What Is a Good Product Roadmap

Why does your product need a roadmap?

“What is the purpose of a product roadmap?” - is a popular question among those who are going to plan their product strategy. The first thing you need to realize is that your product is the absolute result of the whole team's work. A released product is a final result of all the steps and actions of the company when a potential customer understands if he needs to pay for this value or not.

In a perfect world, this value should outweigh the spent costs to allow your business to grow. In this case, every member of the team will see that efforts were not senseless and all the steps made were correct.

How you can use the Product Roadmap?

To use a roadmap effectively it is necessary to remember the two important stages:

1. research and development of the roadmap;
2. following the roadmap while moving to your goals.

Both steps are very important to bring benefits to your team and company.

Developing a good roadmap and finding the best route to success is something from art. You need to figure out what should be described on it and what’s not. Scaling and indicating details are important aspects of creating a product roadmap. You and your team have to know the planning period and the obstacles that may arise.

Normally, at different phases, your roadmap:

• allows you to clarify how the team is going to achieve its goal;
• explains what the Objective is;
• can be a document that includes the interests of all involved parties;
• answers the question “when will you finally do this?”

How to define the Objective of a good Product Roadmap?

 It seems to be rather difficult to set objectives. There is a myriad of examples when badly formulated objectives had a bad effect on business.

Why can setting goals be tough? The subject of clear causation, prioritization, and selection makes the process difficult. Compromises harm the good objectives. They can mislead your team and as a result, the objectives will not be completed.

A good example can be a release of a new product. Every team wants their application or service to be useful and enjoyable for people. To complete this goal, the team needs to “release a product”. So the “product” has become an instrument to achieve an original objective. 

To identify the Objective:

1. Set the Objective: Release a good application.

2. Ask the question: “For what?”. What is the purpose of “releasing an application”? The purposes may vary:

• achieve commercial success
• attract more users
• personal ambitions

3. Set a causal relationship between the final reasons and the original goal. The fact that a “product release” will lead to “commercial success” is not obvious.

Product release seems to be a rather abstract objective. And to make a release successful we need to set the factors that will indicate its commercial triumph.

What will lead you to commercial success?

• Your product solves user’s issues
• Users know about the capabilities of your app
• Users enjoy your app and use it actively

These factors have a direct impact on commercial indicators and can be easily reformulated into a particular objective. A good roadmap in Goals by KeepSolid can easily answer the questions “What will happen to the product in the future and why?”

Tips and tricks to evaluate the roadmap quality 

1. Set the objectives and Key Results on the way

Before developing a roadmap - describe your product vision and actual commercial conditions (use SWOT and KANO diagrams).

Commercial conditions can show your current position and product vision will describe the destination point of your product. Try to create a good product roadmap for several quarters or months. In today’s fast-changing it is not efficient to design a product roadmap for a year or longer.

A good product roadmap is usually developed for several quarters or months. The VUCA world has made it almost senseless to develop a roadmap for a year. The world is changing too fast. Commercial KPIs can also help you to figure out the best route to your objective.

2. Define the issues 

The difference between the desired condition and the current condition can be defined in the languages of the issue. It is necessary to find the issues that can make more impact after being solved. Where can you get these issues? The sources for them are as follows:

• Feedback of users
• Product Competitive Analysis
• Usage Data

3. Consider stakeholder expectations

The product lifecycle depends on many engaged parties. The product must solve the user’s issues, be interesting for investment and have a clear and understandable product strategy. Your project must be trusted by all parties interested in it. And there is no better way to address these issues than to involve the right resources in development.

Roadmap alignment should start from the early days of roadmapping and strategy planning. The team and stakeholders should participate in work and discussion. 

4. Define success metrics for objectives

The language of numbers is the common and understandable language in business. Using a well-developed roadmap, the team will know the status of the tasks and realize if they are going according to plan. Understandable and clear criteria for success like KPI will let you know if the goal was achieved and if your actions were successful.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) approach is the perfect methodology to answer these questions. It is a great framework to set goals and divide them into smaller and clearer tasks. The main  steps for using the OKR approach are:

• Intent to use. The customer’s action shows us that he is going to use the product we have created.
• Activation. The moment that shows us that our product becomes a valuable item for the customer.
• Engagement. The stage when our customer continues using our product or feature and receives value (how much, how often, for what period).

5. Determine the responsible parties

When you use the roadmap designed by yourself there will be no questions and all the information displayed on it will be clear. It turns different when the team has to use your roadmap. But if a product roadmap is designed wisely, the team will definitely gain invaluable collaborative experience. Cooperative research, setting objectives, and finding answers are, in fact, already half of the battle.

A good product roadmap will help you and your team to find the best route and get ready for unpredictable events or changing circumstances.

Conclusion

It is not so easy to create a good product roadmap. You have to clarify your Objectives and Key Results, manage priorities, and explain all the details to your team. And one of the most important things is to remember, that product is not about features, it’s about solved issues of your users. This must be your focus.

The product team must define purposes and problems and find a way to solve them within a certain period. Based on this, a product team sets goals and defines Key Success Factors (metrics and key performance indicators).

Questions:

Can the Roadmap be used for operational management?

It depends on the purpose for which the map was initially created. It’s all about the details. Let’s turn to paper maps. It is unlikely that a world map will help you plan a trip to Andalusia, but if this is a map of this region itself … Then why not? Military maps, for example, are an extremely accurate tool and it is almost impossible to solve even operational tasks without them.

A problem may arise when, for example, a strategic roadmap is used to solve operational issues.

What is the difference between a Gantt and a roadmap?

Gantt is a project tool whose main value is to implement planned activities within certain limitations.

The main difference lies in the purposes. The purpose of the roadmap is to get to the goal (as you know, many roads lead to it). To do this, you often need to make changes to the route.

The purpose of using Gantt is to accomplish what was planned with a minimum number of changes. The fact is that if a project requires certain changes, it can become a different project and a new Gantt will be needed for it.