Product Roadmap: Why and How

Do we really need a product roadmap? Why? How do we go about creating a product roadmap? What are a few of the best practices? This article sheds light on these ‘planning questions’ which probably every product team has come across. Especially agile teams. Let’s quickly review first what is a product roadmap and then review top three concerns and their solutions when it comes to building it.

Product roadmap is typically a visual plan for depicting the vision, plan and direction for the short term to long term features, from product development standpoint. It also works as a guideline for costs estimation and budgeting. Its target audience is comprised of a variety of stakeholders including but not limited to the senior leadership team, customers, partners, domain SMEs, sales and marketing, engineering teams. It is created and maintained for shared understanding as well as ongoing feedback from various stakeholders. It can be arranged in many ways such as by features or by releases or by products/in a platform.

Now let’s look at some common concerns while building the same.

Concern #1: It seems to be a waste of time to spend time on building a long-term roadmap as we really do not have clarity on the features. Time is money!

The above-mentioned concern is very much a genuine one. Even though we know in theory we must…