Build a Product Roadmap

Your Challenge

• Product or application owners and managers are tasked with breaking down overarching goals into manageable and plannable tasks to be executed by different delivery teams.
• They are also expected to build a roadmap that will communicate components of those plans to various stakeholders to obtain buy-in, validate strategy, and manage the product lifecycle.
• While planning is imperative to development, long-term planning can prove to be wasteful when strategic elements are yet to be validated or requirements are subject to change.
• Stakeholders have drastically different communication requirements, priorities, and technical understanding of development, which demands different views of the product.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• Projects can learn from products. While clear-cut distinctions exist, many aspects of product-based delivery will benefit your projects, including dynamic, strategic, and flexible product roadmaps.
• Consider roadmapping as a spectrum. Don’t treat roadmaps as either tactical, technical, detailed, and committed or strategic, goal-based, high-level, and flexible. Use elements of both to build the ideal roadmap.
• How flexible do you need to be? Shorter delivery cycles and greater volatility require more flexibility to drive value with your roadmap.

Impact and Result

• Determine the characteristics of your product and its disposition and also the internal and external constraints of your organization to establish the appropriate type of roadmap you should use.
• Establish the communication objectives of the roadmap: Who is the audience? What language will you use to describe the future of your application?
• Build the structure of your roadmap and define the standards for the artifacts that will populate it.