How to Create a Product Roadmap (+8 Examples)

Creating a product development and growth strategy is crucial for product managers. Effective project planning and management is essential for PMs to stay aligned on collaborative projects and provide transparency regarding what they’re working on and prioritizing.

To do this, PMs rely on a product roadmap.

A product roadmap is a high-level summary of how your product will evolve, including the functionality you plan to build, the challenges you expect those features to solve, and the long-term business goals your product should help you achieve.

In this article, we’ll explain the product roadmap concept, break down its components, explore examples of different product roadmaps, and provide best practices for creating your first product roadmap.

Components of a Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. It’s an action plan that helps align an organization around short and long-term product goals, how they will be achieved, and how development will be prioritized, tested, and launched.

A product roadmap is a ‘living’ document that provides helpful information for general business leaders and technical development audiences to understand the future roadmap and current status of new features, product updates, and overall new development.

Here are the eight core components of a useful product roadmap:

• Product Vision: Describes the overall product and its vision, enabling product teams to take on strategic initiatives and develop solutions that achieve business outcomes. It outlines all product expectations, benefits, use cases, features, etc., and works toward north-star goals.
• Strategy: Product roadmaps must include a section on strategy that enables product leaders, executives, and customers to understand a project’s goal. This provides a high-level representation of the efforts or more significant themes at play that must be completed to achieve a goal.
• Goals: Measurable, time-bound goals that can be clearly defined, benchmarked, and measured associated with a new feature or product update. Goals may be tied to individual projects or overall product strategy.
• Release: A release is any launch of a new feature or update. In terms of a product roadmap, a “release” can an identifier for product teams to cite new features or updates.
• Features or functionality: The new feature, capability, product update, or improvement.
• User story: Defines a new feature or product update from an end-user’s perspective, including what the user is trying to solve.
• Timeline: Includes dates on when a project is starting, estimated time-to-release, expected release date, amount of work needed per release, etc.
• Status: Clear progression update on product vision, strategy, releases, and project timelines.

Types of Product Roadmaps

Different types of roadmaps are used depending on the end-user and its intended outcomes. The main differences between them are the audiences they’re built for, their use in the product management process, and what they contain. Here are five main types of product roadmaps:

1. External roadmaps for customers

Customer-focused roadmaps help you share your product vision with customers, get customer feedback, and keep them posted during the product development process. This way, your users can:

• Request specific features
• Vote for items under development
• Leave comments on open tickets
• Sign up to beta test a feature before it’s released

For instance, Front has a public roadmap where users can track previous releases, observe features that are under development, and vote for features to be prioritized based on how essential they are to them.

Github’s product roadmap (built in Github) is split into quarterly sprints that show previous launches, upcoming features, and how far into the development process the team is. Buffer hosts their public roadmap on Trello, where users can follow their past, ongoing, and future releases, leave comments, upvote features, and track projects as they navigate from to-do (i.e., exploring) to done.

2. Software product roadmaps

A software product roadmap is a blanket term for any high-level document a software product team uses to plan their development efforts, decide which features to build, track releases, and cooperate on product development. It is an umbrella term for all kinds of product roadmaps, including release plans, sprint plans, etc.

3. Delivery-focused roadmaps

Delivery-focused roadmaps help you track features as they progress from planned to release. They’re focused almost exclusively on launching new functionality and keeping stakeholders (i.e., investors, C-Suite, etc.) in the loop.

To help us understand better, it might be helpful to compare a delivery-focused roadmap with other types, like a customer-focused roadmap. The basic goal of a customer-focused roadmap is to help a product team communicate with their users and get them involved in the development process, while a delivery-focused roadmap serves like a high-level to-do list where a product team checks off action items and tracks features from to-do to done.

4. Business roadmaps

A company (i.e., business) roadmap serves as a general blueprint that shows a product team’s vision, the goals they want to achieve, and a basic rundown of the tactics they intend to use to get there. Company roadmaps contain a lot of aspirational goals and are generally low on technical details.

5. Leadership roadmaps

Leadership roadmaps help product managers update a company’s senior leadership, who may not be directly involved in the development process, on how a product is evolving, any challenges they’re facing, and any detours they’ve had to make.

