Roadmapping is the process of creating a visual representation that outlines a project’s goals, major deliverables, and timelines, serving as a strategic guide to align teams and stakeholders toward achieving specific objectives.

Roadmaps bridge strategy and execution, visually guiding teams on objectives and timelines. They provide clarity, align teams, and ensure focus on shared goals.

A well-crafted roadmap aligns teams on priorities and timelines, guiding decisions, resource allocation, and focus on key tasks.

Clear communication and alignment drive successful roadmaps. By articulating the vision and steps, they manage expectations, foster collaboration, and keep teams on track.

Roadmap vs. Project Plan

Roadmaps offer a high-level strategic overview, focusing on vision, direction, and major milestones while defining the “why” and “what” of product development.

In contrast, a project plan details execution, specifying the “how” and “when” with steps, timelines, and resources. It focuses on daily tasks needed to implement the roadmap’s vision.

The roadmap sets direction with a strategic framework, while the project plan translates it into actionable tasks, ensuring effective execution.

Roadmap vs. Strategy

Strategy and roadmaps are closely related but serve distinct roles in the process. Strategy sets long-term goals and vision, answering “why” and “what” to provide clear direction.

The roadmap, on the other hand, is a visual implementation plan that outlines how the strategy will be executed over time. It details the specific initiatives, timelines, and resources needed to achieve the strategic goals.

Together, they provide a comprehensive framework for achieving organizational objectives.

The Product Strategy Stack is a framework that delineates the relationship between a company’s mission, strategy, product plans, and goals to ensure alignment and effective execution.

This structured approach ensures that each layer builds upon the previous one, facilitating coherent decision-making and alignment across the organization.

1. Company Mission. The world your company sees and the change it wants to bring to that world.

2. Company Strategy. The logical approach you have to bring your company’s mission into being.

3. Product Strategy. The logical approach for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy.

4. Product Roadmap. The sequence of features that implement the Product Strategy.

5. Product Goals. The quarterly and day-to-day outcomes of the Product Roadmap that measure progress against the Product Strategy.

Definition and Evaluation

The Top-Down approach defines the strategy by working from the company’s mission down to execution, ensuring alignment and clarity at each level.

The Bottom-Up approach evaluates execution by tracking progress from product goals upward, measuring impact against company-level objectives.

Four Artefacts of the Product Strategy Model

Roman Pichler’s Product Strategy Model includes four key artifacts:

1. Product Vision. Defines purpose and impact.

2. Product Strategy. Outlines approach, market, and goals.

3. Product Roadmap. High-level plan for evolution.

4. Product Backlog. Prioritized implementation tasks

Together, they ensure strategic, goal-driven product development.

Roman’s Product Strategy Model

By Roman Pichler on 2022/9/13

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romanpichler.com

Product roadmaps come in various formats, each tailored to specific planning horizons and objectives. Understanding these formats helps organizations align their initiatives effectively.

Strategic Roadmaps

Timeframe: 12+ months.

Strategic roadmaps provide a high-level overview of an organization’s long-term objectives, aligning product development with overarching business goals.

Types:

• Business Roadmap: Aligns product initiatives with the company’s long-term business objectives, ensuring cohesive progress across the organization.

• Goal-Oriented Roadmap: Centers on achieving specific, measurable objectives, guiding teams toward desired outcomes rather than merely delivering features.

• Strategic Roadmap: Provides a high-level overview of major initiatives and timelines, aligning stakeholders on the product’s direction and priorities.

• Portfolio Roadmap: Offers a consolidated view of multiple products or projects, facilitating resource allocation and strategic planning across a portfolio.

• Product Vision: Articulates the long-term mission and aspirations of the product, serving as a guiding star for development efforts.

Timeframe: ~3 months.

Tactical roadmaps focus on the short-term, detailing the specific actions and milestones required to achieve strategic objectives. They emphasize actionable steps, timelines, and resource allocation, ensuring that teams can effectively execute the strategic plan.

Types:

• Metrics-Based Roadmap: Prioritizes initiatives based on key performance indicators, ensuring that development efforts are data-driven and aligned with measurable goals.

• Feature-Based Roadmap: Outlines the delivery plan for specific features, providing clarity on what functionalities will be developed and when.

