5 Steps to Develop a Product Roadmap & 10 Best Practices

Product roadmapping is crucial for steering your product development towards success, yet doing so is far from straight-forward. That’s why, we have decided to leverage our roadmap design experience and walk you through five essential steps of building a product roadmap, from setting goals to establishing a realistic timeline.

On top of that, we’ll share ten best practices to ensure the roadmap’s effectiveness – using data to inform decisions, ensuring total visibility and accounting for risks will all be discussed as well.

What Is a Product Roadmap and Why Are They Necessary?

A product roadmap acts as a central source of truth, ensuring that all team members, from executives to customer support, are on the same page regarding the product’s trajectory. It doesn’t just list features and timelines; it articulates the “why” behind each initiative, linking them to vital business and customer goals. 

In essence, a well-crafted product roadmap not only guides day-to-day decision-making but also creates a shared understanding of what long-term success is. At the same time, its utility will slightly vary depending on the roles in the company, for instance:

• For Leadership: Executives rely on product roadmaps to monitor progress towards strategic goals and make decisions about resource allocation and future investments.
• For Product Teams: Product managers use roadmaps to make sure every team member understands their roles in product development and can prioritize their tasks accordingly.
• For Development Teams: Engineers and developers refer to roadmaps to understand the broader context of their work – it helps them see how their efforts contribute to the overall product vision.

Planning for a Product Roadmap

Before you can start doing that, some preparation is in order. While it’s not necessary to have all of your assumptions validated by hard data at this stage, it’s better to at least have them well-formulated. This, and a number of other activities is what can do when planning for a product roadmap: 

• Define Hypotheses: Before outlining your roadmap, formulate your assumptions about market needs and user expectations. Try to identify gaps in existing solutions and understand the root causes behind customer dissatisfaction.
• Segment Users and Prioritize Needs: Segmentation is key to understanding diverse user needs and prioritizing features accordingly. Define user personas based on behavior, demographics, and pain points – this will ensure that your roadmap will address the most pressing needs of your core user groups.
• Conduct Competitor Analysis: Gain a competitive edge by conducting in-depth analysis of competitors. Identify competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and benchmark against industry leaders to understand best practices and emerging trends.
• Establish KPIs: Set clear, measurable KPIs to track the success of your product roadmap. Define metrics such as user adoption rates, customer satisfaction scores, and revenue growth targets. 

How to Create a Product Roadmap

Creating a product roadmap is essentially translating a strategic plan into actionable steps that guide product development and align with your business goals. There are different ways in which this could be achieved, but the following process is what our team believes to be the best: 

Step 1: Understanding Both Business and User Goals

Define the broader strategic goals of your company – revenue targets, market expansion plans, competitive positioning, etc. When doing so, make sure that the goals you set are specific and measurable, i.e. “to increase the product’s conversion rate by 30%”. This will be necessary for when you start aligning your product features with these business goals, as will want every feature to directly contribute to your success.

At the same time, your business goals will be irrelevant if they don’t match with your users’ goals – for users to convert, your product must give them something they want. That’s why, invest time into uncovering their pain points, preferences, behaviors, and aspirations related to your product. 

Remember that all effective product roadmaps strike a delicate balance between business imperatives and user needs. 

Step 2: Brainstorming Features and Estimating Efforts

Create an inclusive environment where everyone on the team, from product managers to designers, developers, and even customer support, are encouraged to contribute ideas. Feel free to experiment with various techniques like mind mapping, design thinking workshops, or ideation sessions to generate a broad spectrum of feature concepts.

At the same time, collaborate closely with your development team in particular to estimate the resources required for each feature. Consider factors such as development time, technical complexity, skill availability, and potential dependencies. 

Step 3: Prioritizing Features

With features defined and efforts estimated, it’s time for prioritization. For that purpose, you may use the MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) framework or the Value vs. Effort matrix (which is our preferred choice). Assess each feature based on its potential impact on user experience, market differentiation, technical feasibility, and alignment with your goals.

For example, a feature like Single Sign-On (SSO) is typically considered very high value against roughly medium effort, which automatically makes it a high priority. 

Step 4: Marking Dependencies

At this stage, you need to map out dependencies between features, tasks, and milestones to make the execution as smooth as possible. Look at both technical dependencies (e.g., API integrations, platform compatibility) and logical dependencies (e.g., feature prerequisites) early in the planning phase. 

Also make sure to anticipate potential risks associated with dependencies and develop contingency plans to mitigate their impact. It’s usually a good practice to have clear communication channels in place so that your team can quickly resolve dependency-related issues should they arise.  

