A product roadmap will information you thru the product management course of, which is notoriously generally known as a detail-oriented self-discipline. Stepping into the weeds is a part of the product supervisor job description, however one ought to by no means get misplaced there. Product managers should use instruments similar to a product improvement roadmap to carry their heads out of the day-to-day operations of the product improvement course of to take a bigger take a look at the place they’re in context.
Product roadmaps are important to product administration as a result of they permit the product manager and anybody concerned within the challenge to see the massive image. We’ve created a product roadmap instance and template to clarify how they work, however first, let’s outline what goes into making a product roadmap in order that it’s as clear and helpful as attainable for product improvement.
What Is a Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap is a product improvement instrument that captures the product imaginative and prescient and technique and serves as a information for executing that product technique, whereas getting inner stakeholders aligned, facilitating discussions round product options, and aiding communication with exterior stakeholders and prospects. It’s all laid out so that everybody within the product improvement staff understands it.
The product roadmap additionally referred to as the product improvement roadmap, is the duty of the product supervisor, each to create and to make use of as a communication instrument. This units the correct expectations whereas sharing the product overview and highlighting essential options to come back.
Product managers use software program instruments like ProjectManager to create product roadmaps. ProjectManager is provided with Gantt charts, kanban boards, job lists and challenge calendars that can assist you create and handle your product roadmap. Get began with ProjectManager without spending a dime.
Why Is It Essential to Create a Product Roadmap?
Constructing a product roadmap permits producers to visualise and schedule all of the actions that have to be executed to develop, manufacture and launch merchandise to the market.
Product roadmaps are a flexible instrument that can assist information the efforts of cross-functional groups, monitor progress, estimate the costs and period of duties and talk the standing of the product improvement course of to stakeholders.
There are numerous varieties of product roadmaps to select from. Every has professionals and cons relying on the product planning and work management method of your group.
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Product Roadmap Template
Use this free Product Roadmap Template for Excel to handle your tasks higher.
Product Roadmap Instance
Right here’s what a Gantt chart product roadmap instance appears like. Gantt charts are an incredible planning instrument that enables product managers to create interactive product roadmaps.
With ProjectManager’s Gantt Charts, you possibly can create product roadmaps to maintain monitor of person tales, epics, assets, your staff’s workload and far more!
Beneath, you possibly can see a product roadmap instance wherein a company makes use of ProjectManager’s Gantt chart to make an interactive product roadmap which permits its product improvement staff to visualise and schedule all the activities required to develop a product, check it to make sure it meets high quality and security requirements and launch it into the market.
In addition to itemizing duties and estimating their period, you possibly can assign them to your staff members and ProjectManager’s Gantt chart will routinely calculate labor prices primarily based on the staff member’s hourly price. Additionally, manually enter different prices for all of the duties, which helps keep track of the budget.
Who Oversees the Means of Creating Product Roadmaps?
Usually, the product supervisor is accountable for overseeing the method of creating and updating the product roadmap, however attributable to their significance for the success of a producing firm, making the product roadmap must be must be a cross-functional effort that welcomes enter from different departments similar to advertising and marketing, gross sales, customer support or the chief staff.
Every of those departments can present helpful info that would assist the product improvement staff higher prioritize its efforts when it comes to creating the merchandise that can assist the corporate obtain its strategic planning goals.
What Sorts of Groups Use Product Roadmaps?
Product roadmaps are particularly helpful for companies that develop advanced merchandise that take months or years to make, as these require in depth project planning. In case your group designs and develops such bodily or digital merchandise it’s best to use a product roadmap to schedule duties, assign work to staff members, monitor their progress and monitor useful resource allocation and prices, amongst many different issues.
Listed below are some examples of industries that use product roadmaps.
- Software program improvement
- Vehicle
- Robotics
- Electronics & home equipment
- Aerospace engineering
What Instruments Can You Use to Create and Handle a Product Roadmap?
Making a product roadmap is a crucial duty for any product supervisor or enterprise proprietor, but it surely doesn’t have to be overly sophisticated, so long as the fitting instruments are employed. ProjectManager, for instance, is challenge administration software program geared up with planning, scheduling and monitoring instruments that are perfect for making a product roadmap. Listed below are a few of these options.
Gantt Charts & Roadmap View
ProjectManager’s Gantt chart helps visualize the product roadmap on a timeline that enables one to assign work to staff members, estimate their period and prices, determine job dependencies and track their progress in actual time. ProjectManager additionally affords a roadmap view, which is analogous to a Gantt chart, but it surely supplies a higher-level view of a number of product improvement tasks.
