Product Roadmap What It Is And Why It Matters

If you’re in a business and you have product offerings, you need to develop a product roadmap. Essentially, a product roadmap helps businesses in linking short-term efforts to long-term business goals. This makes it easy for businesses to keep their teams moving in the same direction.

In very basic terms, a product roadmap is an action plan that aligns the goals that a business has for a product or a project and shows a clear document that outlines the vision, priorities, direction, and progress that a product goes through overtime.

Though product roadmaps show clearly what a company is creating, they also help those who look at them understand why those products are being developed. As such, the items that appear on the roadmap need to be linked to the existing product strategy. Product roadmaps aren’t cast on stones, they should be flexible enough to accommodate changes in customer preferences and the business environment.

Why Businesses Need Product Roadmaps?

Companies use roadmaps to build consensus among employees on how to grow their products and foster collaboration. Product roadmaps come in different forms for varying audiences. For instance, product development teams can use them to organize their day-to-day basis to build processes and operations to meet release targets and achieve milestones.

On the other hand, business executives need the roadmaps in order to focus on employee efforts and ensure that they support the broad goals that a company has. As such, their roadmaps will show progress towards these goals over time.

Businesses can also develop roadmaps for sales teams to support sales conversions by focusing on new product features and benefits to customers. At the same time, businesses can develop their customer roadmaps to create excitement about what’ll be coming next. Such roadmaps should be easy to read, and visually appealing. The idea is to give customers a general view of features that the new product will have and the problems they will solve.

If you’re developing a product and wonder whether you need in order to create a product roadmap, here’s why having it really matters in the business:

1. Prioritizing Business Investments

Product roadmaps help businesses in identifying priority areas where they need to focus their investments based on clearly defined drivers. In every stage of the planning process, the focus is given to important things including product drivers, customer needs, or technology investments.

When they have a clear roadmap, product development teams will be prompted to identify, develop, or implement the most critical aspects of their first product. This enables them to spend the resources available in the best way possible. Product development teams also find it easy to make choices and tradeoff decisions that correspond with company objectives when they have a clear product roadmap guiding the development process.

2. Gathering Feedback from Customers

Most customers would love to see your product roadmap even before your product is fully developed. As such, creating one and sharing it with them will enable you to generate great conversations with them and in the process, gather valuable feedback about a new product. With this feedback, you’ll be able to tell whether the product you’re developing addresses their needs, meets their expectations, or whether they prefer something else.

Developing and sharing roadmaps for new products with customers is also a great way to demonstrate to them how your business uses their feedback by adding new features to your offerings. You can take this further by adding initiatives to the roadmap based on their comments and requests.

3. Setting Realistic Targets

In most instances, businesses have to set performance targets based on the competitive landscape of the industry they are in. For instance, experience curves come in handy in setting industry-based targets. Knowing that a winning product strategy can’t be everything to everyone enables product development teams to set objectives that enable them to either lead, maintain the status quo, or lag behind competitors in specific areas. Having a product roadmap makes it easier and ensures companies set more realistic, but competitive targets.

4. Tracking Product Development Progress

A product roadmap serves as an artifact that shows business executives and product development teams the progress that has been made towards meeting the set goals and milestones. For customers, it provides an idea of the direction that a company is taking to create products that respond to their needs.

Product road mapping also plays a critical role in keeping product development teams focused on the goal. The reality is that there are many routes that product development can take. However, when the ultimate destination is unclear, employees can spend time working on projects haphazardly and not achieve anything. Having a clear vision of a product enables these teams to stay on track and achieve the set goal or target.

5. Customizing Communication to Different Stakeholders

There are different stakeholders in a business – they include customers, top management, sales teams, as well as product development teams. Each of these stakeholders has varying information needed throughout the product development process. Rather than bombard them with the same information, product roadmaps make it possible for companies to customize information for each audience based on their information needs.  

The best way to do this is to create two versions of roadmaps – an internal version and an external version. By doing this, you’re able to retain top product secrets and boring details of the public eye while sharing the aspects that offer real value to customers with the public. Often, the external version of your roadmap will communicate the product vision. The internal version is a tactical document that outlines the operational details and the order that the development process will take to deliver the new product.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re developing a physical product or software, you need to develop a roadmap to guide you through the process. A product roadmap offers numerous benefits to a business including getting buy-in from key stakeholders, focusing available resources, and keeping the development team focused on the bigger goal.