PRODUCT

ROADMAPS

Your Guide to Planning and

Selling Your Strategy

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PRODUCT ROADMAPS
Your Guide to Planning and Selling Your Strategy

Table of Contents
Why We Wrote This Book
Introduction: The Key Role of Product Managers
Tying Strategy to Your Roadmap
Planning and Prioritizing Your Roadmap
Building Your Roadmap
Communicating Your Roadmap
Summary
Why We Wrote This Book

At ProductPlan we’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most forward-thinking
product managers at the world’s most successful companies. We’ve had a chance to learn
along with them, and in turn we’re sharing that knowledge with you.

In my 15 years of product management and new product development, I’ve learned that
product vision, goal-driven decisions, customer evidence, ruthless prioritization, and clear
roadmap communication are essential for product success.

Product roadmaps are central to what you do as a product manager. But every week I
hear how product managers still struggle with planning, creating, and communicating a
compelling roadmap. After working with thousands of product teams and others involved
with creating, marketing and managing products, we’ve learned that there is no single
best way to roadmap.

Because there are so many different types of products, companies and product managers,
every roadmap is different. Regardless of whether or not your title is “product manager,”
your goal in developing your roadmap will always be the same: To clearly articulate where
you’re headed, and to show your strategy to your stakeholders in a compelling way. For
this reason, the lessons in this book will be helpful for those developing IT, technology,
engineering, and marketing roadmaps as well.

In this book we’ll talk about product roadmaps from two perspectives: The process
of discovering and communicating the roadmap, and the document you build to
communicate the roadmap. You’ll learn:

• The Key Role of Product Managers.

We’ll define what a product roadmap is and discuss the important role
you have as its steward.

• Tying Strategy to Your Roadmap.

We’ll discuss the importance of product vision and goals, and how these
tie back to the roadmap.

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  lanning and Prioritizing Your Roadmap.
• P
We’ll give you several practical approaches to thinking through the best
initiatives to put on your roadmap.

• B
 uilding Your Roadmap.
We’ll provide you tips and specific examples of roadmaps to inspire
your own roadmap process.

• Communicating Your Roadmap.

We’ll give you suggestions for how to work with your stakeholders
to achieve better alignment around the roadmap.

We’ve attempted to distill our learnings from other product managers. From that, we
hope that you can pick out a few new techniques and best practices to help you sell your
product vision and become a more effective product manager.

We’ll update this book, so please send suggestions and best practices you’ve learned.

We hope you enjoy it.

Jim Semick, Co-founder, ProductPlan

jim@productplan.com

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INTRODUCTION

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Introduction

The Key Role of Product Managers

Product managers are not created equal. The role each product manager plays depends
on many dynamics — the size of the company, the type of company, the type of product,
the stage of the product, and the culture of the company all dictate the role and
influence of the product manager.

As someone who is at the intersection of a lot of critical information in your organization,

you are in a unique position to define the success of your product. Even if your culture
is hierarchical and bureaucratic, you have significant influence over the choices your
organization makes during the lifecycle of the product. And a key part of that influence
is the roadmap you produce.

Characteristics of Successful Product Managers

For most product managers, their core role remains to set the long-term product
strategy and manage the roadmap. As part of this role they need to interact with a broad
range of stakeholders and departments to ensure their product’s success.

Key skills that effective product managers (and product teams in general) must bring to
the table:

1. Be transparent about your prioritization and roadmap process.

2.  Be able to say “no,” but explain why in terms that stakeholders understand.

3. B
 e a ruthless prioritizer while balancing the needs of customers & stakeholders.

4. Bring evidence-based decision-making to your communication.

5. Be metrics-driven when determining which opportunities to pursue.

The Purpose of Product Roadmaps

Let’s start by defining what a product roadmap is. And to do that, we will first explain
what a roadmap is not. A roadmap is not simply a list of features arranged in a somewhat
prioritized order, nor is it the product backlog.

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 A roadmap communicates the “why” behind
what you’re building. It’s a plan for your strategy.
A roadmap is a high-level visual summary that
maps out the vision and direction of your
product, often over time.

Your roadmap needs to convey the strategic direction for your product. And it has to tie
back to the strategy for the company.

The roadmap has several ultimate goals:

• Describe your vision and strategy

• Provide a guiding document for executing the strategy

• Get internal stakeholders in alignment

• Facilitate discussion of options and scenario planning

• Communicate progress and status of product development

• Help communicate your strategy to external stakeholders (including customers)

Note that we did not include specific resource requirements, man-hours, story points,
or other details. These details are typically reserved for the execution of the roadmap.
This information resides in your company’s project management solution.

It’s worth noting that roadmaps aren’t limited to products. Technology teams, marketing
teams, and others can benefit by communicating their plan with a roadmap. In this
book, we will provide several examples of roadmaps for other situations, including
technology, architecture, and marketing roadmaps. In a typical organization, these
roadmaps might be combined with the product roadmap to provide a complete view
of the strategic plan.

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The Roadmap Planning and Communication Process
It’s important for product managers to think of the roadmap as a living document rather
than a plan set in stone. It should be regularly discussed, prioritized, estimated, updated
and shared. Figure 1 illustrates the general process we’ll follow.

Roadmap Set Strategic

Communication Goals

Stakeholder
Engagement
Roadmap Gather
Proposal Initiatives and
Organize

Prioritize
Initiatives

FIG. 1 — Roadmap Planning and Communication Process

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TYING STRATEGY TO
YOUR ROADMAP

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Tying Strategy To Your Roadmap

The most important part of the roadmap process happens before you begin building
your roadmap. Setting the vision and strategic goals for the product — and, more
importantly, getting alignment on these with your stakeholders — is the first step to
creating a successful roadmap.

Top-Down Strategic Planning

We’ve found through hundreds of conversations with product managers that executives
prefer top-down strategic planning and communication, as shown in Figure 2. They
want to have productive discussions about future initiatives that tie directly to the
product vision and goals. This top-down discussion and planning has a greater chance of
producing a product roadmap that moves the needle for the company.

By sharing a high-level product vision, you can get the executive team, marketing,
support, engineering management and the rest of the organization on board with
the strategy.

Product managers have told us

their executive team simply doesn’t
care much about the details — what
duct Visio
ro n
they really care about is whether
P ct G
the proposed roadmap fits with the
odu oa
Pr l
strategic direction of the company
s

and when its initiatives will be

duct Roadm
delivered to support the strategy. o
ap
Pr

Successful product managers tap

into this by keeping the roadmapping Release Plan
& Backlog
process high-level and collaborative.
From there, they can derive the
detailed release plan and backlog.

FIG. 2 — Take a top-down approach when planning your

roadmap, starting with the product vision.

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Developing the Product Strategy
A product roadmap is not a document you simply sit down and start drafting — not
without first developing a strategy and plan for what the roadmap needs to accomplish,
why, and for whom.

Equally important at this pre-roadmap planning stage is developing a strategy that

you can clearly articulate and defend. You will, after all, need buy-in from various
stakeholders, including your executives. That means you’ll need both a high-level vision
and evidence or other supporting data to back up your plan.

When developing a strategy that ultimately leads to a product roadmap, it’s important to
identify and articulate your product’s vision and principles — the “why.”

“Clearly explain why your product exists and

your approach to running it. This could be a mission
statement, tenets, or principles. The important thing is
that you believe in them, and by pinning them at the
top of every roadmap it will be clear if what follows
in the roadmap doesn’t match your principles.”

— Ian McAllister, Director of Product Management at Airbnb

Spend time before you begin planning your roadmap determining the product’s mission,
and then distill it into a simple statement your stakeholders can understand. This
includes product vision, the problems it solves, its target customers, and its value to the
marketplace. Documenting this forces you to nail down many of the key items that will
inform your roadmap.

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 Ikea’s Vision:

“At IKEA our vision is to create a better everyday life

for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision
by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home
furnishing products at prices so low that as many
people as possible will be able to afford them.”

Your executives need to know (and agree with) your plans for your product’s
development and updates — because they will ultimately need to sign off on those plans.
Your development teams need to know what you have planned for your product, and
why, because they will be responsible for building it. Your sales, service, and marketing
teams will need to know the what and why as well — so they can articulate your strategy
to the market.

This strategy-first approach has several benefits:

• I t makes it easier to articulate the product vision to any constituency across your
company, and ensure your stakeholders are on the same page before you begin
the detailed conversations that follow.

• I t makes it easier for you to clearly see your product’s vision, and allows you
throughout the roadmap process to more clearly identify priorities as well as those
items that should be set aside because they don’t serve the product vision.

Google’s Vision:

“To organize the world’s information and make it

universally accessible and useful.”

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Defining Your Product Goals
From the product vision you can derive product goals that will in turn influence the
initiatives that are on your roadmap. Coming up with product goals is the step that helps
you translate your product strategy into an executable plan.

