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When conveying the product vision to company stakeholders and development teams, the ability to communicate quickly and concisely is vital to promoting a clear understanding of the business goals within your organization.
Excel spreadsheets and word documents have traditionally been employed in product manufacturing as a means to provide important information and guide the production process. However, these documents lack the versatility that is required for efficient roadmapping, effectively stunting the product development process.
PRM Software Your Entire Organization Can Benefit From
Product roadmap software is a roadmapping tool that presents a clear, high-level visual roadmap of the product strategy. A visual roadmap is more effective as a communication tool as it makes information easier to grasp and helps to generate consensus across the organization.
When your product teams have access to a roadmap with a visually defined strategy, they can prioritize their focus to meet the goals and be clear on the steps they must take to achieve them. From product managers who define the product strategy to the product teams who implement them, product management roadmap tools are essential for their success.
Product Managers
Product Roadmaps provide an effective means for a product manager to manage the entire process of product development. This encompasses a number of important duties.
Deliver the product strategy to stakeholders
It is the job of the product manager to take the company vision as defined by the business executives and transform it into a product strategy and plan that everyone can access. Visual roadmaps provide a clear concise plan that is easy to understand. By eliminating the need for lengthy vision statements and drawn-out product plans, your teams can align quickly and respond better.
Define the Short, Mid, and Long-Term Goals
By defining the short, mid, and long-term goals, your product teams gain clarity and insight as to where the company is headed. This allows them to better navigate their own processes to ensure the goals are met and priorities are in line with the long-term aspirations of the company. Having a well-defined long-term goal also provides a forum to boost innovation in order to exceed the expectations of the market.
Focus on Strategy and Implementation
Static documents such as Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations take time to create with updates to the product plan requiring the re-creation and redistribution of roadmap documents. This time-consuming process eats up significant manpower hours which limits the product manager in his fundamental role of developing new and successful products.
By using a roadmap template that is agile and responsive to change, updates can be made easily with changes conveyed to all your product teams in real-time.
Respond Quickly to Change
When the entire production process is outlined in one clear, easy-to-understand roadmap, the impact of any disruption and its knock-on effect can quickly be assessed.
Changes in consumer taste and demand may lead to a requirement for feature updates. Informing the appropriate departments to take action to implement the change is easy when they have access to a single source of truth.
Supply chain disruptions may lead to production delays. Understanding the dependencies of a particular resource or component across the product line will allow a product manager to pivot quickly and mitigate any damage that may result from a delay.
Communicate Easily With Stakeholders
Information conveyed using traditional document creation applications and distributed via email has proved to be unreliable for several reasons.
Creating new plans and informing the relevant teams of updates is time-consuming and causes unnecessary delays. In addition, when several versions of a particular roadmap plan exist, understanding which is the most current can cause confusion and lead to implementation errors.
Product roadmap management software improves communication by offering a single source of truth on which all of your product teams can rely. By offering one centralized roadmap that is accessible to all product teams across geographic locations, everyone benefits by having access to a clearly defined set of instructions.
Product Roadmap Tools Benefit All of Your Product Teams
Product roadmap management tools provide numerous built-in functions that are a key benefit to all of your product teams to help them navigate their role more effectively.
Marketing Departments
Visual roadmaps allow the marketing department to be aware of important timelines that will impact the product release date. Both pre-launch and post-launch marketing initiatives have to be planned well ahead of time, so having a clearly defined product timeline will help them to implement their strategy more effectively.
Competitive analysis tools help the marketing team to assess how their product compares with that of the competition.
Engineering Teams
With product goals clearly defined, the engineering team is better able to respond and give feedback on any engineering constraints that may affect the viability of a product.
The Product Option Matrix with its intuitive grid layout makes it easy to set engineering constraints and understand dependencies within the product line plan. This information is easily accessed by other product teams such as sales and marketing so they understand the full extent of the capabilities offered by each individual product.
The feature library also provides a useful tool to understand the type of features and functionality on offer. The ability to model different scenarios with the benefit of weighted scoring also helps to develop a great product that the customer wants.
Sales Management
By staying connected to the product roadmap, the sales team can better plan initiatives to cater to the needs of various markets.
The Product Option Matrix identifies key features and modules for the product line. Knowledge of these features allows sales management to align specific products with the appropriate markets in order to meet consumer demand.
When customer feedback suggests a benefit of focusing on certain features over others, modeling different scenarios will provide quantitative data on financial costs and estimated projections of making that change. This access to quantitative data is useful in the decision-making process.
Product Roadmap Management Software with Stunning Visuals
A product roadmap is a plan that outlines the product strategy from the development process through to product launch and beyond. By providing a platform that brings the product teams and their processes together, Gocious PRM software offers the tools to promote efficiency and transparency in all of your operations. Book your free demo today, to see how our product roadmap with its enhanced visual interface will allow you and your teams to work together more effectively.