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A product roadmap is an important tool that helps to outline the product development process. From product conception through to product completion, it defines all of the steps that are needed to build the finished product.
Start by Establishing Goals for Your Products
Define Company Goals in Your Roadmap
A product roadmap helps you to establish the goals for your products. These include short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. A well-defined roadmap outlines these goals on a visual timeline to communicate the company strategy to product teams and external stakeholders. Having a clearly defined set of goals allows your product teams to work with a combined focus toward achieving these goals.
Timelines to Meet Product Goals
The project manager will establish detailed timelines for different aspects of the production process within their department. This would conform to the more general deadlines set by the product manager for the completion of larger goals.
By outlining a detailed timeline for the development of the product, internal teams can synchronize their activities to ensure the finished product is completed on schedule. This is important as the marketing department will often advertise a specific release date to build up the hype and promote interest in the product. Any delays due to ineffective management of the production process will be costly and can affect the success of the product.
Know What Your Customer Wants
Market research is essential to identifying and developing new products. It provides critical information about your market and often involves extensive research in the form of focus groups and consumer surveys. Your research will help you identify new target markets and define products that customers would like and need to have. Market research provides valuable data that will help a product manager decide which new products to build.
Looking at your existing product line and understanding how these products are perceived in the market is also vital to developing a successful product strategy. Customer Success teams are a valuable resource for gaining feedback from end users. By tapping into the customer base, a company can find out what the customer values in their product and what features they would like to see added.
By knowing exactly what the customer wants, you are better able to build a product with specific features to meet that defined need. Product Roadmap management tools, such as a comparative analysis tool, are useful for gaining insights and quantitive data on how the proposed change affects costs and sales projections.
Align the Product Strategy with Company Goals
Is Your Product in Line With the Company Vision?
Does the product being developed fulfill the product vision and the business goals of the company? If, for example, the goal of the company is to become more environmentally friendly, it is important that they use sustainable materials to build their products.
An automobile manufacturer that wants to achieve zero carbon emissions on all of their consumer vehicles by a specified date must work incrementally towards reaching that goal by eliminating gasoline-fueled vehicles from their product line and replacing them with electric and alternative technologies.
By clearly defining the company vision on the product roadmap, all product teams can work in alignment to meet these goals.
Are Product Features in Alignment With That Market?
When the company vision includes growth in new markets, it is important to understand that cultural and other environmental differences may require a different product strategy. Market research will help to identify which products may be desirable in new markets. Customer demand will dictate the product features, choice of materials, and in which market a particular product is likely to do well. Use comparative and competitive analysis tools to compare your potential offering to that of existing competitors in the market.
Use Your Roadmap to Manage Unexpected Disruptions
Product development is a complex process that relies on multiple components to create a single finished product. With many of these components sourced from across the country and around the globe, a product roadmap helps a product manager keep track of what is happening in which locations and when it is happening.
The most effective product roadmapping tools allow you to map out all of the components of a single product. This is useful for managing the development process, especially when an unexpected delay in one component will affect the product timeline.
The ability to easily identify components and their dependencies across the product lines allows a product manager to better manage supply chain disruptions, delays in manufacturing, and other unexpected complications. As part of the risk management strategy, it is important to have alternate plans in place to mitigate the problems of a product backlog.
Analyze and Define Product Features and Dependencies
Product line visualization allows a product team to identify any issues or gaps between their products in a particular brand. This is helpful as it allows product teams to analyze the product and communicate the content of the product with the stakeholders. Sales and Marketing will know the advantages of the product against competition, and the key features that distinguish the product. Engineering can collaborate with Product Management to ensure the content satisfies the needs of the market. Pricing and product management can look at the packaging and line-up of the product to ensure that each offering and configuration has enough differentiation to justify the price difference.
The Product Matrix
The product matrix is a useful tool to show all the ways a product can be configured. These will include aesthetic features as well as functional features. It also identifies how selecting a specific feature may affect the availability of other features for that product.
The Product Walk
The product walk shows how features change from one model to the next. This provides a clear visualization of how you differentiate between products and which features are available in each product. Your product matrix allows you to define your products based on product features and dependencies.
Product Comparison Chart
The product comparison chart compares features side-by-side comparison between products and is a useful tool for comparing your products with that of your competition. By visualizing the difference between product features, you are better able to identify changes and updates that may help to improve your sales.
Create Greater Transparency with the Right Product Roadmap Management Software
Product roadmap management software provides a single source of truth that allows your product teams to access the latest product information in real time. By creating a product roadmap that outlines the production process with a definitive timeline, your production teams can work towards meeting the wider business objectives in a specified time frame. By creating greater transparency within the production process, you are also able to communicate more effectively with your teams and promote cross-collaboration for greater efficiency.
Manage the Product Roadmap
Managing the roadmap requires periodic review and consistent updates to keep it current. While the product manager has overall access to the entire product roadmap, they can also provide access to product teams with editing and reviewing capabilities and allow different levels of access depending on their needs.
With changes made in real-time and updated across the platform, your teams always have access to the latest information. By updating regularly, all product teams are aware of progress and any problems that may affect their own functioning. This allows individual project managers to take a proactive approach to manage their own operations to meet the greater needs of the organization.
When you use Gocious cloud-based product roadmap management software, even remote teams have access to the single source of truth, making nationwide and global operations easier to guide and manage.
Software that Makes Product Roadmap Management Easier
Gocious product roadmap management software is a powerful tool that allows better execution and management of your product plan. Book your free demo today to see how creating a product roadmap will greatly improve your ability to meet your product business goals.