Every organization’s product goals will be different. You can develop product-specific,
company-oriented, or more generic goals. Here are some examples:
• Competitive Differentiation
• Customer Delight
• Technical Improvements
• Sustain Product Features
• Improve Customer Satisfaction
• Increase Lifetime Value
• Upsell New Services
• Reduce Churn
• Expand Geographically
• Mobile Adoption

As you can see, these goals are general, but can usually be measured and tied back
to metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It’s these types of goals that will
resonate with your stakeholders. Goals are often longer-term initiatives — for example,
they might change annually rather than monthly.

Roadmap Planning in an Agile World

At first blush, the terms agile and product roadmap seem like a contradiction, but
they’re not.

In most agile product development organizations, the backlog defines the product
features for the near term. From the backlog, the development team is (hopefully) aware
of what’s coming next, at least for the next few sprints or iterations.

But the backlog in itself is not the roadmap — a product roadmap defines a strategic
view of where the product is headed over the mid to long term. The roadmap is tied to
the organization’s vision and strategic goals, often for the next 12 or more months. In an
agile organization, the roadmap provides guidance rather than a strict project plan.

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The Backlog is Not a Roadmap
The roadmap needs to communicate the big picture to the organization — the initiatives
that move the needle, expand markets, address competition, and create customer
value. That big-picture thinking can’t be distilled in the backlog. It’s challenging to
communicate strategy in a list that’s 200 items long, especially to executives and other
stakeholders who might not think in terms of iterations or sprints.

Your roadmap cannot simply be a list of features — it

should ideally convey high-level strategy, goals and vision.

Even agile organizations need this strategic view. At ProductPlan, we’ve discovered our
customers are sharing product roadmaps with the engineers to give perspective to the
backlog. This helps the development organization understand how the next few sprints
fit into the big picture.

A roadmap speaks in terms of epics and themes, while the backlog represents the
detailed features and other tasks that deliver the product. In a sense, the backlog is a
translation of how your team will deliver the vision outlined in the product roadmap.

Agile Roadmaps
A roadmap should be agile and treated as a living document — not a fixed plan. You
should expect to regularly revisit, discuss and re-prioritize your roadmap based on
new inputs.

“Today’s companies need to be agile, move quickly, and be

adaptive — and that is really difficult with a static roadmap.
We believe that anything that is more than just a few months
out is fuzzy and needs to change. We’re fast moving and to be
agile, it’s important to have a living roadmap!”

— Jon Walker, CTO, AppFolio

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Because the roadmap will inevitably change, it’s important to set expectations with
your stakeholders that the roadmap is not a promise. Many of our customers keep the
roadmap dates at a monthly or quarterly level, or leave the dates off altogether to avoid
setting the impression that features will be delivered by a specific date.

Product managers need to regularly communicate where the product is heading so that
everyone is on the same page, especially stakeholders who make final decisions, control
the budget, or influence the direction of the company. Your agile product roadmap,
therefore should be a visual, easy-to-digest document that your stakeholders can
understand and that gives perspective to your backlog.

Typical Roadmap Process Challenges

Why are product roadmaps so challenging? In our conversations with product teams, we
hear some common themes: Product managers are frustrated that their executives and
other stakeholders aren’t on board with the product strategy. Product managers want to
convey the big picture but are stuck in the weeds.

Primary Roadmap Objective:

Communicate Product Strategy
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30%
Communicate Product Strategy

Help Plan and Prioritize

Get Consensus on Product Direction

Communicate Milestones

Manage Product Backlog

Other Option
Product Roadmap Survey Results |

FIG. 3 — The primary objective of most roadmaps is to communicate product strategy.

According to a product roadmap survey that ProductPlan conducted in 2015 — the

results of which are shown in Figure 3 — the primary objective of most roadmaps is to
communicate product strategy. A secondary objective is to help plan and prioritize.
Unfortunately, these are the very items that product managers struggle with the most.

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Strategic decisions are essential for your product’s eventual success in the market. But
product managers today face several challenges — some organizational — in developing
roadmaps that are as effective as they could be.

Let’s look at a few of these typical challenges to creating effective product roadmaps,
and how to overcome them. These challenges and solutions go beyond the roadmap
document and get to the heart of the process you use to develop the roadmap.

Challenge: Attempting To Lock In Plans That Are Too Long-Term

Many product managers today build roadmaps with long-term plans and deliverables
locked in, sometimes years into the future. But in today’s era of agile development
(and this is true of products in many industries — not only software), market demands
and opportunities, as well as new technologies, often require mid-stream changes in a
product’s development or priorities.

This is why successful product roadmaps are designed as living documents, focused on
high-level product strategy and organization goals — with built-in flexibility to adjust
plans and priorities quickly and easily.

This is also why it is so important that your roadmap effectively communicate to all
constituencies the need to keep the milestones and deliverables flexible, in favor of
meeting the high-level goals for the product rather than any specific deadline.

Challenge: Prioritizing In The Moment

It is the product manager’s responsibility — at an early stage, when developing the
roadmap — to create goals that drive prioritization. The product manager must also
prioritize the product’s development within the larger context of the organization’s
other initiatives that will be running in parallel.

Building a prioritization framework into your product decisions gives you leverage
when faced with deciding whether to prioritize a stakeholder’s pet project or a feature
required by a big prospect. Similarly, this step is vital to managing expectations
and ensuring that when necessary, a team can quickly switch focus to a
higher-priority initiative.

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 23% of product managers cite prioritization as
their #1 roadmap challenge in 2015 (the second-biggest
challenge, behind communicating product strategy)
— ProductPlan’s 2015 Product Roadmap Survey

We’ll discuss more specifics about prioritization in chapter 3 — Planning and Prioritizing
Your Roadmap.

Using Metrics to Support Your Roadmap

Metric-driven product management is now at the foundation of most successful
products. But new products or features that are on your roadmap are sometimes
challenging because there is rarely a history of data. In some cases, if the product has
recently launched, there might be a flood of data, but no structure or focus on the right
metrics to use.

What are the right metrics that product teams can use to measure the potential success
or weakness of a new product? Here are several tips for incorporating metrics into your
roadmap planning.

Define the Metrics Early

By defining the right metrics early, you can get better insight to guide your product
decisions and your product roadmap. It’s a good practice to begin discussing success
metrics as early as you can during the development of the product — and well before it
reaches customers.

With so many new analytics tools available for product managers, it’s become common
to have a firehose of data and metrics soon after your product launches. The real
challenge is in determining the few metrics to focus on — the sooner the better.

The Scientific Mindset

In order to begin setting the right metrics and product goals early, you’ll need to think
like a scientist. Scientists first describe their hypothesis, define a test, and measure.

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Product managers can do the same by setting goals and then setting metrics for those
goals. Although simple, this scientific mindset is one of the best ways to guide new
products to success.

For example, you might decide that a conversion metric is important to measure — such
as the percentage of trial customers who convert to paying customers.
Even without solid customer data, you can create a hypothesis about what you think
you will see and a target of what is ideal. This process itself is incredibly valuable because
you’ll have great conversations with the team about the business model and will be able
to spot challenges early on once the customer data begins arriving.

Are You Measuring the Right Things?

Ultimately, the metrics you choose depend on the stage of your product, your industry,
the type of product, and the size of your company.

But the most important consideration is to focus on a limited number of metrics that
really matter. These are metrics that tie back to the organization’s top-line goals and
business results.

Avoid “vanity metrics,” those metrics that feel good but in the end are rarely actionable.
For example, vanity metrics might include website page views or the number of
Facebook likes. In the end, these metrics rarely tie directly back to business results or
customer success.

Better choices would be metrics such as active users, acquisition cost, and average
revenue. These are metrics that make a difference to the business.

Sample Metrics for Your Product

If you don’t already have success metrics, how do you set about finding the right ones?

Begin by researching metrics discussed in your industry. Whether you are in SaaS, retail,
media, or another industry, there are experts who are discussing those
metrics online.

Look at information about competitive products — companies that are publicly traded
will often discuss those metrics during earnings calls.

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Generally speaking, business goals such as revenue, margin, acquisition cost and
retention are good places to start. Customer-specific metrics such as product usage and
retention are good starting points as well.

Here are a few examples of metrics that will help you measure success from a customer
and business standpoint. Of course, the metrics you select will depend on your business
and product. Choose only a few to start, so you can focus.

Customer success and product

Business-oriented metrics
engagement metrics

•P roduct usage/adoption (sign in • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

frequency, sharing, etc.)
• Lifetime Value (LTV)
•P
 ercent of users who take a specific
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
action that matters
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) per
• Feature usage (usage versus other
customer
features)
• Average Revenue per User (RPU)
• Which customer type is using certain
features • Conversion (e.g. site visit to lead
conversion)
• Retention or churn rate

• Quality (e.g. average bugs, net

promoter score)

FIG. 4 — Sample Metrics

You’ll pick a handful of these metrics to set the baseline — these are a great place to
start, but ultimately you’ll refine the metrics for your business. Work with your team to
get consensus on the metrics that matter.

These are actionable metrics that tie back to the strategic goals and initiatives you put
on your product roadmap. Revise the goals and metrics periodically — as the product
matures, the metrics will need to change and likely grow with it.

