A product roadmap will guide you through the product management process, which is notoriously known as a detail-oriented discipline. Getting into the weeds is part of the product manager job description, but one should never get lost there. Product managers must use tools such as a product roadmap to lift their heads out of the day-to-day operations of the product development process to take a larger look at where they are in context.

Product roadmaps are essential to product management because they allow the product manager and anyone involved in the project to see the big picture. We’ve created a product roadmap example and template to explain how they work, but first, let’s define what goes into creating a product roadmap so that it’s as clear and useful as possible for product development.

What Is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap is a product development tool that captures the product vision and strategy and serves as a guide for executing that product strategy, while getting internal stakeholders aligned, facilitating discussions around product features, and aiding communication to external stakeholders and customers. It’s all laid out in such a way for it to be easily understood by everyone in the product development team.

The product roadmap also called the product development roadmap, is the responsibility of the product manager, both to create and to use as a communication tool. This sets the proper expectations while sharing the product overview and highlighting important features to come.

Product managers use software tools like ProjectManager to create product roadmaps. ProjectManager is equipped with Gantt charts, kanban boards, task lists and project calendars to help you create and manage your product roadmap. Get started with ProjectManager for free.

Key Elements of a Product Roadmap

As stated above, as a product manager you’ll need to know how to create and manage a product roadmap. To do this, you’ll need to understand what are the essential elements of a product roadmap.

• Product Strategy: The term product strategy refers to the planning process of researching the market, setting business goals, creating a product vision and developing a product based on customer and stakeholder feedback.
• Product Vision: Just as with a company’s vision statement, your product vision describes what your company intends to achieve with this product, what is the core value proposition, and the main product benefits.
• Goals & Objectives: In product management, goals are the high-level statements that give a larger context to the product in terms of what it’s trying to achieve. Objectives are more specific and result in tangible deliverables such as product features.
• Strategic Initiatives: Strategic initiatives are a group of related user stories that are needed to complete specific goals. There can be several initiatives being executed simultaneously in a product roadmap.
• Product Releases: A product release is the launch of new features, completion of user stories, epics and other additions to an existing product.
• User Stories: In product management, a user story is simply a product feature, only described from the user’s perspective so that the product development team better understands what needs to be done.
• Epics: An epic is a user story that is too complex to be done in a single product release. Epics need to be broken down into several user stories that are easier to develop by the product team.
• Timeline: One of the main purposes of a product roadmap is to track progress. That’s why product roadmaps should include a timeline that defines due dates and milestones.
• Product Development Status: Your product roadmap should have status indicators and metrics to determine the percentage of completion of tasks, goals, user stories and epics.

How to Create a Product Roadmap

Now let’s put these product road-mapping concepts into action. Here’s how to create a product roadmap in 4 steps.

1. Define Your Product Strategy

To define your product strategy approach, you’ll need to factor in your company’s strategic planning, product vision, customer value proposition, business objectives and stakeholder requirements.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

A product roadmap can be created for a variety of audiences such as stakeholders, executives or the product development team. Product managers must understand their target audience to include the information that’s most relevant for them.

3. Define Product Features

You’ll need to define your product features, starting with the minimum viable product with the most basic features, and adding more features from there. Then classify those features as user stories or epics and add them to the product backlog.

4. Create a Timeline for Product Releases

Now that you’ve identified the user stories that need to be completed, organize them on a timeline by priority level. Identify any strategic initiatives and task dependencies.

A product management software such as ProjectManager can greatly speed up this process and give you more control over your product roadmap. Get started with ProjectManager for free.

Product Roadmap Best Practices

• Set Measurable Goals and Objectives: Set goals and objectives that can be measured using KPIs, OKRs and other performance management metrics.
• Promote Collaboration and Communication: There are likely many teams, and certainly lots of different people and departments, that are all working together to create the product. Therefore, the product roadmap must facilitate that collaboration through clear communication of the overall strategy of the product and keep everyone on the same page.
• Align with Corporate Objectives: The high-level view of a product roadmap is designed to dovetail with the overall objectives of the corporation to make sure the product is aligned with where the company is going. (Read more about aligning projects to strategy.)
• Leave Time to Learn and Research: This graphic view of the schedule, which is laid out from left to right, must also include whatever research and learning curve is needed to make sure everyone on the product team is knowledgeable about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

Product Roadmap Example

Here’s an example of what a product roadmap looks like. The product roadmap shown in the image was created using a Gantt chart. Gantt charts are a great planning tool that allows product managers to create interactive product roadmaps.

With ProjectManager’s Gantt Charts, you can create product roadmaps to keep track of user stories, epics, resources, your team’s workload and much more! Get started today with our free 30-day trial.

Product Roadmap Template

If you feel like using a product roadmap template might be too complex for you, we have a nice alternative to help you create one. Our product development template has a product roadmap sample. All you need to do is easily customize its fields to reflect your product development process.

Why Use a Product Roadmap?

It should be obvious that a product roadmap is a great tool to make sure that everyone knows what the product is about, how it will be executed and who is doing what. But it never hurts to reinforce the benefits for a little extra motivation.

Fast Communication

The product roadmap is a great way to quickly communicate the product strategy and goals at a high level and with visual clarity that makes it easy to understand for everyone. This includes managing the expectations of stakeholders as well as communicating with all other important parties. A product roadmap is a living document and should be updated regularly, so it’s a great tool to send to anyone in the product group or customers to keep them up-to-date on progress.

Keeps It Grounded

As constraints and variables occur, the product roadmap keeps your decision-making tethered to the goals and objectives of the product, so you can prioritize tasks and make decisions quickly and accurately.

ProjectManager is the Best Product Roadmap Tool

There are many tools that can help one create a product roadmap, from the simple to the more dynamic. Because the product roadmap is a visual tool, though, it’s not something that can be slapped together on a Word document or even a spreadsheet.

However, a spreadsheet can be a good place to collect all the information needed to go into the product roadmap. There are software solutions that can take that raw data and import it to display on a visual timeline. ProjectManager imports spreadsheets and instantly creates a Gantt chart, which is a visual timeline.

The Gantt chart will display all the milestones of the product, the tasks will be points on the timeline with lines across that timeline to indicate the duration of the tasks. If any tasks are dependent on one another, they can be linked. All of which offer a graphic and clear overview of the product.

For a different visual expression of the product, there are Kanban boards. Kanban is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing where columns are created and under which tasks that are related are collected, which are called Kanban cards. These cards can then be moved across the board to indicate where they are in the process.

Both product roadmaps are features of ProjectManager, but they’re only part of the tools provided by the software. With ProjectManager, the product roadmaps are online and easy to convert and share. They are living documents that are updated in real-time and offer collaborative tools to keep teams communicating effectively. With the real-time dashboard, the data can be filtered and made into charts and graphs. It’s like having a product roadmap fueled with octane.

The product roadmap is one of the many essential documents that help start and keep product management on track. ProjectManager is a cloud-based project management software that has features to create product roadmaps in a visual style that works with your product. Plus, it offers tools that take that product roadmap to the next level. See how it can help you by taking this free 30-day trial.