to desired product outcomes. That will happen only when you back them up with decisive and actionable data sources. Skipping this step is like knowing what you need to deliver but avoiding why it is important to deliver. Let’s look at some important data sources for informing your product roadmap:
Competitor Research
You may have noticed a key pain point for your product to address and put down a deliverable in your roadmap. You need to do competitor research to know if a market solution already exists for this pain point. Researching your competitors will also help you make your offering more distinct.
User Research
The most obvious yet easily overlooked aspect is researching your potential user. There are various segments, demographics, age groups, habits, and needs to consider to build a user-centric product. Overlooking this step can be disastrous in terms of building a product that no one wants in the first place.
Utilizing Product Analytics
Whether you’re revamping your old product or upgrading it from a website, or even an Excel sheet, you have to understand what the present version lacks from data points. Only then will your product be able to build on it further and minimize the disadvantage of building from scratch.
A clever way to go about this would be to outsource development to a dedicated product team who have previously worked on building similar products that you are building now. They can work closely with your in-house experts and bring in a wealth of information and data points from their previous projects.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Now that you have a better idea of how to build your product roadmap, here’s another pro tip from us. The mantra to success has at least one guaranteed go-to, and that is the ability to adapt and change, for which you need an informed roadmap that can act as your reference point and navigation map to your final product destination.
You can get in touch with our Product Strategy and Consulting and MVP Development, to get started with building new-age technology products or modify your existing product roadmap.
