Blog 73: What is a Product Roadmap including when, who and where?
- Idea2Product2Business Team
- Jul 15, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
MRD, PRD, and TRD (refer blog 59 for MRD and PRD; blog 63 forTRD) will give us a good understanding of the why, what, where, who, when and how of our product idea.
The next step is to create the product roadmap. A product roadmap lists upcoming product features and functionalities mapped against a timeline.
- It breaks down the final deliverable into smaller milestones and tasks.
- Each task will be allocated to individuals with their respective roles and responsibilities.
- This roadmap makes it easy to update stakeholders on the progress of a specific feature. - Stakeholders can be internal and external.
- Internal stakeholders include leadership, developers, product team, marketing & sales.
- External stakeholders are customers and other key partners.
Product roadmap components
What: What features and functionalities to build?
Why: Why are we building this? (substantiated with data facts and data points on why we need to build this feature and functionality?)
When: When is the delivery or launch date of a particular feature and functionality?
Who: Who will build it? – their skills, roles, and responsibilities.
Where: Where will we build it? Platforms, technologies, external & internal resources etc.
Creating and updating the product roadmap is a continuous process. Like MRD, PRD, and TRD, a product roadmap is NOT a one-time documentation activity. Here some best practices to keep in mind.
· Keep it short and precise.
· Keep stakeholders in the loop (i.e., only the part that is relevant to them).
· Regularly measure and monitor its usage.
· Must encapsulate both short and long-term goals.
Below are two sample screenshots of the available software roadmap tools.
For a company following a product-led strategy (read blog 71: How do product-led and sales-led strategies differ?), the roadmap is essential. As it helps listing important features and functionalities. The roadmap also helps in prioritisation (refer blog 68: 5 popular product management prioritisation frameworks). According to a ProductPlan’s survey, 22 percent of product managers rate prioritisation as the biggest challenge they face.
At any given point of time, with the help of a product roadmap, we will know what the team is working on, why are they working on it and what is coming next.
Jump to blog 100 to refer to the overall product management mind map.
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All the best! 😊
