One of the most asked questions in a product manager interviews. As a product manager we often work to prepare the product roadmap. The product roadmap is very important tool for your product's future. It shows the short term and long-term intentions of your product, aligned with company's vision.
There are lot of articles on the internet about how to prepare best product roadmap or guidelines for product roadmap. Here is my simple structure about how to come up with an excellent product roadmap for all upcoming product managers.
💎 Understand Organizational Goal: Before you start working on, don't forget to read the organizational vision. Generally, product roadmap is prepared for yearly basis (short term product roadmap) or 3-5 years (long term product roadmap). Your product roadmap should be aligned with the strategy of organization for the same timeline. If there are any strategy roadmap for product portfolios or overall strategy roadmap/technology roadmap - please get your hands on them. That will help you to gather information related to your product.
Ex: Assume that your organization launched an online hotel booking portal (like Airbnb) and for upcoming year the strategy is to increase user base or increase user engagement. So, the product roadmap should focus on the same. You may choose to develop an app, setting up inventory or listing of hotels in your portal, identification of marketing channel, target user segment, target market etc. will be your part of product roadmap.
In an oil and gas sector company, if organization decide to reduce the carbon footprint globally, I can't just prepare a product roadmap which has a huge impact in carbon footprint thought it might increase the profitability.
💎 Gather the Requirements: Products exist to solve customer problem/pain points. You need to think from customer perspective while collecting all the requirements. This is very important. Be very specific. The requirement might be different for different customer segment. The roadmap is very much connected with the target customer segment. Connect with different stakeholders, departments to know as much as possible. It is a new launch. So, your target is to make the launch successful with error as much as low possible (In am assuming in the first iteration there will be some issues obviously).
💎 Review with Management: It is good to review the requirements with the management team. You need to explain the reason of taking or considering each of the requirements. Show the benefits to them (better to put the benefits in graphical format). If you have data to support your decision, please keep that handy. The priority list might be updated. Don't forget to seek the sign-off after the review meeting.
💎 Put a Timeline into them: Put a timeline to each of the requirements. Your requirements are already prioritized at this level. So, putting a timeline will give a perfect visualization, what and when you will launch at the market.
💎 Set up Success Metrics: Don't forget to set up the success metrics. What you are implementing, that needs to be validated. How will you know that you are moving towards the right direction? There needs to be some benchmark or standard KPIs. Also review the metrics with your key stakeholders.
💎 Communication: Once you have a roadmap ready, it needs to share with different stakeholders. Now there are development team, marketing team, business stakeholders and so on. Depend on the stakeholder type, you might need to tweak the product roadmap a little bit.
Here are some versions of your product roadmap when you share it to different stakeholders:
🔸 Product Release Roadmap: This might be useful for the customer operations team. They need to know the detailed release roadmap. The release roadmap contains more details about the release plan on top of the actual product roadmap. The customer ops are the first level of support and first level of customer contact. So, they need to be aware what's going on. They are very much interested on product release dates, feature, benefits etc.
🔸 Sprint Level Product Roadmap: This is important for development team. I am assuming that the company is following agile development model. Each sprint, what are the feature development teams needs to work on, that is the main priority here. You need to decompose all the requirements at feature level or functional level, that will help the development team.
🔸 Strategic Product Roadmap: This is useful for business stakeholders. They are interested in the high-level product roadmap with the timeline. Also, the cost benefit analysis for each of the item present in the roadmap.
🔸 Feature Level Product Roadmap: This is useful for the sales and marketing team. At the feature level product roadmap, please mention the benefit associated with each feature. The marketing team will use them in their line of work.
The above list is just some examples which I have seen. But based on the stakeholder type, you might need to tweak the main product roadmap a little. But don't change any item in your roadmap if you get a suggestion from stakeholder after some time. The roadmap is a sacred document which was reviewed and signed-off by all. So don't change anything if a new stakeholder comes up. If require, have a meeting with all the stakeholders who were involved in the discussion at the beginning.
There might be scenario when you might need to update the product roadmap after a certain point of time.
Below are some factors which might impact your product roadmap:
➡️ If government come up with some regulation which is impacting your product, you need to prioritize that.
➡️ Customer expectation change suddenly. There might be new trends which customer is preferring more than the existing available products. You might need to adapt that.
➡️ Organizational goal change suddenly (This is rare)
Note:
👉 Don’t forget to mention the Risks, Dependencies, Assumptions in the product roadmap. We work with multiple internal/external teams, distributed infrastructure, several technologies. It is natural to have Risks, Dependencies, Assumptions.
👉 Keep clear communication with all the stakeholders. If you have multiple versions, don’t forget to share the latest version with all the stakeholders.
Hope the above guidelines are useful for preparing an excellent product roadmap. Don't forget to comment if you know any other best practices. Happy Learning 😊
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