8 Examples of Effective Product Roadmaps

Product roadmaps can come in various formats based on their intended use case. With that said, here are eight examples of product roadmaps:

1. Goal-based roadmaps

Goal-based roadmaps track specific product goals and metrics for each release cycle. This can include metrics tied to user engagement, feature adoption, revenue growth, usage, paid subscriptions, etc. A goal-based roadmap helps product teams target a measurable goal and keep working at it until they achieve it.

When working with a goal-based roadmap, nothing is off the table, and you keep iterating until you meet the benchmarks you’ve set.

When building a product based on a goal-based roadmap, you only ship new features, fix bugs, and improve your UX because you want to hit specific metrics, such as higher revenue, usability, increased user engagement, etc. So, in this case, your goals determine which features you build.

2. Feature-based product roadmaps

Feature-based roadmaps track the development, timeline, and release of new features. Feature roadmaps enable product teams to provide a public roadmap to customers and internal teams to showcase what’s coming in the next few months.

A feature timeline roadmap uses a Gantt chart to help product teams track work-in-progress against a timeline. It helps you assign a timeline to your action items and visualize the feature(s) you’re working on against how long you’ve spent on it and how much time is left.

For example, let’s say a SaaS product team is working on a usage-based pricing feature for their product.

They want to be able to charge customers on a per-unit basis, and they want to build it in-house. So, the product team targets to launch the product within three months. In the planning phase, they create many sub-tasks under the usage-based billing goal and assign three months as the timeline for the product’s completion.

Here’s how a feature timeline roadmap will help them: it essentially serves as a clock that adjusts the action item (i.e., launch usage-based billing) against a timeline that shows how much work has been completed (and is still undone) vs. the timeline for the project (i.e., three months).

3. Portfolio roadmaps

Portfolio roadmaps provide a more holistic view of all upcoming releases across your product(s) in a single view. This enables product teams to showcase all their projects when giving status updates to leadership or providing product vision strategy updates to executives.

4. Sprint planning roadmaps

A sprint planning roadmap is typically used by product teams using the agile methodology. It focuses on planning the features a team intends to deliver during future sprints, assigns each action item to a team member, and serves as a source of truth for agile product management teams.

A sprint planning roadmap usually includes:

• The goals the product team plans to achieve, usually a product release, an update, a bug fix, or a patch, and the strategy the team plans to deliver those goals with
• A breakdown of the goals above into smaller tasks and action items
• User stories that define the product or features you intend to build from your ideal user persona’s perspective
• A product release plan
• An open feedback mechanism for users and stakeholders to leave comments

Product roadmaps are generally regarded as living documents that evolve with the product, while sprint plans are designed to be purely aspirational since they focus on creating a product vision.

5. Objectives timeline roadmap

Similar to a feature timeline roadmap, an objectives timeline roadmap tracks the completion of a target against the time window allotted to it to help the product team determine if they need to ship faster or extend their timeline.

While a feature timeline roadmap tracks the delivery of specific product features, an objective timeline roadmap tracks the progress of a company’s big-picture goals and the reasons why the company is building those features in the first place. For instance, an FT roadmap may track items such as launch usage-based pricing and support single sign-on via Facebook and Google, while an objective timeline roadmap tracks the completion of strategic goals such as:

• Growing ARR 30% this year
• Increasing mobile app retention rates by 10%
• Growing our number of DAUs by 50%, etc.

6. Release plans roadmap

A release plan is a blueprint where a product team documents and tracks the features they plan to launch in an upcoming product release cycle, which usually lasts a quarter. A release plan typically includes:

• The features the product team plans to launch
• A user story that explains how the feature works from the users’ perspective
• Action items and tasks (ranked in order of priority) to be completed for the feature(s) under development to be shipped successfully
• The product team’s (estimated) velocity, i.e., how long it takes them to complete a task on average, and
• The goals that need to be completed for that release cycle to be successful

Compared to a product roadmap, a release plan is more of a short-term (usually quarterly) planner, while the latter serves as the nerve center where all the planning for the product development process happens on a long-term basis (usually 12 months or longer).

7. Kanban roadmaps

A Kanban roadmap is used to group goals and initiatives into buckets, based on a team’s sentiment towards it—i.e., whether it’s just an idea they might explore, whether it’s being worked on, or has been completed.