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 PLANNING &
PRIORITIZING THE
ROADMAP

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Planning & Prioritizing Your Roadmap

Only after identifying and articulating your vision and goals should you begin the next
step: Sifting through all of the information you’ve gathered about the product and
market to begin prioritizing what should actually make it into your product roadmap.

Making Sense of the Firehose of Ideas

At this point, you’ve distilled your product’s vision, and articulated it in a high-level
message that your stakeholders understand (and hopefully agree with).

Now you’re ready to gather all of the business intelligence you’ll need to build the
best product you can. This intelligence is what will ultimately lead to the details of your
roadmap: What the new product (or new version of the existing product) will include, for
whom, why, and how it will advance your company’s strategic goals.

When it comes to finding data about what to include

in your roadmap, the problem isn’t having too little
information—it’s having too much.

If you’ve been a product manager for any time, you’ve likely found that your challenge
isn’t a lack of data, ideas or feedback. It’s just the opposite — having too much
information, and trying to sort through it all to decide what supports your product’s
goals and what doesn’t.

Here are some great places to start gathering this business intelligence to help
determine how to build your roadmap.

Customer Feedback
Obviously one of the best sources of feedback on how your product is working, and
where it needs work, is with the customers who are actually using it.

Use whatever methods of communicating with your customer base will work best for
you. That could be phone calls to specific customers for detailed interviews, online
surveys, hosting user groups, or even asking your customer service teams.

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But keep this in mind: Your customers represent a skewed set of data. They, after all,
have purchased and are using your product. Don’t fall into the trap of relying on your
existing customer base as the sole source of information about where your product
excels, where it falls short, or what should be included in the next version.

And more importantly, don’t build exactly what your customers ask. Sometimes
customers’ feature requests do not necessarily align with your product vision. As a
product manager, you also need to bring to the table your knowledge of what’s feasible
to solve their problem in the best possible way — and that might not match with their
feature request.

When looking for market feedback, consider all of the prospective customers who didn’t
buy your product, but instead bought a competitor’s. And don’t forget your prospects
who haven’t yet made the decision to buy. A caveat: Although you want to solicit
feedback from the sales team, you do not want to have sales drive the roadmap, as their
goals may or may not align with the product goals.

Competitive Landscape
Your goal, of course, is to create a unique and valuable product in the market. However,
you can learn a great deal about the landscape by reviewing your competitors’ products.

While it’s possible to identify features you hadn’t thought of, be aware of the danger of
using your competitors for inspiration. Simply using your competitors’ feature list for your
roadmap is a sure fire way to launch another “me too” product that provides little in the
way of competitive differentiation.

Gain valuable competitive intelligence by looking in less-obvious places than within your
competitors’ products themselves. For example, check out blog comments or support
pages where users are discussing your competitors’ products. This can represent a gold
mine of intelligence for you.

Learn what customers like about these products, what they don’t like, and what they
wish they had.

Related idea: Do the same with your own product. Spend time regularly reviewing your
social media channels and user support sites where your customers are discussing your
product, offering each other tips, complaining, etc. There’s gold there, too.

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Sales and Customer Service
Your sales reps are your front-line liaisons between your company’s products and the
people and organizations that ultimately buy them (or don’t). Your customer service
department might spend more time with your customers than any other group in
your company.

These teams represent another invaluable source of intelligence about how best to build
and update your product roadmaps.

When sales and product management don’t communicate, the business’s bottom line
often suffers. If your sales reps know that a certain product or feature upgrade won’t
resonate with their customer base, or that they won’t be able to sell it at the price your
organization has set, you need to know why.

1 4 product managers say their Sales teams consciously

in
avoid selling certain products in their company’s portfolio

— Pragmatic Marketing’s “2014 State of Product Management and Marketing”

Similarly, your customer service personnel are on the front lines gathering real-world
user feedback. They know what the most common problems are with your product, what
features customers most often call to ask for, etc.

As with your customers, you can communicate with and learn from your sales and
customer service teams in many ways. Take a sales or customer service rep out to lunch.
Create a short online survey and ask these departments strategic questions about their
experiences with customers and the company’s products.

Bottom line: Don’t leave your sales and customer service teams out of the product
roadmap process. Including their feedback among the valuable information you’ll be
gathering from around your organization will give you better real-world intelligence and
will also help to better align everyone’s interests across the organization.

People like to be asked for their input, particularly in a professional setting where they
know they have valuable insights to contribute.

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Imagine how much more effective you can make your products if you speak first to the
people who earn their living selling those products, and the people who field real-world
questions and complaints about them.

Analyst Research
Study industry reports about your category of product (from Gartner, Forrester and
other analyst firms that cover your industry) to determine what types of products work,
with whom, and why.

What’s often useful about these reports is the survey-generated data they gather from
your target customers across the landscape. While it is relatively easy to create a survey
for your own customers or prospects, it is much more difficult (and costly) to gather a
similar set of responses from all of those target customers out there with whom your
organization has never communicated and has no relationship. And remember: Studying
only your own customers will give you a skewed picture about your products.

Consult your sales and customer service teams

for their insights in the early stages of your product roadmap
development. This will give you better real-world intelligence
and will also help to align everyone’s interests
across the organization.

Analytics and Metrics

Evidence is far more compelling than your opinion — or anyone else’s opinion, for
that matter. Your executive stakeholders and your other product roadmap constituents
will be less interested in what you think or what your gut tells you than in what
you’ve proven.

If you have real-world user data on your product — or, if you’re developing a new product,
data on similar products you’ve launched in the past — then you already have an excellent
source of business intelligence to inform how best to build your product roadmap. Let
your own analytics help guide your decisions.

This data could be video of your customers discussing or using your product, user analytics,
direct customer quotes or requests, etc. But it needs to be evidence, not speculation.

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Organizing Initiatives Into Themes

Theme:
Does this product meeting sound familiar? You’re
stuck reviewing an endless laundry list of future
features while everyone’s eyes glaze over. in product roadmaps,
a series of similar
It’s a slow death by a thousand features.
product features, epics
Building your product roadmap to convey your vision or initiatives grouped
in a compelling way is challenging. But by grouping together according to a
initiatives together into themes, you can organize larger, strategic objective
your roadmap in a way that describes value to they share, and ideally
customers and other stakeholders. Themes can help described in terms of
you put together a roadmap that creates a story — customer value
the why behind what you’re proposing.

Rather than listing individual features and tasks in your product roadmap, instead think
bigger-picture and group them into “themes” — arranged on the roadmap in a priority
hierarchy that you can clearly explain and defend.

In their simplest form, themes are groupings of similar features, epics or initiatives.
Ideally, themes describe customer value — what customers are going to be receiving
or the job that you’ll help them accomplish. In Figure 5, “Customers Complete First
Purchase Faster,” is an example of a theme, and into this theme you would group the
initiatives that support it (new features, feature enhancements, bug fixes, etc.).

Theme: Customers Complete First Purchase Faster

Mobile Support Credit Card Processor API

New Admin Console UX Improvements

FIG. 5 — Group your initiatives into themes.

Themes help keep your roadmap at a high level, especially for those long-term, fuzzier
initiatives. One benefit is that you can switch features in and out of the theme without

25
significantly affecting the roadmap. It’s a better way to keep executives and stakeholders
on the same page and focused on the big picture.

So, how should you develop your themes? Themes should be goal-driven. If you can get
executive alignment on the goals first, it’s easier to create themes that align with those
goals. As part of the process it’s essential to discuss the metrics and KPIs that define
whether the goal has been met.

There is often discussion in agile circles about the difference between epics and themes.
We’ve defined a theme here as a grouping of similar epics. Whatever your definition, it’s
important to keep your themes at a high level.

How to Create Themes

Your product’s strategic goals are a good way to identify roadmap themes. You can pick
a handful of high-level initiatives you want to accomplish — they can be at the product
level or identified for the broader organization (such as a platform-oriented initiative).

Themes can be short in duration (spanning one release) or they can span multiple
releases. If you are agile, themes can contain one or more epics. They are rarely
feature-specific.

One caution on using themes: Stakeholders such as the sales team are quick to fill in
the blanks about what a theme includes. Therefore, education is an important part
of communicating the roadmap — educating stakeholders about how you define the
theme, how you are measuring success, and of course providing some detail about what
is included in the theme.

One of the key things you do as a product manager is communicate. Getting the
executive team and other stakeholders on board with your vision is essential. Whether
you use a product roadmap template, an online roadmap spreadsheet, or product
roadmap software, themes can simplify your product plan and create a more
compelling vision.

Prioritization Techniques
Your organization has finite resources. Choosing when to prioritize forward-looking
initiatives like new features or enhancements, and when to deploy those resources for
more defensive projects like adjusting the user experience based on complaints or other
data, will be a decision only you can make.

26
How then should you prioritize them in your roadmap? What criteria should you use?

As your organization’s central hub for your products, you are probably bombarded with
requests for features and tweaks and updates from… just about everywhere.

