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Staying competitive in your market requires regular updates to your products. As your suppliers and R&D teams come up with exciting solutions to customer needs as new modules, as a product manager, you want to see these innovations on your products to get the value to the market as soon as possible.
We built Feature Roadmaps so as a product manager or lead engineer you can capture and communicate when a feature or module will become available or become deprecated, and which products are planning to integrate it. With this information you can now make updates that may involve introducing new modules, improving existing ones, or phasing out certain modules, and adjust your product launch dates to align with the availability of new solutions.
Keeping on top of your products and their dependencies can be challenging. Whether you manufacture physical goods, hardware components, software systems, or a combination, you need an efficient and transparent way to manage the features. With Gocious roadmapping tools, you now can.
Example Feature Implementation Roadmap inside Gocious:
Manage Modules and Key Features Across All Your Product Lines
Using Gocious to manage your product roadmaps helps align your teams, facilitates streamlined communication, and keeps your products on schedule. What if you could do the same thing with your product modules? With our new release, your product teams can now sort, plan, manage, and track all modules across your product lines. Key product features and Modules can be defined as Gocious Features in Gocious Feature Library and Plans can implement them creating Feature Roadmaps.
High-Level Information
We’ve made the same clear visualizations, color-coding settings, and easy-to-use system we created for product roadmaps available to roadmap your Features. Whether it's a module, a key feature, or a component, you can capture them in the Gocious Feature Library and access a high-level dashboard to see when features are about to launch, and which ones are scheduled for deprecation. By using the Feature Roadmap tool, you can keep everyone informed, reducing risk and miscommunications.
Track and Analyze Feature Families
Our visualization allows you to see entire Feature Families which are a set of related modules, components, or key features, and their use in your product lines, as well as each separate Feature in greater detail. You’ll see which plans and products use which Features and receive alerts when issues arise. Feature Roadmaps help eliminate surprises when a module is no longer available for use or a new feature is delayed in the release.
Keep Engineering Teams Connected
When multiple teams and departments are working on a product, it’s easy to get disconnected and hyper-focused on one aspect of the product. With a Feature Roadmap and integrations that benefit engineering teams, such as our Jira Integration, the work done by product teams becomes easily accessible and less siloed.
This new release makes it possible for your engineering teams to let everyone working on the product know when a new feature will be ready, preventing premature launch dates. They can also share details on when a module will no longer be available, avoiding the mistake of planning to use modules when they’re no longer available. Feature Roadmaps help keep your engineering teams connected to the rest of the product stakeholders.
The Benefits of Using Feature Roadmaps
Roadmapping your product modules is an innovative way for companies to communicate across product teams to break down silos and increase transparency.
Bridge Communication With Automation
The new Feature Roadmaps help bridge communication between product managers, their teams, and the engineers. When information on the status of each feature is up-to-date in one central location, your teams spend less time tracking down details on the status of each feature. Teams also get alerts as soon as a feature is slated for phasing out, allowing ample time to plan for substitutes and replacements.
Easily Monitor Release Dates
Roadmap views make monitoring the release dates of available new features easy. Product managers can quickly see what is launching, what is in development, and what is coming next. Product messaging becomes easier to strategize when this information is shared with other stakeholders, such as sales and marketing.
Knowing the dates of when a new module will be available also helps product teams plan better products. For example, when product line A is launching with a new module X, then product line C can also request access to module X for their next release. Sharing ideas and modules can improve the scope of multiple products rather than just one.
Manage the Phasing In and Out of Features
Product teams need to know which modules are phasing in and out and when. Planning to use a module in a product release, only to find out it is no longer available, creates significant risk for companies. With Feature Roadmaps, these mistakes are avoidable because the entire team can easily see what is available and when. This leads to better product planning.
Reduce Redundancies With Platforming
The ability to see which modules are used across the product lines helps to reduce redundancies. Teams can simplify and share modules, rather than each product team creating and using all their own modules. Minimizing variations between modules where it makes sense helps save time, resources, and cost.
Encourage Innovation
When advance notice of a module change is provided, engineering and design teams have room to innovate and create improved solutions rather than scrambling to replace a module at the last minute. Advanced planning encourages innovation and allows product teams to create solutions customers want intentionally.
Feature Roadmaps in Action
Creating roadmaps for your features will make the product development process easier to manage, no matter your industry. To illustrate the versatility of the benefits, here are three examples of how using Feature Roadmaps can benefit the product planning process in different sectors.
The Electronics Company
An electronics company decides to upgrade the main processor in their top-selling line of laptops to stay competitive. When this information is shared in the feature roadmap, other laptop lines may decide they want to upgrade to the same main processor or take the opportunity to differentiate with a high-performance version.
The Software System
A software system team chooses to upgrade the authentication process to support passwordless sign-ins. Their provider for authentication has deprecated their older sign-in method, making it essential to upgrade or lose authentication altogether. Using Feature Roadmaps to alert all teams of the upcoming change will prevent other teams from depending on the old authentication process.
The Car Manufacturer
A car manufacturer may be changing suppliers and cause a rearview camera module to deprecate. In response to this scheduled change, product teams look at their roadmap and identify the plans that are scheduled to use the old rear-view camera and adjust the plans to take on the new camera and phase out the old one. Using Feature Roadmaps notifies every product line of the upcoming changes and of the new module in the works.
Stay Organized With Gocious’ Powerful Product Management Tools
Product management requires organization, transparency, and effective communication to keep everyone aligned. There are many factors to monitor, which is why roadmapping tools offered by Gocious make the work of product teams easier to manage.
For these reasons, we created Feature Roadmaps to show when features or modules of products will be available when they will be deprecated, and when the new product initiatives plan to launch. Book a free demo to learn how your teams can benefit from our new Feature Roadmaps. 