• Delivery-Focused Plan: Emphasizes the timelines and logistics of delivering product increments, ensuring that release schedules are met.

• Release Plan: Details the schedule and scope of upcoming releases, coordinating cross-functional teams to ensure smooth deployments.

The Now-Next-Later (NNL) roadmap is a flexible product management tool that organizes tasks into three timeframes—Now, Next, and Later—allowing teams to prioritize effectively without committing to specific dates.

Now

Deliver. Tasks currently in development or ready for immediate execution, reflecting the team’s top priorities.

Timeframe: 1–2 months.

Next

Discover. Initiatives slated for upcoming development, requiring further research and preparation before execution.

Timeframe: 3–6 months.

Later

Explore. Long-term projects or ideas that are on the horizon but not yet fully defined or prioritized.

Timeframe: 6+ months.

Already

Features or functionalities that are currently available, providing stakeholders with a clear view of existing capabilities.

Trash

Never. Items that have been evaluated and deemed not valuable or feasible, effectively removed from consideration.

Outcome-based product roadmaps focus on the value a product should deliver, rather than merely listing features. This approach emphasizes achieving specific outcomes like increasing user engagement or reducing churn.

To transition from feature-based to outcome-based roadmaps, it’s essential to set clear, measurable goals, involve stakeholders and development teams in the goal-setting process, and ensure that all planned features directly contribute to the desired outcomes.

• OKRs: Integrates Objectives and Key Results to align tasks with measurable goals, ensuring that each initiative contributes to broader business objectives.

• Jobs-to-be-done: Focuses on understanding customer needs and designing tasks to fulfill specific user jobs, enhancing product relevance and user satisfaction.

• Problems: Centers on identifying and solving user problems, ensuring that development efforts address real pain points and deliver value.

An outcome-based roadmap for NNL focuses on achieving results, not just completing tasks. It aligns initiatives with business goals, solves user problems, and improves product relevance.

The 4D Product Roadmap framework offers significant benefits over traditional prioritization methods. By evaluating initiatives through the four lenses—Strategy, Vision, Customer, and Business—teams can ensure a balanced approach that aligns with long-term goals, addresses immediate user needs, and drives key performance indicators.

4 Lenses

The 4D approach aligns KPIs, brainstorms objectives, and prioritizes initiatives for impactful roadmaps.

• Strategy: Focuses on initiatives that align deeply with the product’s strategic direction, often requiring significant time and effort but yielding substantial, needle-moving results.

• Vision: Concentrates on bringing the product closer to its envisioned future, guiding investments in necessary groundwork that may not yield immediate results but are essential for long-term success.

• Customer: Addresses problems explicitly communicated by users through feedback, leading to immediate engagement wins and giving users a sense of being heard.

• Business: Targets key performance indicators (KPIs) and focuses on improving them as quickly as possible, often leading to ideas for immediate, incremental improvements.

A thematic roadmap is a strategic planning tool that organizes product development efforts around high-level customer needs, known as themes, rather than specific features. This approach emphasizes delivering value by focusing on desired outcomes instead of predefined outputs.

Themes

Themes represent broad customer needs or problems that the product aims to address. By centering the roadmap on these themes, teams can maintain a clear focus on achieving meaningful outcomes for users, ensuring that development efforts align with delivering real value.

Subthemes

Subthemes break down the main themes into more specific customer needs or problem areas. This hierarchical structure provides detailed insights into particular aspects of a theme, guiding teams to address distinct facets of customer challenges effectively.

Best Practices

To maximize the effectiveness of a thematic roadmap, it’s advisable to group related initiatives under their respective themes, maintaining a high-level perspective that focuses on outcomes rather than getting bogged down in feature specifics. This approach ensures that the roadmap remains flexible and aligned with overarching strategic goals.

The Roadmap Audience Canvas is a strategic framework developed by Phil Hornby and Justin Woods of Talking Roadmaps. It assists product teams in tailoring their roadmaps to effectively communicate with diverse stakeholders by considering their specific needs and expectations.

Audiences

Identifying key stakeholders like customers, executives, and teams ensures the roadmap meets their needs and concerns.

Jobs

Each audience uses the roadmap differently—executives for strategy, teams for tasks—so defining roles helps it serve its purpose.