Step 5: Establishing a Timeline

Finally, you need to break down your product roadmap into iterative phases or releases aligned with development sprints. Define clear milestones and deadlines, but don’t be too stringent with them – you should balance ambitious goals with realistic expectations to maintain momentum and keep the team motivated. At the same time, there are situations when meeting strict deadlines is a must – for example, the end of a fiscal year or a big holiday.

Either way, you mustn’t forget to regularly communicate timeline updates and adjustments to every team member to manage their expectations.

What Makes a Great Product Roadmap? 3 Key Elements

From our experience, here are three most essential elements that distinguish a strong product roadmap from a substandard one:

Feature/Goal Alignment 

A great roadmap tells a story of how each feature contributes to the overarching business strategy. It aligns with the company’s vision and customer needs, so that every initiative serves a purpose. 

On the contrary, a bad example would be to include features into a product that don’t aim to achieve any specific goal. Only because the feature looks somewhat appealing is never a good enough reason – while an AI-chatbot might seem trendy, if your users don’t want it, don’t plan for it. 

Sufficient Flexibility

Avoid committing to very strict deadlines – our experience has shown us that most of the time they are unrealistic and only cause stress for the team. Instead, your roadmap needs to accommodate changes in market conditions, customer feedback and even basic human factors such as dips in productivity. 

If possible for your specific product, use iterative cycles of planning, development, and feedback in the roadmap. Agile sprints will allow for incremental feature releases and steady improvement that will be based on user validation. 

Clear Dependency Outline

Clear dependencies on a roadmap make sure that all features are sequenced in a logical order – this way, teams can identify critical paths and prioritize their development efforts effectively. For example, it’s natural that core features must precede those that build upon them, but not all roadmaps have it vividly spelled out.

A well-defined dependency outline also helps with realistic timeline management. With well-outlined dependencies, teams can establish more accurate project milestones. This prevents overcommitting or underestimating project durations, ensuring that at least most deadlines are met consistently throughout the development process.

10 Best Practices for Product Roadmapping

As you may have realized by now, creating an effective product roadmap requires more than just plotting out features and deadlines. To finish off our article, we present you ten best practices that can help ensure your roadmap is your asset, not a liability: 

• Start with Clear Goals and Objectives: Clearly define your business objectives and user needs at the outset, and translate these into specific, measurable goals for your product roadmap. For example, if your goal is to reduce user churn by 15% within a year, identify features that directly enhance user retention.
• Use a Value-Based Prioritization Framework: Adopt an effort vs. value approach to prioritize your features. This ensures you only focus on initiatives that offer the highest value relative to their cost and effort. 
• Stay Flexible: Design your roadmap to be flexible, allowing for adjustments as you gather new insights and as conditions change. Establish regular checkpoints to reassess your roadmap and  maintain a buffer for unexpected changes.
• Clearly Outline Dependencies: Identify and document all dependencies early in the planning process. Use visual tools like Gantt charts or dependency matrices to map out and manage these dependencies, ensuring a clear understanding of how different elements interrelate. 
• Use Your Data: Utilize your analytics and user feedback to inform your roadmap decisions. Collect data on feature usage, customer satisfaction, and market trends to prioritize and refine your roadmap.
• Ensure Cohesive and Intuitive User Experience: Avoid creating a Frankenstein roadmap by integrating features seamlessly and logically. Conduct user research and usability testing to validate your designs and iterate based on the feedback received.
• Make Roadmap Updates Visible to Everyone: Set a regular schedule for reviewing and updating the roadmap. This ensures it remains a living document that accurately reflects the current state and future direction of your product development. No less important is making sure that every team member sees the same roadmap version as everyone else at any given moment.
• Focus on Deliverables and Outcomes: Define success in terms of user impact and business results, rather than just feature completion. Use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to align features with desired outcomes and track progress against these key results to measure the impact of each roadmap item.
• Promote Cross-Functional Collaboration: Nurture a culture of collaboration across different teams (development, design, marketing, customer support) so that all perspectives are considered and integrated into the roadmap. Hold regular cross-functional meetings to discuss roadmap progress and encourage collective problem-solving.
• Account for Risks: Identify potential risks and uncertainties early in the roadmap planning process. Develop contingency plans and various risk mitigation strategies to address these risks and minimize disruption to your project timelines.

Conclusion

Product roadmapping is a multifaceted process that requires strategic foresight, meticulous planning, and continuous adaptation. So, how to develop a product roadmap? The five key steps are understanding both business and user goals, brainstorming and estimating features, prioritizing them, marking dependencies, and establishing a realistic timeline – and each should be approached with great care.