How to build a product roadmap?

Learn how to design a great product roadmap that will help you plan your product strategy.

Harish Deivanayagam

5 minutes to read

Intro

While building your product you’ll be constantly juggling with customer support, feedback, and pre-planned features.

Developers get confused about what features to build.

This is a classical example of poor product planning.

Today, I will be walking you through how to design a great product roadmap that will help you plan your product strategy.

Roadmap?

A product roadmap lets you clearly say, what and when a feature needs to be built.

It also helps you streamline your development team and helps them stay focussed on the things they’re working on.

A Roadmap is not a to-do list, rather it helps you build better products for your users.

Types of product roadmap

Now, Next and Later Roadmap

This type of roadmap helps you choose the categorize your features across three vertical columns. The features that need to be built immediately, the features that are planned next, and the features that are planned but less important.

Goal-Oriented Roadmap

This type of roadmap is a more of general one rather than a technical roadmap. This roadmap focuses on certain goals. For example “Onboarding more enterprise users” is a goal. For this goal to be achieved you need to have certain features or tasks to be completed across different departments. The technical team must complete SOC/HIPPA compliance or build a Single Sign-on capability. The marketing team must be running an ABM campaign.

Feature-based Roadmap

In this type the features are listed on the first column. The tasks are spanned on the rest of the rows and columns with the timeline on the first row of the table. For example “mobile support” feature requires tasks like making the design responsive and building a PWA (with a service worker).

Release Roadmap

This type of roadmap helps your team across different departments align on what features are coming up next. This is a list of features along with the release timeline.

How to build a product roadmap

Product User Fit

Know what your product does, and who are your ideal customers. Knowing this is super important because. It helps you decide the 90% features that need to be built. Great products have good product-user fit.

Users of the roadmap

Know who will be using the roadmap, developers marketers, or technical support? Choose the roadmap that brings better visibility to them.

Get Feedback

As a product owner or manager, get feedback from the roadmap users. Iterate until all stakeholders are aligned.

Iterate Roadmap

You can’t simply define a roadmap and leave it unchanged for so long. If your product has users or if you're already into sales or user research. You’ll get feedback. You need to reprioritize items to match the expectations of everyone including users and your team members.