A sales rep tells you about a customer who made an offhand request that something be
added to the product, ASAP. An executive stops you in the hall with a great idea for the
next revision. A prospective customer — who hasn’t actually bought your product — calls
customer service to tell them you should move a feature off of the product’s
main page.

You can’t afford to treat every request as a priority — not even the ones from your
longstanding customers, or from your executives. You need to be more strategic about
how, when and why to update your product.

Suggestions for Prioritizing

Regardless of the prioritization method you choose, here are some suggestions for
thinking through which initiatives to include on your roadmap:

• Approach prioritization as a team activity; not only does it create buy-in on the
team, you get different perspectives. It’s also a lot more fun.

• L
 imit the number of items you are prioritizing  — focus on the biggest items rather
than the details.

• Categorize and group initiatives together into strategic themes (for example,
“improving satisfaction” for a particular persona would be a good way to group).

• B
 efore you begin prioritizing, it’s helpful if you understand the customer value
for each initiative. The customer value should be rooted in evidence that you’ve
gathered from customers rather than your opinions.

• S
 tart with a rough estimate of cost for each item. Even T-shirt sizing of “small,”
“medium” and “large” will be helpful during the process.

Here are several other ways of quantifying the many variables among the features,
enhancements, fixes and other items competing for the limited resources in your
product roadmap.

27
Value versus Complexity

7
In the Value versus Complexity model, you evaluate
every opportunity based on its business value and
strategies
for weighing
its relative complexity to implement. Based on roadmap initiatives
our conversations with product managers this is a
common approach, and many product managers • Value vs. Complexity
go through this assessment instinctively every day. • Weighted Scoring

The matrix, as shown in Figure 6, is simple: The

• Kano Model
initiatives that have the highest value and the • Buy a Feature
lowest effort will be the low-hanging fruit for your • Opportunity Scoring
roadmap. • Affinity Grouping
You can modify this matrix for your own purposes, • Story Mapping
including adding in variables for customer impact.

High

1 2
BUSINESS VALUE

?
Low

COMPLEXITY / EFFORT High

FIG. 6 — Value Versus Complexity Graphic

28
Weighted Scoring
With Weighted Scoring you can use the Value versus Complexity model, but layer in
scoring to arrive at an objective result.

By using a scoring method, such as the one shown in Figure 7, to rank your strategic
initiatives and major features against benefit and cost categories, product managers can
facilitate a more productive discussion about what to include on the product roadmap.
While there are many inputs that ultimately go into a product decision, a scoring model
can help the team have an objective conversation.

FIG. 7 — The Weighted Scoring Model in ProductPlan

Kano Model
With the Kano model, you can look at potential features through the lens of the delight
a feature provides to customers versus the potential investment you make to improve
the feature.

As illustrated in Figure 8, there are some basic features that your product simply needs
to have in order for you to sell your product. You need to have these “threshold” features,
but continuing to invest in them won’t improve customer delight dramatically.

There are some features (like performance) that give you a proportionate increase in
customer satisfaction as you invest in them.

Finally, there are some “excitement” features that you can invest in that will yield
a disproportionate increase in customer delight. If you don’t have these features,
customers might not even miss them; but if you include them, and continue to invest in
them, you will create dramatic customer delight.

29
 Customer Delight vs Product Function

High
CUSTOMER DELIGHT re s
tu
ea
n tF
e me
cit
Ex ce
an
rm re s
rfo e atu
Pe ld) F
sho
(t h re
B asic
Low

Absent Fully Implemented

PRODUCT FUNCTION

FIG. 8 — Customer Delight versus Product Function

Buy a Feature
The Buy a Feature model is an activity you can use with customers or stakeholders to
prioritize a set of potential features. The approach is simple but fun. List out potential
features and assign a “price” to each (based on a relative cost to develop it). Hand out
a set amount of cash and then ask participants to buy the features.

Some will place all their money on one particular feature they’re passionate about, while
others might spread their cash around. The result is your prioritized feature list.

Opportunity Scoring
Opportunity Scoring is a type of Gap Analysis that comes from Outcome-Driven
Innovation. Without getting too detailed, the idea is to measure and rank opportunities
based on their importance versus customer satisfaction (see Figure 9).

Importance of New Satisfaction with Existing

Job/Outcome Features Features Opportunity
(1-10) (1-10)

Reporting & Printing 8 2 High

Billing 8 4 Medium

Purchasing 4 7 Low

Account/Management 6 3 Medium

User Management 7 8 Low

FIG. 9 — Opportunity Scoring Example

30
To conduct Opportunity Scoring you ask customers to score the importance of each
feature and then also score how satisfied they are currently with that feature. Your
opportunities are those features that are highly important yet customers gave a low
satisfaction score.

Many organizations identify product opportunities with the “Jobs to Be Done” theory:
It’s a customer’s desire to get a job done — rather than features — that will cause them to
buy a product or service in the first place. Using the Opportunity Scoring model you can
find innovation areas by plotting the competitors and the customer’s relative satisfaction
with features.

Affinity Grouping
Affinity Grouping, illustrated in Figure 10, can be a fun prioritization activity. The idea is
simple: have everyone brainstorm opportunities on sticky notes. Then as a team, begin
to group similar items together, and then name the groups. Finally, everyone on the
team begins to vote on or rank the groups.

ENHANCE PERFORMANCE INCREASE CUSTOMER INCREASE REVENUE

SATISFACTION

3rd Party
UX Improvements Integrations SEO Improvements
• Slack
• Salesforce

Self-Service Automatic Renewal

Cloud Support
Portal Service

Shopping Cart Android Launch Referral

Improvements Application Program

Decrease Page Customer Programs for New

Load Time Outreach Vertical Markets

Improve API

FIG. 10 — Affinity Grouping Example

31
Story Mapping
Story Mapping is a great way to document the MVP by organizing and prioritizing user
stories. The idea in a nutshell is that you first create task-oriented story cards as shown
in Figure 11, and group them into a workflow. You then arrange the cards in priority order
for each group. The final step is to draw a line (often with tape) across all the stories to
divide them into releases/sprints.

USER MANAGEMENT BOOK ROOM CHANGE RESERVATION

Update Search View room View Change Cancel
Register Login preferences for room info Back room reservation reservation reservation

Create Create By Show Credit card By Change

new user login form room type pictures form reservation date
#

RELEASE 1 By View room Change

availability details Room

By
location

Update name Integrate with By Cancel

PayPal
and email 3rd party username online
RELEASE 2
Add payment
information

Embed room Make room

Google Change
registration form details available reservation
RELEASE 3 on homepage Checkout
via API API call

Google Book room

Upload profile through
Account image
Login Expedia.com
BACKLOG

Facebook Book room

through
Login Kayak.com

FIG. 11 — Story Mapping Example (book a hotel room)

Buckets of Features
Balancing the effort across new features, enhancements, usability issues, and so on
depends in large part on the goals of the product and organization. A new product
may focus on new features, while a mature product may be focused on improving the
experience for a new market.

32
In addition to creating themes, you can use a Buckets of Features model to allocate by
percentages or some other weighting across buckets such as:

• C
 ore feature enhancements
•  New features that are requested by customers
•  Bug fixes and UI improvements
•  New innovative features (customer delighters)
• I nternal initiatives

Paying Special Attention to “Level of Effort” in Your Prioritization Strategy

In the previous section, we briefly discussed the importance of factoring in the level of
effort that each new feature or initiative will require, and that this should inform your
overall roadmap strategy.

For our pre-roadmap planning stage, we can broadly think of the “level of effort”
required for adding a new initiative as all of the costs required — to your team, to your
business, and even to your customers — to bring that initiative to fruition. That includes
the time to implement, level of expertise required, monetary cost and — perhaps most
important — the opportunity cost of not being able to implement something else.

This is why the first suggested method we listed above for weighing an item was to
create a Value versus Complexity matrix, and then to augment the details of this matrix
by adding a Weighted Scoring system that you can apply to each item.

The reason this is worth calling out here is that it is easy to forget that none of your
possible features or other initiatives can be added in a vacuum — they will all consume
some of your organization’s limited resources and edge out some competing initiative.
You have to weigh each feature addition or bug fix for its value to the product as well as
the business. But you must also consider the implementation cost against every other
possible initiative.

If a colleague tells you, “This feature add won’t take long,” that’s not enough information
to add it to the roadmap, even if it seems like a useful feature. You need context, the full
picture. You need to understand what adding this feature will mean in terms of all other
jobs you’re weighing for inclusion in the roadmap. You also need to know how many
other “won’t take long” features are also on the list. They add up.
At this pre-planning stage of roadmap prioritization, we recommend grouping each

33
item on your list into broad categories — such as “big undertaking,” “medium effort,” or
“simple task.” Or use the more standard T-shirt sizing we mentioned earlier, and group
items into “small,” “medium,” or “large” buckets.