Inputs and outputs

Identifying the information each audience provides (inputs) and expects to receive (outputs) is essential for designing a roadmap that facilitates effective communication.

Pain points

Addressing issues like misalignment or lack of detail makes the roadmap clearer and more effective for all stakeholders.

Effective product roadmap prioritization ensures that development efforts align with business goals and deliver maximum value to customers. Various frameworks assist in systematically evaluating and ranking potential features or projects.

Backlog

Prioritization

Rank Key Features By Key Metrics

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Voting-based

• MoSCoW Method: This technique categorizes tasks into four priority levels: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have.

• Desirability, Feasibility, Viability.

Scoring-based

• RICE Scoring: Evaluates projects based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, facilitating objective prioritization.

• Impact vs. Effort analysis.

• ROI-based.

Timing-based

• Critical Path: Identifies the sequence of essential tasks that determine the project’s minimum duration, highlighting dependencies.

• Cost of Delay (CoD): Evaluates the financial impact of delaying a project, helping prioritize initiatives that should be expedited to minimize losses.

• Who/What/When Structure.

As teams balance strategy and execution, common visual patterns emerge to effectively communicate priorities and uncertainties.

Traditional

• Gantt. A timeline-based roadmap showing tasks and dependencies. Useful for tracking deadlines but lacks flexibility for agile teams.

• Board. Structured like a kanban board, often using categories like Now, Next, Later. Helps visualize priorities but may resemble a backlog.

• Table. A spreadsheet-style roadmap for organizing items clearly. Works for internal documentation but lacks visual appeal.

Ambiguity

• Funnel. Expands over time to show increasing uncertainty. Helps teams communicate flexible long-term planning.

• Crawler. A roadmap that fades into the distance. Highlights near-term priorities while keeping long-term vision visible.

• Radial. A circular roadmap with priorities radiating outward. Encourages strategic thinking over rigid timelines.

• Horizons. Based on McKinsey’s 3-Horizons model. Balances core business, growth, and future innovation.

• Territory. Groups initiatives into current, next, and future. Focuses on expansion areas instead of fixed timelines.

Linear

• Sequence. A left-to-right roadmap with milestones. Simple but may overlook dependencies.

• Road. A roadmap shaped like a road with milestones. Great for storytelling but lacks detail.

• Moonshot. Focuses on bold, long-term goals. Inspires innovation but may seem disconnected from reality.

• Domino. A roadmap where each step enables the next. Shows sequential progress toward big goals.

Miscellaneous

• Tree. A roadmap mapping problems and solutions. Helps teams focus on value creation over timing.

• Plot. Initiatives plotted by time and risk. Encourages discussion on feasibility and uncertainty.

• JIRA. A project management tool that allows teams to track issues, plan sprints, and create detailed product roadmaps.

• Asana. Facilitates task management and project planning, enabling teams to outline product roadmaps and monitor progress.

• Trello. Uses boards, lists, and cards to help teams organize tasks and visualize product development stages.

• ProductPlan. Specializes in building and sharing product roadmaps, offering drag-and-drop functionality and real-time collaboration.

• Roadmunk. Allows teams to create visual roadmaps and gather feedback, ensuring alignment with stakeholders.

• Productboard. Prioritizes features based on user feedback and business objectives, integrating them into a cohesive roadmap.

• Craft. Provides tools for product management, including roadmap planning, feature prioritization, and team collaboration.

• Prodpad. Offers product roadmap templates and idea management features to streamline product planning processes.

• Aha! A comprehensive product management suite that includes roadmap creation, strategy planning, and idea management.

• FigJam. A collaborative online whiteboard by Figma, useful for brainstorming sessions and sketching initial roadmap ideas.

• Miro. An online whiteboard platform that supports collaborative planning, allowing teams to design and share product roadmaps.

• Notion. Teams can utilize it to document processes, plan projects, and build collaborative roadmaps.

• Google Docs. Can be used to draft and share product roadmaps with minimum of administation.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are commonly used for product roadmaps because they are familiar, flexible, and accessible to all team members.

• Simple: 101 Roadmap

• Highly analytical: 201 Roadmap

• OKR Themed: 301 Roadmap