Creating Your First Product Roadmap

There is no single template — so where do you start?

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Photo by Slidebean on Unsplash

Suppose that you’ve just joined a company or launched your minimum lovable product to market. You’re beginning to receive fantastic feedback and validation from your clients. Congratulations!

You are now being bombarded with feature requests your customers, partners and suppliers. They are all asking you when you can deliver their requested features, yet some of these features seem less priority than others— so, what do you do?

Perhaps its time to communicate through a product roadmap. Sounds simple enough, but the process is much more nuanced than you first think!

Provided below is a guide to creating your first product roadmap, which you’ll see is art mixed with science.

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Why creating roadmaps is so challenging

Even the most experienced product managers can often find it difficult to consistently articulate a roadmap to their internal and external audiences. Reasons include:

1. Competitive and market landscape constantly changing — this results in changes in what you build in the short to medium term. Take, for example, COVID-19 and the immediate shift to remote-first tasks.

2. Clients or partners depend heavily on what you are building—e.g., they’ve requested a feature, and you’ve set some expectation that it will be due ‘soon’ but haven’t delivered it yet.

3. Feature ideas come from all over the place— for example, your sales team may push your product and engineering teams to change your priorities due to an impending sales opportunity that cannot be won without a specific feature released.

4. Your management team or board demand concrete timeframes — but you are unable to commit to any because your development team cannot provide appropriate estimates on deliverables due to complexity or scope.

5. Its purpose differs between internal and external audiences —internally, a roadmap is used to build consensus and gain alignment on priorities and goals. Externally, it is often perceived as a release plan containing dates for when certain features will be released.

Whatever the case may be, it can often be overwhelming for a new product manager to come up with a roadmap that appeases multiple stakeholders and priorities.

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What isn’t a roadmap…

There are many opinions on what a roadmap should and shouldn’t be, but many would agree that a roadmap is not:

• A wish list of functionality requested by your partners or clients

• A list of features to close ‘urgent’ deals in the sales pipeline.

• A way to force commitment on timelines in a delivery plan

• An exercise conducted in sole isolation of the product team

• Something you throw together last minute, the day before a workshop

Perhaps Teresa Torres says this best:

We need to let go of the idea that we can enumerate a list of features that represents what we’ll do in the future. This idea is absurd. Rather than sharing feature lists with the rest of the company, we should be communicating how we will make decisions. — Teresa Torres

Instead, roadmaps should be considered very carefully in strategic alignment with your organisational objectives, business strategy, and overall product vision defined per product within your overall portfolio of one or many products.

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What is a roadmap…

Here’s a handful of definitions from fellow product leaders and companies that specialise in enabling Product functions to create roadmaps from scratch:

• “A high-level, visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of the product offering over time, communicating what you are building and why — ProductPlan.”

• “A statement of intent — it communicates both the short and long term initiatives that the team will work on and tells you the how and the why behind the product organisation strategy — Roadmunk.”

• “A high-level strategic overview of a significant business initiative... used to manage the development of a new product or the execution of a company-wide project — Airtable.”

• “…it describes the path from where you are now, to realizing the vision you have spelt out in your product strategy.” — Roman Pilcher.

• “…they are guides that describe the steps you need to take to move from your current location to your desired destination” — Clement Kao.

You should see some recurring themes in the quotes above. These are the following:

1. A Strategic artefact or statement of intent.

2. A depiction of short vs long term goals.

3. A description of the desired set of steps to achieve both short and long-term goals.

But how does one actually go about creating a roadmap from scratch? Well, let’s consider asking some more basic questions first before we dive into actually writing up your first roadmap. After all, a roadmap without alignment in strategy or shared goals is simply a wish list that is not worth the paper it's written on.

Let’s begin!

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Step 1 — Confirm business strategy and objectives.