How to Build the Product Roadmap That Benefits Your Product Development in 2022

We have come to realize that in recent times, more and more companies are looking to publish their own roadmaps for the products that they are trying to sell, in order to have a higher rate of connection with their customers.

A lot of companies publish product roadmaps for as many products as they can, because this is the ultimate win-win solution, for both your product as well as your brand.

Why is this increasingly becoming a trend?

Well, firstly because of the age of the internet. As we get more and more connected with each other without leaving the comfort of our homes, it becomes extremely easy to keep our channels of communication open. Especially since in recent unprecedented times, our channels of communication have hopped online sooner than we could have ever imagined.

Other than the means of communication, the need of the hour to simply communicate also becomes ingrained in our product life cycle. Having open channels of communication will help you:

Keep a steady stream of thoughts and commitment, and a solid plan to allow for this stream; and
Keep your customers in the know - making them feel valued as a stakeholder in your company.

Having a well thought out and established product roadmap is absolutely crucial for the success of a product. The presence of one can really cement the path to greatness for you and your brand! After all, this product is the result of your blood sweat and tears - and we cannot have anything less than a dynamite tool to plan out your product development process.

If you are a customer of Hellonext, you are already enjoying the fruits of the labor that your roadmap provides for you. If you aren’t one yet, and need a little convincing, let's get right down to it, shall we?

What is a Roadmap?

A product roadmap is a simple device, that would allow product managers to communicate with the product teams, the upper management as well as the customers themselves - with the optics, pathway and your prerogatives of and towards the product that you are hoping to build.

A product roadmap will almost be like too sentient a being of your product - which will grow and reform over time.

It is the most essential component of the product management process.

We have to understand that a product roadmap will be the one walking stick that product managers can lean on through their progress towards the goal - at the end of the day, it is a document that will relay to your business as well as the clientele the direction that your product will take.

A product roadmap will bring clarity by painting a picture of how the product manager will plan to build a product and acquire the budget as well as the strategy for its development. It is, quite simply put, a plan - for how your product will aim to meet your business goals as well as the strategies that are involved in building it.

It might be important to consider adding information points of value for any questions that might arise out of the actual building of your product. And since we understand that it might not be relatively easy to foresee all changes that we could expect along the way, it might be a good idea for having the product roadmap retain enough flexibility to accommodate such changes in the future.

There are multiple kinds of product roadmaps that you can make use of, namely:

Waterfall Roadmap
Agile Roadmap

While a waterfall product roadmap will lay out the long term commitment to build a specific feature of the product in a set timeline, it is the agile roadmap that will be able to accommodate those aforementioned changes that can occur during the product development processes. It will work itself towards short-term product goals that would be pliant in the face of customer value goals too.

How to build a Roadmap?

You have to understand that building a product roadmap will usually be a team effort where collective brainstorming and discussion will lead you towards the best suited product roadmap for your product specifically and later, for your business as a whole.

To build a roadmap, the product owner should consider the market trajectory, value propositions and engineering constraints. It is after understanding these variables that the roadmap must be ultimately constructed with initiatives and timelines. It might also be a good idea to bring in all the stakeholders of the product prior to building the roadmap itself. During these meetings, ideas and suggestions from all stakeholders should be taken into consideration and noted down.

You can also work towards building a series of roadmaps - depending on your team fragmentation. By this all we mean is that for the executive team, it might be easier to build a roadmap that shows the general trajectory of the product for insights into how to build a strategy for your product. Whereas, for individual development teams, it will be advisable to build roadmaps that will show each lateral with respect to your product’s movement through the development process.

Step 1: Ascertain the Goals of your Project

Before you sit down to build your product roadmap, you have to first make sure you and your team have clarity on the end-goal. Depending upon whether you are planning on an entirely new product or if it is simply a redefined feature of an existing one, your roadmap is going to be structured accordingly.

For instance, in case of a new product, it might be useful to look at whether the minimum viable product or the MVP will be able to go through development and production within a profitable time period or whether it requires a longer walk through with your production and development teams as well as the stakeholders of the company.

Step 2: Prioritize clarity of thought

When you and your team, the investors included, are all on the same page, you might find the development process to be smoother. For this to happen, you have to ensure that everybody is on the same page and alignment towards the same end goal.

It will be necessary to keep your roadmap simple and precise, without the usage of jargons and technical terms. While we know that having a detailed plan might ensure you towards the steps of success, however you might find this approach leading you to possible miscommunication or misconceptions. A roadmap that shows clarity of thought will help the employees stay motivated towards the same goal.

Step 3: Visualize your approach

Once you have decided upon the goal of your product, you can begin to map your user stories. Mapping out your ideas will help your team to brainstorm ideas in a holistic manner that removes the requirement for one of those dry and boring word dumps on paper.

Try to visualize your approach from the perspective of the end user which will be the turning point for identifying requirements for the administrator himself.

A roadmap will be exceptionally helpful in such a case since it will let you carry out your task lists without any hitch!

Step 4: Map out the feature sets that you want to incorporate along with the core product

Building your product roadmap should include steps to take into consideration for the features that you wish to install in your product itself. When you are creating a SaaS product, these features must include additional related characteristics.

It will also be necessary to plan out the priority of your related features and how immediate it has to be developed during your project trajectory. If a particular feature is more essential to your core product, it goes without saying that it will need to have its development process put to production right as the core product is being processed or even before the core product is being developed - depending upon your needs as well as your goals.

Step 5: Set achievable goals and targets

Now, it is time to decide on your timeline and the targets that have to be met with each time period. Here, you can go ahead and use something as simple as an excel sheet. Make sure that you are compartmentalizing your targets and achievable goals, so that with each goal that is met, you and your team can enjoy a feeling of accomplishment.

