Product Roadmap

Avi Siegel

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6 min read

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a visual representation of product priorities over time. It transforms abstract planning into a clear view of what the team is currently building, is planning on building, and has already built.

Unlike traditional project plans with fixed dates and deliverables, product roadmaps used by Agile teams focus on outcomes and customer value, maintaining flexibility to adapt as market conditions and business needs evolve.

What are the goals of a product roadmap?

The primary goals of product roadmaps are to:

  • Provide transparency around the priorities (and non-priorities) for the product

  • Manage expectations regarding what is most important to build versus what can be delayed (or not be done at all)

  • Align teams so they can coordinate their efforts as necessary

How is a product roadmap managed?

Product roadmapping is an ongoing activity that requires regular review and updates. The following activities are key parts of maintaining an effective roadmap.

Gather input

A product roadmap is synthesized from information collected from a wide variety of sources, such as:

  • Customer feedback and requests

  • Market research and competitive analysis

  • Technical debt and infrastructure needs

  • Business objectives and KPIs

Pro Tip: Don’t pay too much attention to competitors. It is useful to know what they’re up to, but watching them too closely will make your product more of a follower in the space and less of a leader. You’ll want to attract customers through your differentiation and innovation, not by offering the same thing your competitors offer (and later than they offer it, no less).
Pro Tip: Be mindful when deciding whether specific tech debt must be dealt with - just because something is not ideal on the technical side, does not mean it’s worth the effort to address.

While all the above sources, and more, should be leaned on to understand what is important to build out in the product, keep in mind that the roadmap is not determined by any one of these, and it is also not determined by an internal or external democratic voting mechanism. Rather, all of this information must be combined and distilled down to determine what is most valuable across customers, the business, internal team needs, development velocity, etc.

For instance:

  • Customers may insist on the development of certain features that they deem mandatory to do their job

  • Customer Support may want certain parts of the product to be improved so fewer users write in with questions

  • Customer Success may request certain features to be built to satisfy new use cases

  • Sales may need certain features to help them close deals

  • Engineering may state that certain infrastructure work must be done to keep the product stable

  • Design may push for certain UI changes to improve the user experience

  • Leadership may demand certain work be done to hit revenue targets

  • Other Product teams may hope for certain work to be done to enable their work to be done

Pro Tip: Do not (necessarily) build exactly what customers ask for - their problems are important to address, but their proposed solutions are often not what needs to be built (after all, users are not product development experts, nor do they consider all the other factors that go into prioritizing a roadmap).

Add items

When you are confident about either what problem needs to be solved or how specifically you plan on solving it, add that item to the roadmap.

Provide as much detail as you can - e.g.:

  • Context, description, requirements, etc.

  • Links to any existing documentation related to the work (feature specs, tech specs, mocks, etc.)

  • Other work that may be intimately connected (e.g., work that is a prerequisite, or which the work in question is a prerequisite for)

  • Alignment to specific strategies, initiatives, themes, OKRs, KPIs, etc. as pertinent to how your organization categorizes work

Pro Tip: The roadmap is for work you will do (given enough time and resources at least), not for big dreams about what you could do. To that end, big ideas belong more in an idea tracker than a roadmap - when they are refined into more specific descriptions of what you need to do, that’s the time to place them on the product roadmap.

Prioritize

Determine the relative priority and timing of items on the roadmap. Various prioritization frameworks can be utilized to help you compare the importance of different sets of work. These different frameworks will help quantify comparative importance of work by:

  • Evaluating business impact vs. effort

  • Identifying dependencies between separate sets of work

  • Accounting for technical prerequisites

  • Balancing different types of work (e.g., new features, feature improvements, bugs, support requests, tech debt, infrastructure, etc.)

Adjust continuously

The product roadmap is a living document. As such, as circumstances change, the roadmap should be regularly reviewed to:

  • Add new items and validate existing items (e.g., remove items that no longer represent problems in need of solutions)

  • Further detail work (e.g., provide additional details, break down epics into smaller / more iterative subsets of work, etc.)

  • Confirm or adjust priorities and sequencing

  • Track progress against goals

  • Make necessary adjustments to timing or scope

Communicate

Once the product roadmap exists, it should be shared with all relevant parties. Internally this may take the form of an open, distributed, widely available view of the product roadmap. Externally, this may be less transparent or complete (albeit still useful to customers).

  • Share roadmap updates with stakeholders

  • Explain changes in priority or timing

  • Address questions about specific items

  • Clarify what is not on the roadmap

Pro Tip: While most detail on the product roadmap will be intended for internal audiences, it may be useful to provide at least some of it to external users and customers. This allows such individuals to feel involved, shows that their opinions matter, and manages their expectations as to which of their hoped-for features may be coming soon vs. be further down the list (or not on it at all).

Who is involved with the product roadmap?

Roadmap planning requires input from many stakeholders both internal and external to the organization. That said, it should be owned by one person.

The following individuals should be involved:

  • Product manager: Own and drive the roadmap (ultimately responsible for gathering feedback, prioritization, timing, execution, and overall ownership)

  • Engineering manager: Provide technical context and input on feasibility

  • Leadership: Align on strategy and provide business context

  • Stakeholders (both internal and external): Provide domain expertise, requirements, needs, pain points, etc.

Pro Tip: While gathering input from many stakeholders is valuable, final prioritization decisions should rest with the product manager alone. Too many decision makers can lead to an unfocused roadmap that tries (and fails) to please everyone.

Best practices for product roadmaps

  • Keep the format simple and visual. Complex spreadsheets and detailed timelines often create false precision and become outdated quickly. Consider using a tool to help you manage the product roadmap.

  • Focus on outcomes over outputs. As much as possible, describe the customer and business value you aim to deliver, as opposed to specific feature lists. Often you will know what feature needs to be built (which will also be simpler to state on the roadmap) - but often you won’t.

  • Don’t confuse solutions with problems. It is easy to end up, after much good discussion, with a way to confidently solve a given pain point. And it might be the right path forward - at the time. But, by the time you’re ready to execute, it may no longer be the right solution - so before you move forward, reconfirm the need and your answer to said need.

  • Maintain a single source of truth. Avoid multiple versions of the roadmap circulating, which will inevitably lead to confusion about the true priorities for the product.

  • Be transparent about uncertainty. Use appropriate time horizons, and clearly communicate that items further out are directional rather than committed. It may be useful to specifically label parts of the timeline to make this abundantly clear - for example, instead of specifying completion due dates or quarters when work will start, have categories like “now”, “soon”, and “someday”.

  • Treat the roadmap as a strategic communication tool, not a fixed plan. Change is expected and healthy - the goal is to make informed decisions about those changes (rather than prevent them entirely) and ensure stakeholders are fully aware of the current state of the roadmap (to properly manage expectations).

  • Roadmaps are just as much about what is high priority as what is low priority. When individuals can see all the highly important work above their specifically-requested item, it is easier for them to understand why their “urgent” need is indeed not so urgent after all.