Then you can take a step back and view all of your possible initiatives in relationship to
each other. With this higher-level perspective, you’ll be in a much better position to
make intelligent decisions about which initiatives to include, which to exclude, and how
to prioritize those that make the roadmap list.

“Often the magic is in what you leave out.”

— Steve Jobs

Saying No
Great product managers say no (and they say it a lot). Strategic product planning is as
much about what you decide to keep out of your product as what you put in.

Stakeholders inside and outside your company will be continually asking for more
features. And while sometimes those features will be legitimate and logical, often they’re
the result of another agenda — one that runs counter to the product vision and your
company’s strategic goals.

You’ll get feature requests that seem like easy wins, but these features cumulatively add
up to “product debt” that needs to be managed. In other words, each feature requires
not only development, but overhead in quality assurance, operations, documentation
and many other areas of your organization. You’ll also be faced with requests from the
sales team to close a deal or perhaps follow through on a commitment that was made
to a customer. Or perhaps the request is the pet idea of a particularly strong-willed
stakeholder.

There are really only a few legitimate reasons to include an item in your product
roadmap, and the primary one is that it aligns with and supports your product or
company’s strategic goals.

34
BUILDING YOUR
ROADMAP

35
Building Your Roadmap

Once you’ve settled on your product vision and prioritized all your initiatives, it is time
to start building your roadmap. Like with any other craft, before you jump in and start
chiselling out your roadmap, it is important to familiarize yourself with the different tools
available. But before we discuss the different options at hand, let’s take a brief look at
how product managers are building roadmaps today.

How Product Managers Roadmap Today

In our 2015 product roadmap survey, we asked hundreds of product managers to share
their perspectives, goals and challenges of product roadmaps with us.

According to our survey, the primary objective of most roadmaps is to communicate the
product strategy. A secondary objective is to help plan and prioritize. Coincidentally,
the top challenges also match the top objectives. Product managers struggle with
communicating product strategy and prioritizing.

The top issues with managing roadmaps are the amount of time they take to update and
that they are not visually compelling. Most roadmaps are updated monthly
or weekly and are executive facing. Despite new tools on the market, most product
managers still use presentation software, spreadsheets, and wikis to manage
their roadmaps.

When we moderated a panel discussion at a product management trade show, our

panel of product managers echoed that exact same challenge: It’s hard to engage your
audience with the same old PowerPoint® template.

Executives want regular updates on the changing product strategy but are faced with
inconsistent (or non-existent) roadmaps from the product team. In our conversations
with product managers we have heard consistently:

• S
 preadsheets are great for organizing and prioritizing, but bad for
communicating a vision.

•  Presentations take time to produce and are static documents that

are hard to share.

36
 •  Wikis and other documents are disjointed and hard to keep updated.

•  Getting company alignment is an uphill battle.

• There is rarely a single source of roadmap truth.

Roadmap Tool Satisfaction:

“Only 13% of b-to-b product managers indicate they are very
satisfied with the tool they use for documenting and communicating
their product roadmaps and only 15% are very satisfied with the
tool they use for managing product requirements.”

Source: The 2015 SiriusDecisions Field Guide to Product Planning, Prioritization and Roadmapping Applications

In most organizations the development tools are too granular for the big-picture
strategic discussion that needs to happen. In addition, most tools are “bottom up” —
they assume you already know what you want to accomplish.

The Importance of a Visual Roadmap

You’ve planned your product strategy, and now you’re ready to present your proposed
roadmap to the team. You begin to review your spreadsheet outlining how your roadmap
will be a needle-mover for the company. Surely everyone can look past the rows of text
in 8-point font and see the genius of your strategy, right? Maybe. We have all heard that
people respond better to visual information rather than plain text. Yet most roadmaps
are mired in spreadsheets and text-packed presentations.

As a product manager, one of your key jobs is to be an evangelist for the product. A high-
level visual presentation is a powerful way to help get buy-in on your strategy.

In fact, some product teams care so much about creating the right impression that
they spend hours crafting a beautiful product roadmap presentation. We regularly hear
stories about how much the presentation matters. For example:

•T
 he VP of Product who had a designer use Adobe Illustrator to create their product
roadmap document. (Unfortunately, the designer needed to be involved in
every change).

37
 •T
 he product team who asked the marketing department to create their roadmap
— the document was so beautiful they continued to use it even after the roadmap
was outdated!

•T
 he product owner who spent hours each month re-formatting and color-coding
an Excel® spreadsheet to convey how the roadmap tied to the strategy.

These teams understood the value of the visual — so much in fact that they spent an
inordinate amount of time and resources getting the presentation right.

But in today’s agile world, there isn’t time to hassle with updating a graphic, PowerPoint®
deck or spreadsheet every time the roadmap is re-prioritized or your executives want to
review it.

Whether you use PowerPoint, a product roadmap template or product roadmap

software, here are a few suggestions for creating a roadmap document with impact.

• U
 se color. Color is a great way to represent how your roadmap ties to the product
vision or strategic objectives. Color-code each item on your roadmap to help
people make the connection between each initiative and how it fits into the
big picture.

• U
 se large fonts. People have a limited amount of time to digest your strategy, so
use large fonts, especially if you are presenting your roadmap on a projector or in
an online meeting. Think of your roadmap very much like a presentation and you’ll
be ahead of the game.

• K
 eep it high level. Remember that you are telling a story about how your strategy
fits with the product vision. So tell the story in big, bold strokes rather than diving
into the details. If you can, create logical groupings of initiatives to make the
roadmap easier to grasp.

38
The Collaborative Roadmap
Like all things in life, roadmaps are better when shared. Free your roadmap from that
PowerPoint file that is stored deep in your laptop, and use a solution that allows you to
move things around together with your teammates in real time.

Building a roadmap often has to be a fluid conversation — a compromise among

different priorities. A common way to collaborate during the build phase is to enable
each stakeholder to lead their own initiatives within their respective areas.

Let’s assume you are a product manager for a large software company. You could have a
roadmap that shows all your User Interface (UI) initiatives; another roadmap could focus
on all your Application Programming Interface (API) projects; and still another roadmap
could be driven by your architects, outlining your overall software strategy.

As a product manager, you have to stay in the picture on all those initiatives. But you
can’t be an expert in or even own all those areas. It is your job, however, to set priorities.
In order to understand the big picture, you need to be able to roll up all of those
individual roadmaps into one portfolio plan and distill an easy-to-understand picture for
the executive team to earn their buy-in.

How Often to Update the Roadmap

A product roadmap is a high-level strategic document that reflects your long-term
product vision. But a roadmap does not need to be set in stone. You have to be able to
update your roadmap frequently, if you need to adjust your direction.

In an agile world, you can no longer predict what’s going to happen years out. The
reality is that you need to rapidly adjust to market changes, customer requirements,
stakeholder needs, and other influences. Therefore your roadmap needs to be a living
document and allow for changes.

How often you change your roadmap depends on how many details you include on
your roadmap as well as the timeframe for the roadmap. For example, if your roadmap
tends to be long-term (more than 12 months) and is at a higher strategic level, it may not
change as frequently as a short-term roadmap with detailed features.

Our 2015 product roadmap survey revealed that most product managers change their
roadmaps monthly or even weekly.

39
Most Update Roadmaps Frequently 35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%
Daily Yearly Quarterly Weekly Monthly

Product Roadmap Survey Results |

FIG. 12 — Most product managers update their roadmaps monthly or even weekly.

Three Popular Roadmap Styles

The first step in building a roadmap is selecting the appropriate style. Thousands of
roadmaps have been built with ProductPlan, putting us in a unique position to comment
on various formats. Even though the roadmap style permutations are endless, we see
the following three styles most commonly: Timeline, Roadmap without Dates and
Kanban. In this chapter, we will explain when and where these styles make sense and
what some of the advantages and shortcomings are of each roadmap type.

Timeline
Q1 Q2 Q3

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep

User Interface (UI)

Conduct user interviews Interactive UI improvements

React framework

Application Programming Interface (API)

Define API specifications API Beta Rollout production-ready API

Storage

Agree on storage vendors Move entire product lines to new storage vendors Performance improvements

Other Services Integrations

Narrow down integration partnerships Complete integrations before EOY

Rollout first 5 integrations

FIG. 13 — Timeline-Based Roadmap Style

40
Every product manager has heard this question before: “What are you doing and when
will it be done?” If your CEO asks you this question, a timeline-based roadmap can be a
great tool for you and help you to respond to that question.

A timeline-based roadmap, illustrated in Figure 13, shows your initiatives relative to

each other in the context of time. It visually communicates how long you intend to focus
on certain initiatives and when you plan to complete them. Typically, you arrange your
initiatives in a bar chart on a grid that represents a specific timeframe.

Although there might be dates on your roadmap, from a product management

standpoint it is often a good practice to keep your dates high-level and not too specific.
For example, show initiatives spanning a few months without designating exact start and
end dates. You need to manage expectations with stakeholders, and the more specific
the timeline, the more you are setting expectations for delivery of specific dates and
capabilities.

