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Product roadmaps are crucial for communicating the product vision, guiding product development, aligning development teams, and communicating with various stakeholders. The failure to use a product roadmap effectively will often lead to confusion, misalignment, and possible failure of the product. This article focuses on what makes a good product roadmap and how to use it to ensure success.
Your Roadmap Should Be Customer-Centric
Successful products answer the needs and desires of the customer. When planning a new product or upgrading an existing one, you must know your customer feedback and their pain points. This knowledge allows you to design specific features that meet those needs. Your roadmap shows which products have which features to ensure your product plans are on target.
Research the Market
A good product roadmap will prioritize features based on data rather than personal opinions and preferences; a product manager must rely on analytics, user feedback, and market research to identify the features that will bring the most value to the consumer.
Consider the Value to the Business
While consumer needs are an essential consideration, these features should also offer the company the highest business value and return on investment. Failure to consider the financial impact of prioritization could result in increased development costs and a lower return on investment, which could be detrimental to the business.
Prioritization Encourages Alignment
Prioritizing features on the roadmap also ensures that product teams can focus on the tasks that bring the most value to ensure the product's success. When your goal is to delight the customer, working on the features they need makes that product more desirable.
Your Roadmap Should Be Transparent
Roadmaps are meant to bring teams together, aligned to the same goals with the latest information. Without transparency, the work of product development will be much more challenging.
Clarify Your Purpose
When developing new products, it is crucial to have a clear product strategy in place to guide the development process. Your product roadmap should communicate the long-term vision for your product and provide stakeholders with an overview of the development process.
Your Roadmap Should Include Specific Goals and Objectives
Failing to define your goals or setting ambiguous objectives can cause confusion amongst your product teams. It also increases the risk that your team wastes resources on the wrong focus, duplicates tasks without knowing it, and causes overall inefficiency in the development process.
The best practice is to set detailed objectives which are both measurable and defined along a timeline. Incorporating these objectives into the roadmap provides a sense of purpose and direction with which all product teams can align.
Define Your Objectives and Key Results
Defining expected outcomes within a specified timeframe and offering guidance on how these results can be achieved is crucial. It is essential to break down your tasks and relay the expected performance of each division. Setting clearly defined goals gives product teams something tangible to work towards, boosting morale and moving the progress of the company forward.
What Value Can Be Derived From the Product?
Setting, measuring, and tracking key metrics for your products allows you to determine the value of each model. For example, tracking the market share and profit margins makes it easy to compare models side-by-side. Knowing the value of the products helps make informed decisions on filling gaps and opportunities with product lines.
Ensure the Roadmap Is Aligned to Business Goals
Your products should align with company strategies and goals. Deviations from the strategy can make it harder to get support from stakeholders and align with product teams. For example, if your company has a goal to capture a large share of the eco-conscious consumer market, but your product does not focus on sustainability, then you may find it challenging to get support for your product.
Your Roadmap Needs to Be Flexible
As new information becomes available, pivoting and taking the product in a different direction may become necessary. A useful product roadmap is adaptable to changing market conditions that allow for a change in the product strategy. This is particularly important when working within an agile framework where changes and numerous iterative cycles are part of the process.
Include Realistic Timelines
An effective product roadmap should set achievable timelines that drive teams forward. These timelines should also take into account any development constraints, such as resource availability and other delays that may prevent teams from reaching these goals. Setting unrealistic time frames that ignore such conditions can lead to burnout amongst team members and rushed development that may affect the integrity of the product.
Your Roadmap Needs to Be Accessible
For a roadmap to be useful, it needs to be accessible to all stakeholders. Cloud-based software can be accessed from any location with an internet connection, making it possible to work effectively with remote teams across the country and around the globe. Real-time updates of information ensure that there are no miscommunications and that all of your team members are on the same page.
Take a User-Centric Approach
When product managers develop products that prioritize internal agendas or pet projects, they may not achieve the right product market fit. By placing the product user's needs at the heart of the decision-making process, you can focus on solving real user problems and delivering products that have a high value for the consumer.
Your Roadmap Needs to Be Updated Regularly
To ensure your product roadmap is a useful tool, the product manager must take the time to update it regularly. Your roadmap is never set in stone, which means you need to make the time to update it with the most current information. You'll want to include all relevant information that is vital to your product teams and make changes as you go to ensure it is current. While software can update some of the information automatically, certain aspects require management to assess and review manually.
Here are some triggers for when a roadmap will require an update:
- Regularly scheduled reviews (a minimum of quarterly is recommended)
- Introduction of new features or products
- Dependencies within the roadmap
- The market and events within the market
- The maturity of the product
- Meetings with stakeholders
Increase Productivity With Product Roadmap Management Tools
Road mapping tools help to relay the vision and align development teams to the product strategy. As a single source of truth, product teams can rely on the product roadmap as a reliable source of communication to complete various tasks and further their development goals.
At Gocious, we work closely with product managers to create product roadmap tools to assist and guide the development process. To find out how Gocious can help your company, book your free demo today.