It’s important to have a clear direction for our products in order to ensure we’re all working towards the same goals. But how do we use a product roadmap to provide that direction? How detailed do we need to be? And how do we use it on a daily basis to keep us on track? In this article I’ll run you through my own views of how best to use a product roadmap as both a strategic tool for aligning on the future of a product, as well as a tactical tool for the day-to-day decisions.

The Many Meanings of a Product Roadmap

The words “Product Roadmap” mean many different things to many different people. If you search for “Product Roadmap” in Google Images, you get a huge range of results: 

As such, this article will not be a comprehensive overview of every single kind of roadmap, nor will it be the definitive guide to creating a perfect roadmap. Roadmaps are extremely contextual to your situation, organization, and current need. Instead, we will focus on the essential information that should always be included, regardless of the roadmap's format.

What to Include in a Product Roadmap

A product roadmap should encompass the following elements:

Strategic Objectives

Clearly define the goals you want to achieve at specific stages, milestones, or releases. These objectives provide a high-level direction for the product.

Scope

Identify the customer problem spaces that you want to address first. This is not a fixed feature list but rather a flexible approach to solving customer challenges.

Metrics

Determine how you will measure progress at each stage or milestone. Metrics help gauge the product's success and track its performance.

Time Horizons

Establish the order in which you will work on your initiative. This is not about fixed dates but rather a sequence of actions that align with your strategy. 

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For a more detailed overview of Product Roadmaps, check here for a really great talk by Janna Bastow, co-founder of ProdPad.

Using a Product Roadmap as a Strategic Tool

The purpose of a product roadmap as a strategic tool is to provide a high-level vision and direction for a product or service. It helps align stakeholders, communicate the product strategy, prioritize initiatives, and guide decision-making to achieve long-term goals and objectives.

When the product space feels too large

A few years ago when I was a Senior Product Manager at VMware (with Tanzu Labs), I had a new client who had no clue where to start: no clear direction. Clients traditionally have something in mind and want to solve some problem-that’s why they need support from places like Tanzu Labs; but this client’s problem was at a scale too large to solve in one project. I think that this is specifically relevant in the case of startups and in-house teams. Most times you don’t have a problem handed to you on a silver plate, or a “contained'' boundary to work with.

As we started the exploration into the problem space, we asked questions like: 

• What is your strategy to approach this problem? 
• What’s the 5-year plan for your platform? 
• What do you want for the future?

We heard things like: “Reusability of data”, “Centralization of data”, “Trust in the system”, “Good user experience”, “Technical capability.”

Obviously, none of these things are clear strategies for a product at this scale. But our job was to determine: what could we actually begin to build as our MVP (minimum viable product).

Embracing the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Concept

In my experience, one of the most difficult things for business people to come to terms with when moving to a more agile way of thinking is the concept of an MVP.

• They are fearful that key features or processes might be “missed”
• They are not sure about when they can actually expect to have certain features
• They have a hard time trying to just jump to grand visions of a final product
• They try to solution and inject their own view of what the product should be

Needless to say, it very quickly became apparent that the business stakeholders and product owners were getting nervous. The team was faced with the challenge of taking a complex business process and determining the smallest MVP possible, while trying to manage stakeholder’s perception of a solution.

Using a Strategic Roadmap for Clarity

As a way to mitigate this, the team decided to begin to position the product in a high-level roadmap and chunk it into different phases. At this point the team did not add any kind of timeline, it served only to indicate what kind of features and strategic objectives would be attacked in what order.

By aligning our first phase with the users’ top pain points, we were able to show how our first phase (in which we would release our MVP) could both provide user value and also scale to answer their high level goals and the vision for the product.

Below you can see a screenshot of the Strategic Roadmap (all client information removed), where we added: Product Vision, Strategy Statement, Phases and their description.

The Power of a Strategic Roadmap

The “Strategic Roadmap” was a powerful tool to visualize our thinking and positioning of the product. The stakeholders were able to see how we viewed the expansion of the product and how it not only could solve our immediate process problems, but could grow to encompass other processes in the organization.

