A product road map is a simple and clear plan that highlights the future path of a product. It explains several facts such as why you built this product and what you plan to create. This plan helps the product team stay focused and make concerted efforts to achieve product goals.

The product roadmap has many objectives such as:

• It highlights the product’s vision and plan.
• It helps the product team follow the plan.
• Product roadmap ensures that everyone inside the company is satisfied.
• It supports talks about different ideas and choices.
• Product roadmap shares important information with customers and others outside the company.

The product roadmap acts as the bridge and connects the product’s goals with the organization’s overall plan. It usually clearly explains what you will build and when often in a timeline format. Additionally, a clear product roadmap helps leaders to guide the team in a better way and achieve the path of success. 

Oxford Training Centre offers many Product Management Training courses for product managers, focusing on strategy, innovation, agile methods, leadership, and successful product delivery.

Why is the product roadmap ‌crucial?

A product roadmap is important for any company aiming to build successful products. It is a clear, visual plan that explains different factors such as the direction, goals, and timeline for a product’s development. It also makes sure that every product team member understands the bigger picture. By creating a roadmap, the team can align various tasks regarding priority. It helps to focus ‌resources on what matters most and what should be avoided for the time being. 

Roadmaps provide a single source of truth about what we are working on and why. Roadmaps also help foster communication and alignment between teams, like development and sales/leadership. When everyone has a similar understanding of the goals, tracking progress and making adjustments that account for the need to change can eliminate miscommunication, unnecessary questions, and wasted time.

It helps everyone to keep on track and work on the same vision, supports informed decision-making, and increases the chances that a product meets the customer’s requirements which leads to business success. 

How to create a product roadmap?

After getting knowledge about what ‌a product roadmap is and why it is important the next essential part to know is how to create an effective product map. Let’s start by answering this query in a detailed manner. 

1. Viability: The business view

Viability in product management is checking whether the product or its features make good business sense or not. It is one of the important parts of the product plan, answering “Can this product prove beneficial for customers and help the business to make money?”

If you are the product manager, then you are responsible for the below-mentioned points:

• Market Need: Is there sufficient demand for this product?
• Money Made: Will this product earn the expected money?
• Brand Fit: Is the product consistent with the company’s brand and future strategy?
• Competition: How does the product stack up against others? Does it have something unique?
• Rules and Laws: Are there any rules or laws which may prevent the product from succeeding?

In short, viability is your verification to ensure that the product matches the business and market objectives. It ensures your product is not only quality but also able to succeed and earn profit. It is like ensuring your ship is strong and in good waters.

2. Desirability: What customers want

It simply means how many customers are interested in buying and using your product. Desirability is all about what the user wants. 

Sometimes, your products are good and easy to use but if customers don’t like it, it will not do well. Designers must keep in mind the following points:

Even if your product works well and can be made easily, it won’t do well if users don’t like it. Designers think about these important points:

• User Needs: Does the product solve a genuine problem or assist users?
• Easy and Fun: Is the product easy and fun to use?
• User Opinions: What do customers think about the product?
• Brand Image: How does the product alter what users perceive about the brand?
• Feelings: Does the product make users feel bonded or joyful?

Desirability assists you in designing products that users not only require but also love and enjoy. It directs you to design something special for your users.

3. Feasibility: Can we create the product?

Feasibility helps determine if you can make your product idea a reality. It asks questions about “Can we make this product?” 

This brings up the idea of looking at the technology, resources involved, and time constraints. Usually, engineers will go through this.

A couple of important areas to consider for feasibility are:

• Technology: Are we using the right technology? Do we have the right skills to make the product? 
• Resources: Do we have enough people, enough money, enough technology?
• Time: Are we able to deliver the product in sufficient time for the business needs? 
• Maintenance/Growth: Are we able to grow a product and maintain it easily moving forward? 
• Fit: Does it integrate with our existing systems? 

Feasibility helps make sure you have a product idea that is pragmatic – that it is possible. It helps us make sure we are communicating with dreams, and what is possible based on technology and resources. 

Feasibility connects up with two other ideas – viability (could it be a good business case?) and desirability (do users want it?). An effective Product Manager finds the right balance between these three dimensions to ensure the product is viable, desired, and marketable. 

This process of working through feasibility, viability, and desirability is collaborative and reflects a creative-like environment where ideas are shared, tested, and iteratively improved. It brings together how product managers make robust choices while being flexible to adapt and learn.

Five foundational pillars of product roadmap

Creating a product plan is not only about selecting the popular features to sell to customers. Businesses must follow the below-mentioned 5 steps to make a smart product plan.  

1. Identify the issue and value

Taking the initial step by finding out the complications that your customers face and making a plan on how to fix these issues will help your organization. This plan is the basis of your product’s value. 

Example: If a user is suffering from a slow checkout problem, your guess would be, “Making checkout faster will lower cart abandonment by 15% and boost sales.”

Don’t only comply with client requests. While they may desire specific features, their true needs may be more straightforward, such as receiving timely alerts.

At this point, the central focus should be problem and main objective. The solution to the issue will come later. 

2. Generate solution ideas

Once you have a clear plan and idea about your objective, the next step is to collaborate with engineers and designers to come up with many different choices. At this point, think with a broad mind and never reject any ideas too soon. 

For example: If your purpose is to increase the work speed, possible ideas might include adding automatic features and adopting simpler steps. 

Be careful not to stick only to the simple idea. Encourage all members to think creatively and keep in mind all ideas before the final selection. Choose one that is most effective. 

3. Time to perform practical estimates

Once you have identified potential solutions, check to see if they can be made real, given the constraints imposed upon you in terms of time, money, technology, and the capability of your team. This is your chance to reality-check your ideas and ask, “Do we have enough people and skills to make these things real?” 

Think of this as verifying that you have enough fuel, time, and cash to complete each leg of your journey. This allows you to transition from creative thinking to practical solutions that your team can build.

Do not underestimate the problem, and be sure to include any other tools or systems that may interact with your work.

4. Prioritize with strategic intent

One important step is to decide what to do ‌first. It is easy to use the RICE method. RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

• Reach means how many customers will take advantage.
• Impact means how ‌it helps to achieve business goals.
• Confidence means how sure you are that it will work well.
• Effort means how much time you spend and what resources you use. 

Prioritization allows you to choose the best value features with your resources by determining the best possible blend of what’s useful and what can be achieved with your resources.

Make sure that you don’t pick features based on whether there is a money-making opportunity, but also take into account where the user value will be and whether they are practical to build.

5. Plan tradeoffs and order projects

Next, make the best decision possible about all your important projects, given limits, options, and dependent relationships. Assess how each project will affect other projects, what each project needs, and when each project should occur.

This means you’ve established the rough route for your plan based on the distance from one step to the next, its importance as well as its goal. In terms of project management, you have decided the best path to achieve plan completion while ensuring resource allocation is made appropriately.

Don’t conduct multiple significant projects at once because you risk spreading your resource allocation over too much and ending up with low quality.

Following these methods ensures your plan is transparent, user-focused, and actionable. Ultimately this will set your product up for sustainable success.