Kanban Boards
A product roadmap shouldn’t be only a doc, however reasonably a piece administration instrument that helps handle the product improvement course of. ProjectManager’s kanban boards, for instance, will let you plan, schedule and assign duties to your staff members so you possibly can execute the work that’s deliberate in your product roadmap.
Dashboards
One of the essential elements of managing a product roadmap is monitoring the staff’s progress and monitoring the price of manufacturing merchandise. ProjectManager routinely calculates the labor prices of the product roadmap actions primarily based on the staff member’s pay price and the full work hours assigned to them.
Workload Charts
Understanding how work is allotted is important for making an correct product roadmap. ProjectManager’s workload administration chart screens the variety of hours workers are scheduled to work to raised perceive useful resource availability and decide if workload allocation is balanced or whether or not some staff members are over or underallocated.
Product Roadmap Templates
Listed below are two free product roadmap templates to get began with the product roadmapping course of. One makes a web-based Gantt chart product roadmap utilizing ProjectManager, which has superior planning, scheduling and monitoring options. The opposite is a free product roadmap template for Excel, which is a less complicated format that visualizes the actions to be executed over a timeline.
With ProjectManager’s Gantt Charts, you possibly can create product roadmaps to maintain monitor of person tales, epics, assets, your staff’s workload and far more! Get began immediately with our free 30-day trial.
On-line Product Roadmap Template
If utilizing a product roadmap template may be too advanced, we’ve a pleasant different that can assist you create one. Our product development template has a product roadmap pattern. All that you must do is well customise its fields to replicate your product improvement course of.
Product Roadmap Template for Excel
This free product roadmap template for Excel maps all of the steps of a product improvement course of in a Gantt chart format. Merely record the duties and alter the bars’ sizes to symbolize their estimated period. Then color-code the duties and assign them to staff members.
You can even determine milestones, that are essential achievements that may show you how to rapidly summarize the progress of your product improvement course of.
Sorts of Product Roadmaps
Right here’s a fast overview of a number of the commonest varieties of product roadmaps to get a greater thought of the primary benefits and downsides of those approaches.
Characteristic-Based mostly Product Roadmap
As its identify suggests, one of these product roadmap makes use of a visual timeline to indicate the time it takes to make every product characteristic, till a completed product with all of the options is created.
Agile product improvement groups, for instance, check with product options as person tales, that are developed one after the other throughout sprints and represented in product roadmaps generally created utilizing kanban boards and Gantt charts.
Purpose-Oriented Product Roadmap
Basically, a goal-oriented product roadmap works equally to a feature-based product roadmap. Nevertheless, a goal-oriented product roadmap is among the easiest varieties of product roadmap as a result of it doesn’t visualize every product characteristic or user story on the product roadmap timeline. As a substitute, it provides a number of product options into objectives, that are simpler to trace.
Consequence-Based mostly Product Roadmap
As a substitute of specializing in product options or product improvement objectives, an outcome-based product roadmap timeline will present the outcomes from all of the actions wanted to develop a product.
Associated: Free Product Development Template
On this product roadmapping technique, the primary precedence is to let workers know what must be executed, the anticipated outcomes and the estimated timeline.
Product Portfolio Roadmap
You could create a product portfolio roadmap to trace the progress of the event means of a number of merchandise or tasks in a program or portfolio with just one instrument, which is right for producers with massive product portfolios or in depth analysis and improvement R&D efforts. You could select your product portfolio roadmap to be characteristic, objective or outcome-based.
Agile Product Roadmap
Agile is a project management methodology that may additionally assist product and software program improvement groups plan, schedule and monitor their actions. In an agile technique, work is deliberate and executed in brief iterations of time (generally known as sprints) to ship product options, that are known as person tales as a result of they’re product options described from the person’s standpoint and never the producer’s.
Whereas agile groups sometimes plan their sprints and monitor the completion of duties utilizing kanban boards, they nonetheless use Gantt charts or different timeline instruments to visualise the full timeline of their product roadmaps.
Key Parts of a Product Roadmap
As acknowledged above, product managers must know find out how to create and handle a product roadmap. This requires understanding the important components of a product improvement roadmap.
- Product Technique: This refers back to the planning means of researching the market, setting enterprise objectives, making a product imaginative and prescient and creating a product primarily based on buyer and stakeholder suggestions.
- Product Imaginative and prescient: Simply as with an organization’s vision statement, your product imaginative and prescient describes what your organization intends to realize with this product, what’s the core worth proposition, and the primary product advantages.