At the Phase 1 box we were the most detailed, providing a clear picture of what we were planning for the MVP and what the user value was. For Phase 2 we provided additional ideas for subsequent releases after the MVP. For Phase 3 we were able to explain some high level ideas for the near-term. In Phase 4 we communicated very vague ideas and high-level features. (It is important to ensure you are getting less and less detailed into the future, this will allow you to pivot the product as you react to user feedback and changes in priority. More information on that here.)

Optimize your product roadmap for intent, not details

In general, we kept the information on the Strategic Roadmap very high level, and somewhat generic. This helped to focus the conversation on the strategic intent of the project, instead of the tactical details of implementation.

This approach gave stakeholders a clear picture of our direction, but didn’t lock us into any scope or time promises. Surprisingly, it also gave the team/stakeholders a vocabulary to say things like “That sounds like something for Phase 3”, or “We can’t do that until Phase 2”; deprioritizing feature and focusing our team’s effort  on the smallest MVP.

The team also created a version of the Strategic Roadmap in a table format that gave us one more level of detail, including users and desired outcomes. The earlier strategic view can be a conceptual look at the product roadmap, but this format helped stakeholders to feel that we were gearing up towards action.

In summary, use your Strategic Roadmap to:

1. Prioritize/deprioritize features based on a clear strategy
2. Give stakeholders a view on how your product fits into a conscious strategy
3. Support and justify a small MVP that can be scaled out
4. Collaborate with stakeholders on their vision and sequence of functionality/features

To go deeper into strategy and how/what you should communicate around a strategy, there’s some great content by Vince Law here.

Using a product roadmap as a tactical tool

In addition to strategic alignment, the purpose of a product roadmap as a tactical tool is to outline in more detail what needs to be built into a product in order to deliver on near term objectives or problem spaces. It helps to highlight the sequence of necessary work, any dependencies, and what will define success.

Planning in phases

The team was now able to focus on planning the first phase of the product, which was in essence the MVP and a few subsequent releases. As the team ideated and discovered more and more feature ideas and product decision points, we were able to throw them into the different categories of “Now”, “Near”, and “Future”. Without assigning any kind of release date or timeline to these categories, the team was still able to avoid promising scope at a specific time constraint.

Using the roadmap to help with prioritization

This activity also helped the team to prioritize certain ideas based on dependencies or aligned business strategies. You will see that the “Near” and “Future” are more vague and include longer lists of feature ideas as these have been deprioritized when considering the MVP and the “Now” phase.

The team was also able to think through information like the Desired Outcome of a specific phase, Metrics for that phase, Potential Epics, Teams, and Dependencies. The deeper detail helped to give clarity in the short term, and guidelines for the longer term.

This level of detail was only shared within the team as a tool to begin to uncover areas that we needed to action. The value was that this became a framework within which we could prioritize features, focus our user interviews/discovery efforts, and see the current phase with the future in mind.

The tactical roadmap as a communication tool

With Stakeholders on the other hand, we provided details only on the “Now” phase where we were most confident and most clear about the product details.

Alongside the Strategic Roadmap, this detailed view of the first phase gave stakeholders a picture into what we were planning in the near term. This helped to give them a better picture of how we viewed the product and also helped them to advocate for us within the organization.

During a discussion with another product team, our Product Owner was able to push back on features that he felt did not fit in this first phase and wasn’t in line with the strategic vision in the near-term. Even with this more detailed product roadmap, we were able to scale down and frame the MVP as something that would continue to grow.

In summary, use your Tactical Roadmap to:

1. Prioritize/deprioritize features based on a clear strategy,
2. Discover and map out product constraints and priorities,
3. Show stakeholders detail for the short term, and give your team more insight into the long term,
4. Begin to add detail and plan aspects of your product like metrics, user focus, and high-level epics,
5. Collaborate with your team and other teams on product details.

Conclusion

Product roadmaps are powerful tools that can help to shape a product and guide your process. By using this tool effectively, you are able to foster alignment with stakeholders, facilitate collaboration within your team, and encourage synergy across the entire organization. A good roadmap is a vital aid in prioritization, guards against scope creep, and ensures focused execution. To embrace the full potential of product roadmaps, be sure to let your specific context guide the roadmap’s format and level of granularity.

Interested in working with Michael or one of our other product management coaches? Tell us the challenges you’d like to solve here and we’ll match you with your perfect coach. 

A version of this article was originally posted on Michael’s Medium blog.