Timeline-based roadmaps are great to visualize product schedules among the different
tasks at hand. However, a common pitfall for timeline-based roadmaps is to focus on
deadlines rather than emphasizing strategic priorities.

Roadmap Without Dates

People
Increase staff Split groups in special task forces

Onboarding & training

Technology
Define SLA Rollout three 9’s

Increase to five 9’s

Migration Plan Migration implementation

Security
Agree on security plan Rollout must-haves

Meet production goals

FIG. 14 — Roadmap Without Dates

41
Keeping in mind the saying, “It’s not the destination but the journey,” removing date
constrictions from your roadmaps allows you to better focus on modeling the process
— how you can achieve your end goal. While there are a lot of commonalities between
timeline-based roadmaps and roadmaps without dates, the important differentiator
here, as you can see from Figure 14, is that you do not associate any dates with
your initiatives.

You can group similar items together in the same swimlane to better emphasize related
initiatives. The length of each initiative, depicted as bars in the example roadmap above,
could represent their strategic importance or rough effort level. Even though you don’t
need to commit to a specific deadline, a roadmap without dates still allows you to order
all involved initiatives sequentially. You can model the process based on what must get
done first, and put your initiatives in context with everything else going on.

Kanban
BACKLOG TO DO DOING DONE CANCELLED

Shopping Cart 3rd Party Customer

Improvements Cloud Support UX Improvements Integration with Outreach
Slack

SEO Decrease Page Improve API Avoid Application

Improvements Load Time

Automatic Launch Referral

Renewal Service Program

Program for New

Vertical Markets

FIG. 15 — Kanban-Style Roadmap

Kanban is a project management framework that got its start in “just in time”
manufacturing. It’s now frequently used to show a roadmap, priorities and progress. By
matching the amount of work in progress (WIP) to the team’s capacity, kanban gives
teams more flexible planning options, faster output, clear focus and transparency
throughout the development cycle.

42
A key tenent of kanban is to limit the amount of work in progress, because WIP limits can
highlight bottlenecks and backups in the team’s process due to lack of focus, people or
skill sets.

For a kanban-style roadmap, like the one in Figure 15, you want to show stakeholders the
status and priorities for each stage of your development. For example:

• Approved

•V
 alidated

•R
 eady for Estimation

• I n Progress

•R
 eady

Roadmap Examples
Now that we talked about different roadmap styles and highlighted some of their
elements, let’s outline a few specific roadmap examples that hopefully spark some ideas
to get you started.

The style and timeframe that you use depends on your audience — the roadmap
you build for your executive team will be very different from the one you build for
engineering. For example, the executive team will want to see a longer time horizon and
the initiatives at a higher level, with less detail. The engineering team might want to see
initiatives on a shorter-time horizon with a greater level of detail.

Note that this list is not exhaustive — you can use combinations from each style or
example to craft a roadmap that is ideal for your audience, product and organization.

Example Product Management Roadmaps

As roadmaps are to the product manager what a hammer and chisel are to a carpenter,
let’s illustrate three common roadmap examples for product managers first. Because
these product roadmaps are often executive and stakeholder facing, they might be on
a longer time horizon and will show initiatives with less detail. They often tie back to the
strategic initiatives, because this is what these stakeholders value.

43
Single Product Roadmap

FIG. 16 — Single Product Roadmap Example

If you’re a product manager responsible for one

specific product, this is the roadmap for you. Single Product
The example roadmap shown in Figure 16 is a Roadmap
timeline-based roadmap that communicates the
• Time Horizon:
status of the different initiatives for your product
Long-term
in relationship to all the other efforts going
•E
 xample Swimlane Grouping:
on concurrently.
Teams
Let’s assume you’re a product manager at a
•L
 evel of Granularity:
large software company. One way we’ve seen High-level
our customers categorize their roadmaps is by
•E
 xample Legend:
grouping different initiatives for each of the
Company Goals
functional areas together in different swimlanes.

For example, if you have a web application as well

as a mobile application for your software, you could slice your roadmap that way. Each of
the individual initiatives across all functional groups are often color-coded in order to be
correlated back to the company’s overall strategic goals.

44
Multiple Product Roadmap

FIG. 17 — Multiple Product Roadmap Example

Another common example is one roadmap to

coordinate efforts among the different products Multiple Product
or initiatives in your company’s portfolio. A Roadmap
roadmap that visualizes multiple products is
• Time Horizon:
a great communication tool for organizations Long-term
with a single product manager responsible for
• Example Swimlane Grouping:
multiple products or product categories. Products
For example, a startup with multiple initiatives • Level of Granularity:
happening simultaneously will likely incorporate High-level
it all into one roadmap. This single roadmap • Example Legend:
is easy to share and communicate with Project Status
stakeholders. In this example (see Figure 17),
each product has its own swimlane. The colors
symbolize the status of each initiative. The time
horizon in this example is one year.

45
Agile/Sprint Roadmap

FIG. 18 — Agile/Sprint Roadmap Example

Even though development teams have project

management software to track their backlog, Agile/Sprint
agile teams still require a roadmap to show the Roadmap
direction of the product. This is a living roadmap.
• Time Horizon:
Agile companies need to strike the right balance Short-term
in their roadmaps between long-term vision and
•E
 xample Swimlane Grouping:
short-term execution. You need to be able to Application Categories/Teams
adjust your course and respond to feedback or
•L
 evel of Granularity:
change your roadmap quickly.
High-level
The example shown in Figure 18 is a timeline- •E
 xample Legend:
based roadmap across a shorter time-horizon Priority/Status/Teams
that shows sprints as time markers. It is not
unusual for some features to span across multiple
sprints. The colors can represent teams or status.
For features that span across multiple sprints,
you can use milestones to visualize each release.

46
Example Technology Roadmaps
Besides product management, another common use of roadmaps is for strategic
technology initiatives. These roadmaps are often for an internal stakeholder audience,
partners, or enterprise customers.

Technology Roadmap

FIG. 19 — Technology Roadmap Example

You can use a technology roadmap to plan

out strategic initiatives for the year, such as Technology
migrating different software systems, or rolling Roadmap
out software updates. The audience for a
• Time Horizon:
technology roadmap will often be stakeholders
Long-term
looking to the IT team for delivering internal-
facing systems and solutions. The technology
• Example Swimlane Grouping:
Functional Areas
roadmap may also be shared with partners and
vendors who rely on integrations and other • Level of Granularity:
technology from the organization.
High-level

• Example Legend:
In the example illustrated in Figure 19, the
Project Status
roadmap is divided into three different
categories: People, Technology and Security.
The colors indicate the status of each initiative. The roadmap can have a time horizon
such as the next year, or have no dates if it’s important not to communicate timeframes.

47
IT Architecture Roadmap

FIG. 20 — Architecture Roadmap Example

In many software companies, the software

architect is tasked to build a solid foundation IT Architecture
that becomes the backbone of the company’s Roadmap
products. Common architectural roadmap • Time Horizon:
components are the Application Programming Long-term
Interface (API), User Interface (UI), Storage and
•E
 xample Swimlane Grouping:
third-party services integrations. Application Components

These platform components are often part of •L

 evel of Granularity:
other product roadmaps in the organization High-level

because features may rely on them. •E

 xample Legend:
Phase
In the example shown in Figure 20, the
roadmap is color-coded based on project
status: Planning & Design, Implementation &
Testing, Optimization. It is common that the
timeframe for an Architecture Roadmap is
long-term.

48
Enterprise IT Roadmap

FIG. 21 — Enterprise IT Roadmap Example

It is not unusual for large enterprises to lose

sight of all the important initiatives going on. Enterprise IT
An enterprise IT roadmap allows you to Roadmap
visualize your strategic initiatives. The audience • Time Horizon:
for an enterprise IT roadmap will often be 12-18 Months
internal stakeholders looking to the IT team for •E
 xample Swimlane Grouping:
delivering internal-facing systems, security, and Functional Areas
other solutions.
•L
 evel of Granularity:
In the example illustrated in Figure 21, the
High-level

roadmap outlines capabilities based on their •E

 xample Legend:
strategic importance. Those could be grouped, Project Status

for example, by security and compliance

initiatives, High Availability & Disaster Recovery
(HA & DR), as well as operational support tasks. The timeframe for these strategic
roadmaps is longer, often 12-18 months.

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Example Marketing Roadmaps
Marketing strategy is another category we commonly see represented in roadmaps.
The marketing roadmap use cases include marketing plans, product launch plans,
content calendars and marketing-program-based roadmaps.

