How to Create a Versatile Yet Practical Product Road map

A product roadmap is critical for expressing how product & Dev Teams efforts are aligned with lengthy business objectives. Knowing the importance of a roadmap — and how to develop one that works — is essential for keeping product team on track.

Product Managers use roadmaps to work with senior management and lock the overall scope in order to meet the teams objectives. And then high-level roadmap is further divided within their team and come to an agreement on how a product will evolve and change. The roadmap effectively puts everybody on a certain track and provides input to their daily work and future direction.

What are the benefits of creating a product roadmap?

The most important advantage of a product roadmap is the real direction it conveys to all stakeholders. This strategy aligns the teams around similar aims to create outstanding products by matching wider product and company objectives with their development efforts. The roadmap offers updates on the state of work to organizational leadership and “translates” development tasks into non-technical words and a format that is easily comprehended.

Product Leaders can use roadmaps to bring together teams to work on high product updates and effectively communicate objectives with other teams. Roadmaps gives everyone a clearer sense of the “overall picture,” focussing on the most critical tasks, preventing project risk, and making quick, independent decisions.

Now that we have agreed on the understanding and importance of Product Roadmap, here are the 10 hacks / approach / commandments on making a versatile yet practical Product Road map

1) Concentrate on the Objectives and Outcomes:

When working in an dynamic, complex environment your product is always undergoing considerable change or the market is comstantly evolving due to new rivals or new technologies gets introduced frequently — you should use a goal-oriented product roadmap, also known as an outcome-based product roadmap. A product plan like this focuses on goals, advantages, or results including recruiting consumers, boosting engagement, and eliminating technical debt. Although features may still exist, they should be derived from the aims and handled with caution.

2) Product Strategy Led Roadmap:

Capture and validate the product strategy before you start creating your plan. The roadmap is an actionable product plan that describes how the strategy is implemented. A strategy is a path chosen to realize your goal. The value proposition of the product, the target market, standout characteristics, and corporate goals should all be described in an effective strategy. Ensure that you confidently declare them and that you’ve completed the essential product discovery and validation.

3) Tell A Consistent Story: 

Your product roadmap should tell a consistent story about your product’s future growth. Each objective must improve on the one before it, especially if your product is still in its early stages. Follow these two guidelines to create an effective roadmap narrative:

• Break down the product strategy’s stated user, customer, and business goals into distinct and quantifiable subgoals. 
• Arrange the subgoals in a logical manner to create a story.
• Avoid the need to add targets and functionalities to the product roadmap in order to satisfy influential stakeholders.

4) Keep Things Brief: 

Don’t cram too much information into your product roadmap. Maintain a simple and easy roadmap. By focusing on the goals, you may capture what is actually important and leave out the rest. Keep your plan elements fine-grained and derived from your aims. Epics and user stories should not be displayed on your roadmap; instead, they should be kept in the sprint backlog.

5) Establish Significant “Buy-In” Methodology:

Even the strongest product roadmap is useless if the individuals who will be responsible for developing, marketing, and selling the product do not believe in it. Collaboration with key stakeholders (internal & external) and their participation in the creation and maintenance of the marketing plans is a wonderful strategy to reach an agreement. This helps you to tap into their thoughts and knowledge, fosters collaboration, and increases the likelihood that others will back up the strategy.

6) Learn to Say “No”: 

While you want important stakeholders to support the product plan, you shouldn’t say yes to every suggestion or request. This would convert your offering into a feature soup, a mishmash of options. “It’s not about saying yes to everything when it comes to innovation. It’s about saying no to everything except the most essential features”.

7) Usage & Display of Dates: 

Dates on product roadmaps have been a strongly discussed topic among some product folks for a time. On an internal roadmap, I advocate using dates or time frames to organize the activity of internal stakeholders such as marketing, sales, and support, as well as the development team. This aids you in making crucial trade-offs between shipping on time and fully completing a goal.

8) Measurable Roadmap: 

If you’re using a goal-oriented roadmap, make sure each target is detailed and measurable so you can know if you’ve achieved it. If you want to gain customers, for example, figure out how many new customers you should get; if you want to reduce unnecessary costs, figure out how much terrible code you should get rid of or rewrite. Ensure, meanwhile, that you choose a reasonable aim and that the objectives on your roadmap are achievable.

9) RoI Led Strategy: 

Calculate costs from “Highest level to lowest level”. When your product undergoes a considerable degree of change and innovation, I recommend that you calculate development costs top-down rather than bottom-up. It’s nearly impossible to derive the correct epics and user stories from the roadmap features, receive accurate estimations from your team, and accurately predict the product backlog’s pace and rate of change. This will give you an idea of how much labor you’ll need. Then factor in the costs of facilities, infrastructure, materials, licensing, and other pertinent expenses.

10) Regular Review and Modification of Roadmap : 

Change is inevitable in an dynamic setting. As a result, you should review and revise your product roadmap on a regular basis — every four weeks to three months, depending on how new your product is and how dynamic the market is. 

Best Practices To Create Roadmaps

Creating and managing product roadmaps is a continuous activity that you should engage in with your team. There are a few basic steps you may take to ensure your success. The following are some excellent practices for creating the best roadmaps:

• Only offer as much information as your audience requires.
• Maintain a balanced focus on short-term techniques and how they relate to long-term objectives on the roadmap.
• Regularly review roadmaps and make revisions as plans change.
• Ensure that everyone has access to the roadmap (and that they verify it on a regular basis) and that stakeholders at all levels are in sync.

PG Tip: Product Leaders need to ensure that 20% of roadmap is always about long term objectives, i.e. features or products which will give revenue 2 yrs down the line. One should scope those features in current year, implement in next yr such that tangible revenues are demonstrated in the year after that. But very few product leaders are able to bring that vision in their roadmap.