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Product Roadmapping is a strategic document that outlines the vision, direction, and progress of a product over time. The primary purpose of a product roadmap is to tie a product’s vision with a company’s business objectives. At the same time, the detailed product roadmap keeps everyone in the team aligned and headed in the same direction.
Product road mapping is an agile and continuous process throughout the product’s lifecycle to address the evolving needs of the business and market.
What Is A Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap is a result of strategic planning. It documents both the executive strategy and overall goals of a product. However, what specific details go in the product roadmap depends on who you are building the roadmap for.
As a product roadmap example, software development teams will outline detailed execution steps for the team, target release dates, and milestones. The product road mapping chart developed for senior executives will focus on the higher-level details on features and functions and how product milestones fit the overall company goals and metrics. If the product roadmap is for external stakeholders like customers or investors, it should provide details of new features, milestones, and future direction of the product to get them interested.
Product Managers often lead the process of building a roadmap, which is often called Roadmapping. They take inputs from various teams such as market research, production, engineering, sales, and executives.
Taking information from all the cross-functional teams ensures that the product roadmap is grounded in reality and has taken into account the interests, needs, and capabilities of all the stakeholders involved. It also helps build consensus and alignment amongst all the stakeholders to achieve broader business goals.
What are the necessary components of a product roadmap?
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Product Vision
This is the foundation of the product roadmap. Outline details of the product that you are making, its functionalities, and your short and long-term vision for it.
Pro Tip: Perform deep analytics by talking to internal and external stakeholders.
Assess customer feedback by taking into account the sales team’s observations, market and competitor share, and defining customer personas. Share this vision across various teams and stakeholders to align everyone.
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Goals
They are time-bound and measurable targets, with defined metrics for determining success. They are included in a product roadmap to show the critical milestones which need to be accomplished to make the product vision a reality.
The above Product Roadmap template can be used to showcase how product development can be divided into stages. It can be used to highlight the product objectives, project activities, and project deliverables at each phase of product development.
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Initiatives
Strategic initiatives represent high-level objectives that need to be completed to achieve the goals. It is advisable to bucket your feature development and releases under these significant initiatives to show how product development relates to the strategy.
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Time
Dates or time frame for a specific goal or feature to finish. Timelines mentioned in a product roadmap usually act as guidelines for the product teams.
The above PowerPoint Template can be used to highlight a weekly product development roadmap in an easy-to-understand format.
Gantt charts are a widely used planning tool.
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Releases
A release is the launch of a new product, feature, or functionality.
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Status
Status of the different goals, initiatives, development, etc., concerning time.
The below PowerPoint template highlights the product deliverables status and other important information.
A quick check, if you have built a useful product roadmap, is:
- It evolves and changes with the product and market requirements
- It acts as a communication tool between all people involved
- It indicates exact goals and ties them to the business objectives
Collection of Product Roadmap Templates Examples
There are many formats of building product roadmaps. The most critical factor in building a roadmap is the type of audience you are making it for – whether the roadmap is for internal teams (production, supply chain, marketing) or external stakeholders (customers, investors). To give you a better idea, let’s look into different types of roadmaps.
Example 1:
The product roadmap template below is an example of road mapping for external stakeholders like Investors, as it gives a high-level view of the product; a strategic outlook of a short-term and long-term product strategy to influence customers and investors. They can see how your product plans to evolve, listing both functionalities, and the modules developed.
Example 2:
The strategic roadmap below showcases planning once the product hits the market. Visual representation shows activities planned at the various stages of adoption of the product life cycle.
Example 3:
Below is another example from the Product Roadmap templates collection, which is often used by product development, testing, and marketing teams. The roadmap template below shows a release plan for new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in the upcoming months. Usually, release roadmaps represent a 3 to 6 months product development window. It is vital to develop this Roadmap slide template in alignment with all the stakeholders involved like Development, Testing, and Marketing, etc. to ensure consensus around the release.
Example 4:
The Roadmapping below shows the product development work across different functions and teams. This Roadmap PowerPoint template is a useful visualization for the product managers, project managers, and internal teams to assess the product/ project progress and measure against their goals.
Example 5:
The Roadmap PowerPoint template below gives a detailed status of product development at any given point in time. It focuses specifically on what stage of development the product is in at the present moment. The Product Manager needs to continually update the roadmap to show the product progress to all the stakeholders at a glance.
Example 6:
One of the product roadmap templates below is for both internal and external stakeholders. It highlights the high-level goals and objectives of the product. Product managers can use this Roadmap PowerPoint template to showcase the broader goals and objectives of the product.
Conclusion
In any product-based company, products, or portfolios of products are the only source of revenue. This makes developing a product roadmap an irreplaceable tool for any product-based business. Though Roadmapping is a continuous and time-consuming process, investing time in it is critical. Make use of ready-made templates to save time to create your product roadmap. We have developed a library of product roadmap templates and strategy roadmap templates to help you save time. Check out our library of Product Roadmap templates.
Here is a free editable roadmap PowerPoint template for you to try.