Marketing Plan Roadmap

FIG. 22 — Marketing Plan Example

A marketing plan is a blueprint that outlines your

marketing strategy and efforts. For example, Marketing Plan
your marketing plan can outline your company’s Roadmap
positioning and messaging, your digital • Time Horizon:
marketing programs, or your sales strategy. Less than 6 Months

Visualizing your marketing plan in a roadmap • Example Swimlane Grouping:

provides you with a structured overview of all
Project

your marketing initiatives. In this example, the • Level of Granularity:

roadmap is organized by the type of initiative High-level

and color-coded by the owner of the initiative. • Example Legend:

Milestones indicate specific goals. Project Phase

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Product Launch Roadmap

FIG. 23 — Product Launch Roadmap Example

When launching a new product, you need to

make sure that all your initiatives are in sync and Project Launch
that all team members know when they need Roadmap
to complete an initiative that they are driving. • Time Horizon:
Often a product launch roadmap is managed by Less than 6 Months
product marketing to coordinate efforts across • Example Swimlane Grouping:
different teams. Teams

A product launch plan usually is a timeline- • Level of Granularity:

High-level
based roadmap that clearly communicates the
deliverables in relation to time. This example • Example Legend:
roadmap is organized by the type of initiative Phase

(e.g. branding and channel management).

The time horizon is six months, and the colors
represent the phase of the initiative.

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Digital Marketing Roadmap

FIG. 24 — Digital Marketing Roadmap Example

Our last roadmap example is a digital marketing

roadmap. Probably even more important Digital Marketing
than the specifics of an individual campaign Roadmap
is the right marketing mix. A digital marketing • Time Horizon:
roadmap allows your program managers to Near-term
better coordinate all the efforts across different
• Example Swimlane Grouping:
marketing channels. Marketing Programs

The digital marketing roadmap shown in • Level of Granularity:

Figure 24 visualizes your content marketing Detailed

initiatives, your paid and organic search efforts, • Example Legend:

your email marketing campaigns, as well as your Stage
social media strategy. Each of the efforts will be
categorized based on their stage in the
marketing funnel.

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COMMUNICATING
YOUR ROADMAP

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Communicating Your Roadmap

In today’s agile world, communicating your product strategy is not an isolated phase of
the product lifecycle. As you can see from Figure 25, it’s not as if you move neatly from
creating your roadmap to sharing your roadmap to executing your plans — the process is
iterative, and communication is part of every step.

Successful product managers are constantly monitoring feedback from several different
channels (see Chapter 3). That said, you can’t change your plans too often, or you’ll ship
a clunky product with no overarching vision. And you can’t listen to everyone all the
time, or you’ll end up with too many cooks in the kitchen.

So who should you talk to, when, and what should you be talking about? This chapter
covers how to communicate with stakeholders at each stage of the product lifecycle,
as well as how to secure stakeholder buy-in on your roadmaps and avoid common
communication pitfalls.

keholder Engageme
Sta nt
PLAN

RELEASE PRIORITIZE

EXECUTE

FIG. 25 — Communicate your roadmap to stakeholders iteratively.

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Communicate With Stakeholders Throughout the Process
Planning
As we mentioned in Chapter 3, it’s important to work closely with your executives to
understand where you’re headed with your product strategy. Develop a clear product
vision and identify the strategic goals that are most important to your organization —
your metrics might be based around revenue growth, customer acquisition, reducing
churn, etc. (see Chapter 2). If you and your stakeholders can agree upfront on vision and
strategic goals, there will be less confusion about product priorities later on.

Use a high-level roadmap to talk your executives through a handful of themes that
you’ve identified as most important for your upcoming planning period. How far out you
plan will depend on your industry, company size and culture.

Make sure each theme on the roadmap fits with your product vision and relates back
to a strategic goal. For example, if you are a software company and one of your themes
is re-designing your mobile app, your reasoning should not be that it looks ugly or
that it hasn’t been updated in awhile. Instead, you want to be able to communicate
to executives how the re-design will improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, or
otherwise contribute to your strategic goals.

At this stage in the planning process, avoid prioritizing discrete features or committing to
specific deadlines. You might find it most effective to use a roadmap without dates, so the
conversation stays at the strategic level. It’s too easy to lose sight of your strategic vision
when your executives are stuck prioritizing a laundry list of feature requests. Instead,
organize potential features or updates into buckets that represent themes — you can
move things in and out of a theme as necessary, but the theme itself remains intact.

Prioritization
As we discussed in Chapter 3, after you’ve agreed on your strategic goals and identified
a set of themes that will help you achieve them, you can start prioritizing specific
initiatives within those themes. This is where open communication with department
heads in engineering, sales, marketing, and customer support becomes important.
Discuss their top priorities and determine together how those priorities fit into your
larger themes and strategic goals.

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 Working With Stakeholders to Prioritize
“As a product manager, you have to get cross-functional
buy-in. I’ve been challenged by other departments. You
have to get everyone in a room, and ask them what their top
priorities are. You have to rank it, scorecard it, whatever it
takes, and you’ve got to hold them to it.”

— Paul Ninefeldt, Product Manager, Gentex

If you can involve your stakeholders in the prioritization process, they are much more
likely to be on your side. Use a structured thought process to evaluate potential
initiatives, such as the Effort versus Value model (see Chapter 3). The prioritization
technique you use is ultimately less important than the conversation you have.

Product managers often ask us how to handle stakeholders who question why particular
projects are being pursued over others. In our experience, the root cause of confusion
about product direction tends to be a lack of transparency about how initiatives are
prioritized. You can stand your ground by walking stakeholders through your
thinking process.

Execution
Once you have prioritized initiatives to reflect your strategic goals and reached a
consensus among key stakeholders as to what will be included on the roadmap, it’s
time to translate product vision into actionable steps. The roadmap you use now must
become more detailed. You’ll want to allocate resources for each initiative, assign
ownership of initiatives to different team members, and designate release dates.

Make sure each team within the engineering department knows what they are working
on, and understands how their projects contribute to the bigger picture. You might find
it easiest to create custom roadmaps for technical audiences that are more granular
than those used at higher levels of the organization. When using multiple roadmaps,
make sure the color-coding and tagging are consistent.

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You might find that project management tools are best suited to this phase of the
product lifecycle. However, project management tools and product management tools
are not mutually exclusive. Your developers will benefit from using project management
tools, which communicate stories and tasks, in conjunction with product roadmaps,
which communicate the strategic direction of the product.

Release
Once plans have been determined and engineers have been set in motion, it’s important
to make sure all parties in your organization are on the same page. Schedule meetings
with sales, marketing, customer support, etc. to explain what’s coming next.

Use a high-level roadmap that communicates product direction, and be sure to exclude
specific dates when presenting to customer-facing teams. The marketing team should
understand the positioning of the new product or feature set so they can successfully
bring it to market. And the sales team should understand how the product will solve
customers’ problems so they can show prospects its value.

As an organization gets very large, it becomes much more logistically challenging

to include every single person from these departments, but you should involve
the directors and managers so they can then pass the information onto their
respective teams.

Providing self-service access to the roadmap is another way to build consensus and
get stakeholders on your side. Tools like Google Drive and ProductPlan allow you to
build and store roadmaps in the cloud, as opposed to emailing around slide decks or
spreadsheets that might or might not be up-to-date. With self-service access, teams can
check-in independently at any time and remind themselves of the current plan. This can
bridge a lot of communication gaps, and it also might prevent awkward conversations
with stakeholders telling you, “I didn’t know we were doing that.”

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Strategies for Getting Stakeholder Buy-in on Your Roadmap
As a product manager, you will have to present a roadmap to different audiences.
If your audience is comprised of executives, your goal will likely be to get them to buy in
to your strategy or green-light your plans. If your audience is some other segment
of your organization, your goal will likely be to communicate product direction and
build consensus.

In either case, you need to be clear and persuasive, so stakeholders walk away
understanding your strategy and agreeing with your priorities. Here are some tips:

Come Prepared
Hopefully this one is obvious, but what exactly does good preparation for presenting a
roadmap look like? Creating the document alone is not enough; you should be prepared
to tell a convincing story and justify why every initiative on the roadmap deserves to
occupy space.

• S
 tructure your presentation: Much like how you go about building a roadmap in
the first place, a good presentation begins with the big picture and then narrows
down into the specifics. At ProductPlan, we are big fans of the “why, how, what”
framework. Start with the “why” — share your strategic goals — before jumping into
a more detailed explanation of the ”how” and the “what.”

• B
 e concise: If you can’t communicate your roadmap concisely, then you probably
haven’t distilled a clear enough product strategy in the first place. Make the
takeaways from your presentation obvious. Avoid wordy presentation slides and
keep your verbal communication clear and direct.

• A
 nticipate objections: Be prepared to respond to concerns as to why some
initiatives are being pursued over others. This goes back to knowing your market
and using a rigorous prioritization framework. If your methods are truly robust and
data-driven, (as opposed to based on your gut feeling), then you should have no
problem justifying your priorities to stakeholders.

• P
 rovide specific examples: Specific examples are some of the most powerful tools
in your persuasive arsenal; use them liberally. Be able to describe your initiatives
in terms of how they will benefit customers or relieve pain. Will a feature you’re
building save customers time and money? Cite a customer interview or show data
from your analytics tools as evidence.

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Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is a key principle for any type of communication, and roadmaps
are no exception. Bottom-up communication, such as presenting strategic goals to
executives, follows a very different protocol from top-down communication, such as
presenting specific plans to developers.