- Objectives & Targets: In product administration, objectives are high-level statements that give a bigger context to the product when it comes to what it’s attempting to realize. Targets are extra particular and lead to tangible deliverables similar to product options.
- Strategic Initiatives: Strategic initiatives are a bunch of associated person tales wanted to finish particular objectives. There might be a number of initiatives being executed concurrently in a product roadmap.
- Product Releases: A product launch is the launch of latest options, completion of person tales, epics and different additions to an present product.
- Consumer Tales: In product administration, a user story is solely a product characteristic, solely described from the person’s perspective in order that the product improvement staff higher understands what must be executed.
- Epics: An epic is a person story that’s too advanced to be executed in a single product launch. Epics have to be damaged down into a number of person tales which can be simpler to develop by the product staff.
- Timeline: One of many important functions of a product improvement roadmap is to trace progress. That’s why product roadmaps ought to embrace a timeline that defines due dates and milestones.
- Product Growth Standing: Your product roadmap ought to have standing indicators and metrics to find out the share of completion of duties, objectives, person tales and epics.
Product Roadmap Greatest Practices
In addition to choosing probably the most handy kind of product roadmap and the fitting instruments to create one, there are numerous different issues to contemplate. Listed below are some finest practices that can assist the product roadmapping course of.
- Set Measurable Objectives and Targets: Set objectives and goals that may be measured utilizing KPIs, OKRs and different efficiency administration metrics.
- Promote Collaboration and Communication: There are possible many groups, and positively totally different individuals and departments, all working collectively to create the product. Due to this fact, the product roadmap should facilitate that collaboration by means of clear communication of the general product technique and preserve everybody on the identical web page.
- Align with Company Targets: The high-level view of a product roadmap is designed to dovetail with the general goals of the company to verify the product is aligned with the place the corporate goes. (Learn extra about aligning projects to strategy.)
- Depart Time to Study and Analysis: This graphic view of the schedule, which is laid out from left to proper, should additionally embrace no matter analysis and studying curve is required to verify everybody on the product staff is educated about what they’re doing and the way they’re doing it.
Advantages of Utilizing a Product Roadmap
It must be apparent {that a} product roadmap is a superb instrument to make sure that everybody is aware of what the product is about, the way it’ll be executed and who’s doing what. But it surely by no means hurts to strengthen the advantages for somewhat additional motivation.
Quick Communication
The product roadmap is an effective way to rapidly talk the product technique and objectives at a excessive stage and with visible readability that makes it simple to know for everybody. This contains managing the expectations of stakeholders in addition to speaking with all different essential events. A product roadmap is a residing doc and must be up to date recurrently, so it’s an incredible instrument to ship to anybody within the product group or prospects to maintain them up to date on progress.
Retains Selections Grounded
As constraints and variables happen, the product roadmap retains your decision-making tethered to the objectives and goals of the product, so you possibly can prioritize duties and make choices rapidly and precisely.
ProjectManager Is the Greatest Product Roadmap Device
Many instruments may help one create a product roadmap, from the easy to the extra dynamic. As a result of the product roadmap is a visible instrument, although, it’s not one thing that may be slapped collectively on a Phrase doc or perhaps a spreadsheet.
Nevertheless, a spreadsheet generally is a good place to gather all the data wanted to enter the product roadmap. There are software program options that may take that uncooked information and import it to show on a visible timeline. ProjectManager imports spreadsheets and immediately creates a Gantt chart, which is a visible timeline.
The Gantt chart will show all of the milestones of the product, the duties will probably be factors on the timeline with strains throughout that timeline to point the period of the duties. If any duties rely upon each other, they are often linked. All of which supply a graphic and clear overview of the product.
For a special visible expression of the product, there are Kanban boards. Kanban is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing the place columns are created and underneath which duties which can be associated are collected, that are referred to as Kanban playing cards. These playing cards can then be moved throughout the board to point the place they’re within the course of.
Each product roadmaps are options of ProjectManager, however they’re solely a part of the instruments supplied by the software program. With ProjectManager, the product roadmaps are on-line and straightforward to transform and share. They’re residing paperwork that replace in real-time and supply collaborative instruments to maintain groups speaking successfully. The real-time dashboard can filter information and make it into charts and graphs. It’s like having a product roadmap fueled with octane.
The product roadmap is among the many important paperwork that assist begin and preserve product administration on monitor. ProjectManager is on-line challenge administration software program that has options to create product roadmaps in a visible fashion that works along with your product. Plus, it affords instruments that take that product roadmap to the following stage. See the way it may help you by taking this free 30-day trial.
