The best practices for product roadmaps assist you in making the most of your approach to managing and prioritizing your backlog. Every product person’s livelihood revolves around product roadmaps, from product managers to engineers to seasoned leaders.
Being so important, it’s crucial to do things properly, which is why this article compiles a list of product roadmap best practices.
This paper walks you through 7 immediately effective product roadmap tips to align your business around shared goals and excite customers about the future of your product, whether you’re going to establish your first product roadmap or want to improve your present systems.
Initiatives for new products boost productivity and optimism, but sometimes ideas fall short of expectations.
Use these product roadmap best practices to change your strategy or build a new product roadmap with a solid basis if you’ve ever had a product roadmap experience that wasn’t as successful or joyful as you had hoped.
You should keep your vision and strategy in mind while you create and use your product roadmap. A vision helps you stay focused on the desired result, and strategies help you get there. Your roadmap has a vision at the top and strategies throughout.
The result or effect of the product as a whole is represented by your product roadmap vision. You might consider asking, “What do we want users to accomplish?” your product vision, or “how do we serve users?”
The product efforts and features you’ll employ to realize the goal are represented by product roadmap strategies. What features do users require for our product to help them complete their tasks? Alternatively, “What programs will assist various user segments in completing their jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)?”
The appropriate timeframes (if any) to include on your product roadmaps should be carefully considered in light of the needs of various audiences, scenarios, and organizations.
The results of ProductPlan’s 2018 study of 500 product professionals show how various teams and sectors use various timeframes. Given that the majority of product roadmaps have timelines of four to twelve months:
Make sure to give the appropriate time span for your roadmaps considerable thought. You might even determine that the best approach for your company’s product roadmap in the circumstances you find yourself in is to not include any deadlines. That’s fine; just give it some careful thought.
Now that you’ve thought about your timescale and realized that it must change depending on your circumstances, you need to think about how frequently you should update your roadmaps.
If you read online or speak with a lot of product roadmap tool businesses, they will likely advise you to “update frequently!” as best practice. This is a trap, though. Communication pandemonium can result from frequent updates.
Customers that can’t handle or don’t want frequent modifications to roadmaps include CIOs of huge corporations. Finally, frequent updates could indicate that your vision is unclear.
The takeaway from this is that it’s always best to decide for yourself how frequently to update your product plan. It might be appropriate for your team to make it once a month, and you might need to make it once a week right now but not in two months. It might only need to be updated every quarter.
You should make sure you invest in systems and processes that ensure your roadmaps are communicated because roadmaps themselves are communication tools.
Since this is practically its own issue, let’s simply briefly outline some of the procedures you should put in place:
If you agree that product roadmaps are primarily tools for communication, then it stands to reason that you would want many roadmaps in order to communicate with various audiences in the most effective manner.
John Carter, a consultant to Amazon, Apple, Fitbit, and other companies, suggests that each product manager or product team have a minimum of three roadmaps:
Additionally, you could wish to include numerous additional perspectives of your roadmap, such as an external roadmap for your clients. The possibilities here are endless; add what you require to effectively communicate with those with whom you must interact.
This best practice involves assessing the results your roadmap is producing and determining the fidelity for each item/outcome in light of those results.
Instead of giving some vague and pointless generalizations like “an item should be X weeks” or “an item should be X man days effort,” this is about carefully evaluating each item and contemplating what you want to communicate with which audience.
In actuality, this means that, because the audience places a high value on that short, straightforward work, you may have it listed on your roadmap in flashing, attention-grabbing type next to longer-term, chunkier activities that require more time to complete (like your customers).
Assumptions, data, goals, and priorities are used to develop your product roadmap, but both the user experience and product management are dynamic.
The proactive, ongoing activity of seeking out fresh user experience insights to guide product changes is known as continuous discovery. Since discovery is naturally user-centric and inquisitive, you’ll come up with fresh concepts for future product decisions based on data.
The ability of your product team to swiftly, often, and sustainably release product changes and updates, such as new features and issue fixes, is known as continuous delivery. Additionally, continuous delivery provides you with new chances to test and gain knowledge each time you create a feature or update.
Utilizing a dual-track product development strategy, continual discovery and delivery both advance your product, meriting a position in your product roadmap process.
Product roadmaps are very helpful, whether they are utilized privately or publicly. They can be used to inform stakeholders of impending events and maintain organization among all of your company’s departments.
Product road mapping serves as a conduit between gathering customer feedback and carrying it out. Your roadmap will spark discussions about the potential of your product and provide background information for the work you’re doing.
Keep your product roadmap up-to-date, accessible, and well-maintained. You’ll save a ton of time by streamlining every step of the product planning process.
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