• T
 ailor the amount of detail shown: In executive-facing roadmaps, focus on high-
level themes and strategic goals. Your discussion should be around the market
space, customer data, and potential return on investment for new projects. At
lower levels of the organization, your roadmap needs to transition from theoretical
to actionable. Engineering roadmaps, for example, need to communicate specific
tasks, requirements and deadlines.

• U
 se appropriate language: The language you use on your roadmaps should
be appropriate to those who will view it. If your audience is non-technical, use
layman’s terms to describe features and title initiatives; avoid jargon or buzzwords.
In roadmaps that will be widely distributed, do not use acronyms or abbreviations
that are not commonly known outside your industry.

Communicate Status
Roadmaps should generally communicate your high-level strategy, but when meeting
with your stakeholders there is no avoiding some discussion of specific details and
deadlines. Your executives will want to know the status of your current projects, how
you’re allocating your resources, and how the status of those projects could change if
your resources were allocated differently. The reality is that your stakeholders want to
see new features released and will be eager to know how close you are to getting there.

A lot of questions around resource allocation and how to track the progress of specific
tasks fall under the umbrella of project management rather than product management.
However, your roadmap has an important role to play in sparking scenario-planning
discussions that will ultimately help you refine your strategy. A high-level roadmap also
serves as an important springboard for defining stories and setting precise release dates
within your project management platform.

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• I nclude the “percent complete” for each initiative on your roadmap: Without
diving too deep into the details, include the high-level completion status of each
initiative on your roadmap. For example, perhaps the re-design of your billing
page is 60% complete and the launch of your new account management system
is 30% complete. By providing this information on the roadmap, you may spark
important conversations around how the initiatives are dependent on each other
and what can be done to move around resources or reprioritize projects in order to
push them along. As necessary you will dig in deeper and walk your stakeholders
through the specifics, but this should not be the starting point of your discussion.

• F
 ilter your initiatives by status: Another common approach is to use a tagging
or color-coding system to layer in information about the status of each initiative
without cluttering your roadmap. For example, you may choose to distinguish
planned, approved, in-development and completed initiatives from each other
through color schemes or tags. You may also find it helpful to filter your roadmaps
along these parameters, creating distinct views based on completion status so
your stakeholders can clearly understand where everything stands.

• A
 rchive older versions of the roadmap: Finally, be sure to save early versions of
your roadmap as well as roadmaps from years past. By creating an archive of old
roadmaps, you can easily track which initiatives have been completed, delayed,
pushed back or canceled. You can also use this database to analyze how your
strategy has changed over time, and if anything goes wrong, you will be better able
to identify and correct for the decisions that led you off-course.

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Utilize Visuals
People remember only a small percentage of what they hear, so visual aids are crucial to
keeping your audience’s attention and ensuring your key points stick in their memory.
Your visuals should supplement and clarify what you say verbally, not present new
information. Avoid putting up wordy or complicated slides — they compete for attention
and detract from the speaker.

• U
 se words sparingly: Stick to short titles and descriptions for initiatives, and make
sure they’re big and easily legible. Remember, the more text you add, the less likely
things are to be read.

• I ncorporate color schemes: Use color schemes to show how initiatives relate to
one another and to larger strategic goals. Include a legend so people can easily
see what colors represent, and be sure to choose colors that are different enough
to stand out from one another.

•  S
 how the hierarchy of initiatives visually: Do a certain cluster of updates fall
within a particular theme? Are some initiatives part of one release and other
initiatives part of another release? Plot these relationships visually by grouping
initiatives into containers or swimlanes.

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Common Communication Pitfalls

Letting Sales Drive the Conversation

It can be tempting to make product decisions based on the latest sales prospect or the
latest lost sale, but this is not a strategic approach. Your prospects might not know your
business goals, your product vision or your positioning in the market.

If you went around building everything customers requested, you would have a clunky
collection of features with no clear direction. Keep in mind that each additional feature
you build dilutes your product’s core function and complicates your positioning.
Focusing exclusively on requests from sales prospects is a short-sighted approach;
successful companies think strategically and plan for the long-term.

“I can’t just start a product roadmap by calling up my

salespeople, asking them what customers are talking about,
and then using that information to make a list of features.
That’s not strategic and it does nothing to help you
prioritize across the departments and teams that
you’ll need to build the product.”

— Matt Feldman, Director of Product Management, MIND Research Institute

Perhaps your VP of Sales wanted to see a particular feature on the roadmap because a
big prospect is requiring it to close the deal. It’s certainly disappointing to lose a sale, but
you can explain the other factors that went into your prioritization process.

Maybe the requested feature would only be used by a small segment of customers,
and you determined that the effort to build a fairly niche feature outweighed the return
of only a few new accounts. Or maybe you decided to focus on features that increase
product stickiness this quarter, because customer retention is a higher priority
than growth.

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Another big problem with letting sales drive your conversation is that often customers
request features that don’t actually get to the root of their core problem. Problems
can be solved in different ways; this is the value that you bring to the table as a
product manager.

Sometimes prospects don’t have the exact vocabulary to express the features they truly
need because those features are not built yet. It’s up to you to play detective and get to
the bottom of their problem, rather than just building exactly what they ask for.

Sales is just one channel for potential product ideas, and while important, it should never
be the only conversation that moves the needle in your prioritization process.

Engineering Missing the Bigger Picture

Another common communication pitfall is engineers being kept out of the loop on the
strategic direction of the company. We commonly hear that engineers don’t understand
why they are building something.

As a product manager, it’s your job is to make sure your developers get the big picture,
and that they’re not just stuck in their own development silo. Creating a shorter-term
engineering roadmap can help overcome this communication gap.

Oversharing Roadmap Details with Sales or Customers

Finally, it’s important to avoid oversharing roadmap details with sales and other
customer-facing teams. You don’t want to set up false expectations or make promises to
prospects that you cannot keep.

A common communication problem occurs when the sales department reveals

upcoming features to prospects, and then the roadmap changes and those features
get pushed out or cancelled. The result is angry customers and frustrated sales reps
(who will likely blame product management for the mix-up).

It can be hard to resist the urge to tell prospects about bright and shiny upcoming
features, but the risk of not delivering on your word outweighs the potential benefit
of closing a few new sales. If a customer gets the impression that your organization is

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disorganized and doesn’t deliver — and, worse, perhaps even shares that impression
with colleagues or on social media — it will be an uphill battle to repair your reputation
going forward.

The safest route is to eliminate the possibility of over-committing in the first

place. Omit specific dates when presenting the roadmap to teams that interact
with customers.

Furthermore, only include features that have already been approved and are well on
their way to becoming reality. For initiatives still under discussion, it’s perfectly okay
to be vague or to exclude them from the roadmap entirely.

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SUMMARY

65
Summary

Product managers play an absolutely critical role in an organization’s strategic direction.

They are at the intersection of many important feedback streams — customers,
colleagues, executives, and other constituencies. They are also constantly pulled in
different directions by market changes and other external factors. Product managers
need to digest this continuous stream of (often conflicting) data wisely, and lay the
foundation for the company’s product vision.

The Roadmap
A product roadmap allows you to communicate your product’s strategy and map out its
direction for your organization. But before you start building your roadmap, you need
to tame the chaos. A product roadmap is not a document you simply sit down and start
drafting — not without first developing a strategy and plan for what the roadmap needs
to accomplish, why, and for whom.

Your product roadmap needs to convey your strategy in a compelling way. By grouping
initiatives together into themes, you can organize your roadmap in a way that describes
value to customers and other stakeholders. Themes can help you put together a
roadmap that creates a story — the why behind what you’re proposing.

Once you’ve settled on your product goals and prioritized your initiatives, it is important
to familiarize yourself with the tools available. Building a roadmap often has to be a fluid
conversation — sometimes even a compromise among different priorities. In order to
build a perfect roadmap, you have to surround the roadmap with all your experts from
start to finish.

In today’s agile world, communicating your product strategy is not an isolated phase.
It’s not as if you move neatly from creating your roadmap to sharing your roadmap to
executing your plans — the process is iterative and communication needs to be part
of every step.

66
Using the Right Tools
The right software is critical to developing a successful product roadmap. Product
roadmap software is a high-level tool designed to help product managers communicate
a product’s strategy to multiple constituencies across the company (and even outside
the company).

Because many organizations simply do not know about product roadmap software,
many product managers develop their roadmaps using spreadsheets, slides, or project
management software. But such tools (think Microsoft® Project®, Excel® or ticketing
systems like JIRA) do not give the product manager the ability to communicate the
product’s high-level, strategic view.

Build your product roadmaps in strategic-level product roadmap software, rather than
the tactical and task-oriented project management software.

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About ProductPlan

ProductPlan makes it easy for teams of all sizes to build beautiful roadmaps. Thousands
of product managers worldwide–including teams from Nike, Microsoft, and Spotify–
trust ProductPlan to help them visualize and share their strategies across their entire
organization. With our intuitive features, product managers spend less time building
roadmaps and more time shipping products.

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