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Build a Product Roadmap
Create a roadmap that suits your objectives, the characteristics of your product, and the environment it lives in.
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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.
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to understand the key challenges and factors that influence the objectives and audience of a product roadmap.
1. Know your product
Understand the factors that impact the different approaches to product roadmapping and determine roadmap ownership, audience, and communication objectives.
2. Build your roadmap
Build the structure and define the components that will populate your roadmap.
Guided Implementations
This guided implementation is a four call advisory process.
Guided Implementation #1 - Know your product
Call #1 - Run through our diagnostic tool to determine the best approach to product roadmapping and other attributes you should consider.
Call #2 - Discuss your audience, what you need to communicate, and who should be accountable for the roadmap.
Guided Implementation #2 - Build your roadmap