This will also make it easy for you to explain your timelines as well as the resources (in terms of the monetary requirements) that you will present in front of your stakeholders. It will give them a sign of assurance that they will be able to see for themselves all the tangible and gradual progression of the project that they have invested themselves in.

If you are going to undertake a large project, you can go onto five levels in your Roadmap or timeline. However, in case of a smaller project, simply 3 levels will suffice.

It is up to your judgment on how large or complicated your project is - and you can set up your level and timeline accordingly.

Step 6: Spend some time on a Visionary Board

Now by this time we are sure that you understand we love setting up our ideas visually. By putting everything together on a visionary board that is accessible to all your stakeholders, you are giving them the opportunity to track the progress of your product’s development.

Flowing through the agile approach for product road mapping, you can even use this board to test out your product at every level and status completion, without having to wait for the entire product to get completed. This will also be handy in giving you a general idea of the kind of resources that you can use or even dispose off and even when you need to add any more.

The agile roadmap will provide you with an adaptive approach for any unexpected changes that come your way and deal with them to make the product a success!

Step 7: Revise and Review!

One thing we have to establish is that no one is perfect. And that’s okay! Not everyone can be godly at everything that they create! Sometimes there are things that come up that are completely out of the blue and unpredictable. But it's all okay - because this will all account for your process.

All you have to do is to soldier through these and motivate your team to meet deadlines.

However, even that cannot be a guarantee - the best means could simply be to review and try to fine-tune your roadmap each time you face a hardship. Try to understand the core reason for any hitch, and whether it will leave any short term or any long term effects on the product. Would you say you are in possession of the resources that would be required to meet these challenges?

Your roadmap does not have to begin perfectly, but it can be molded through the timeline to ensure that your product turns out exactly the way you envision it.

Remember, at the end of the day, your team will not include only the prominent stakeholders; but also your prod and development team, your designers and others. When you have a Roadmap tool, you give everybody equal opportunity to talk (even if amongst themselves) to resolve a situation that just seems very easy to a fresh set of eyes!

Once you have curated all input and your decisions about what it is that you will want to add to your Roadmap, the next step is to simply create it!

Whilst you’re at the reviewing stage, try and set the stage when it comes to communicating your roadmap. And do you wonder who the roadmap will be communicated to? From your engineering team to your managing seniors and all your stakeholders, including your customer base.

A roadmap will help you manage not only the product, but also manage expectations.

In fact we would argue that it should be made into a practice to communicate your roadmap to on a regular and periodic time frame. You need to keep the business and stakeholders informed of the updates on a regular basis.

Other than the communication that you relay, it is also similarly important to maintain your roadmap like the day you first met it. Say you’ve set monthly or bi-monthly goals - you should have them documented on the roadmap and ticked off in case they have been achieved or commented upon in case they haven’t. In this way you can go back and reassess scenarios that have not been realized in the way that you sought them out to be. It’s not even about not achieving your set targets, sometimes, as you work on your project you will realize there were complexities or non-conformances that you simply did not anticipate while working through your roadmap design. You can go back and re-evaluate the scope of the complexity and whether it remains worth pursuing.

Lastly, build some time into your schedule to also update the roadmap for on-going items. For large firms with a higher number of milestones to fulfill, you can make it a target to update your roadmap quarterly or biannually, depending on the culture at your company. For early stage brands, it will make sense to revisit and revise as many as once every fortnight.

Having said that, we will advise you to have a set of blinders in place to keep you in tune with the ultimate goal of your product. While it may be attractive to reevaluate your roadmap as you build your product, we will ask you to err on the side of caution and neither be deterred nor distracted by a new product or a new feature set that seems to be in trend at the time you are building your product. It helps to keep a finger on the pulse, but not for so long that you completely end up moving away from the initial plan!

How does Roadmap help you in Product Development?

Due to the collaborative effort put into a roadmap, you will be able to provide yourself, your team and your end-point stakeholders with a thorough understand of:

What task you are currently pursuing
What goal you wish to achieve with the aforesaid task
What your path towards achieving aforesaid goal is.

To elaborate on the above, having a roadmap will help advertise your business’ vision. Using roadmaps is a much more modern method of working through your business goals, unlike, say project planning - which is simply archaic and a dogmatic procedure.

When you work through a Roadmap, you are able to be so much more flexible and provide a picture that is more cohesive, as well as visually appealing. This makes your life much easier because you are said to be able to process data that is visually presented more easily that raw data. Roadmaps are a suitable tool for several types of businesses and can be used in numerous different ways. Whether you're plotting out a marketing strategy, outlining the development of a new product, or even changing the way governments communicate, roadmapping is indispensable for accomplishing your goals. In simpler words, any organization looking to continue flourishing should take advantage of roadmapping.

Your business goal is a long marathon and you are going to be running on a journey with your team. You should be clear what your path is and why you are running on such a long journey. You need to know what direction you are headed towards, and when you intend on reaching there.

There are numerous ways to present your roadmap - consider checking out our services at Hellonext. We take pride in our work in keeping it clear and concise. Our platform will be able to provide your organization with a product roadmap that will help you excel, while staying disciplined and focused.

You will be amazed at the different ways that can be curated for your organization - all customized! Since you are going to be selling an excellent product to your customer base, you really do not want to give them a less-than-ideal situation with your roadmap tools. Check us out at Hellonext!

You can be assured that we will provide you with a service you will be proud of showing off that is customized in its entirety to showcase your brand and business values. What’s even better is that we boast of a zero tracking policy, so that you have ownership over your own data.

In conclusion, we want to say that having a roadmap is like having a map to the treasure chest. With trials and tribulations - you can reach the treasure chest eventually, but it sure will come handy to have a map to guide you, wouldn’t you say so ;-)

Try out our services at Hellonext, and have your own brand of treasure map for your precious product.