Blog 73: What is a Product Roadmap including the when, who and where!
- Idea2Product2Business Team
- Jul 15, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 1, 2024
After having created the Market Requirements Document, Product Requirements Document, and Technical Requirements Document (refer blog 59 for MRD and PRD; blog 63 forTRD) we will have a good understanding of the why, what, where, who, when and how. Now is a good time to create the product roadmap.
Product roadmap is a Gantt chart-like list that primarily represents the what, why, where, who, when within the development pipeline.
A product roadmap lists upcoming product features/functionalities mapped against a timeline. In other words, it breaks down the final deliverable into smaller milestones and tasks. Each task will be allocated to individuals with their respective roles and responsibilities. This roadmap makes it easy to update stakeholders on the progress of a specific feature. Stakeholders can be internal and external. Internal stakeholders include leadership, development team, product team, and marketing & sales team. External stakeholders are customers and other key partners.
Product roadmap components
What: What features and functionalities to build?
Why: Why are we building this? (substantiated with data facts and data points on why we need to build this feature/functionality)
When: When is the delivery/launch date of a particular feature/functionality?
Who: Who will build? – their skills, roles, and responsibilities.
Where: Where will we build? – including internal and external resources; Platforms, technologies etc. leveraged.
Creating and updating the product roadmap is a continuous process. Like MRD, PRD, TRD, product roadmap is NOT a one-time documentation activity. Here some best practices to keep in mind.
· Keep it short and precise.
· Keep stakeholders in the loop (view the roadmap that is relevant to them).
· Regularly measure and monitor its usage.
· Must encapsulate both short and long-term goals.
Below are two sample screenshots of the available software roadmap tools.
For a company following a product-led strategy (read blog 71: How do product-led and sales-led strategies differ?), the roadmap is essential. As it helps in listing all important features/functionalities that we need to build. The roadmap also helps in the prioritization of this list (refer blog 68: 5 popular product management prioritisation frameworks). According to a ProductPlan’s survey, 22 percent of product managers rate prioritisation as the biggest challenge they face.
To conclude, at any given point of time, with the help of a product roadmap, we will know what the team is working on, why are they working it and what is coming next.
Jump to blog 100 to refer to the overall product management mind map.
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All the best! 😊