Typically, a Kanban planning board includes (four) columns where users can assign tasks based on their current status, such as:

• Backlog—includes ideas the team thinks are interesting but haven’t committed to working on them, either because they don’t have the resources, approval from leadership or because the specifics haven’t been clarified
• To-do—includes items that the product team has decided should be built but hasn’t commenced working on
• Doing—includes tasks that are being executed
• Done—where tasks are moved once they’re completed

The card for each priority on a Kanban board includes details such as the item’s description, nature of the task, sub-tasks, due dates, the stakeholder or team member it’s assigned to, etc.

8. Now-next-later roadmaps

A now-next-later roadmap organizes a product team’s targets into three brackets, from immediate to long-term, starting with the most important priorities that should be worked on. It’s similar to a Kanban board with a few key differences.

First, action items on a Kanban board move from left to right (i.e., Backlog → To-do → Doing → Done) while tasks on Now-Next-Later roadmaps move from right to left (i.e., Later → Next → Now).

Secondly, while the NNL roadmap focuses on outcomes (i.e., how tasks add up to bigger goals), a Kanban roadmap exists for productivity’s sake. It’s designed to get tasks completed quickly and is not concerned with how they relate to big-picture business goals.

Benefits of Product Roadmaps

Here are a few of the major benefits of product roadmaps:

1. Better product management

Product management boils down to determining which features your users want, shipping them, testing them, and continuously improving the product to better serve them.

To achieve that, a product manager must work with engineering, design, marketing, sales, and customer service to go from idea to product. The product roadmap serves as a high-level summary where all these stakeholders can discuss, make decisions, suggest changes, and manage the entire product development process without conflict.

2. Alignment for your product strategy

Product strategy is your product team’s vision for a product and how you intend to achieve it. It includes details on how exactly your product solves your users’ problems, and how you plan to take your product from idea to scale.

All of that can’t happen if you don’t have a plan or if the stakeholders involved can’t agree on exactly how you intend to execute your product vision.

A product roadmap serves as a map where everyone involved in the product development process can create a plan together and stick with it through the product’s lifecycle.

3. Builds excitement for what’s to come

A product roadmap gets users invested in your product’s vision and shows them how you intend to solve their pain points as your product grows. You can supplement your roadmap with new product launch emails to drive additional excitement and prepare your customers and users for what’s coming in future releases.

4. More visibility into your product’s upcoming releases

No product is ever finished and users usually have to make some tradeoffs to use your product over a competitor. Of course, if your product stagnates and doesn’t launch new, improved features, you’ll see a good chunk of your existing users churn and flock to products constantly evolving to better meet their use cases.

A public roadmap helps you capture your users’ attention, keep them posted on the features you have in the pipeline, and even serves as a forum where users can vote on which features they want more urgently. Public roadmaps help build trust and convince users that if they want a feature badly enough, your team will be responsive to prioritize it.

Who Uses a Product Roadmap?

Product roadmaps are used across an organization’s stakeholders, including:

1. Product

Product managers provide the link between the development team, customers, and leadership. They have a deep understanding of the product and use the roadmap to determine which features should be built, communicate with stakeholders, create timeframes for product releases, and guide the product development process from start to finish.

The product roadmap serves as a dashboard where a product manager does all their work, cooperates with their team, assigns priorities to their team members, and keeps everyone involved posted on the progress of their product development efforts.

2. Engineering and design

This includes quality assurance specialists, UI and UX designers, and developers who turn ideas into code. The product roadmap helps engineers to coordinate their efforts with the product management team and make sure they’re building what users want most at every specific time.

It serves as a dashboard for communicating priorities, sharing ideas, tracking project completion against a timeline, and ensuring everyone involved in the product development process is all on the same page.

3. Executives and leadership

Depending on the size of your company, senior leadership usually doesn’t micromanage day-to-day product decisions. This includes CEOs, VPs, and board members and they create long-term targets for their direct reports to pursue.

A product roadmap serves as a dashboard where a company’s senior leadership can monitor which features are being built, track performance using agreed KPIs, and provide high-level oversight for the product team without getting into the weeds of the design and development process.

4. Marketing and sales

A marketer’s main tasks are to position your product as a solution to your customers’ needs, generate demand with organic and paid promotions, and to collect feedback from existing users and leads to determine what your product might do better to win them over.

Your sales team pitches your product to potential users and keeps them engaged through the sales funnel until they convert to paying users. If you’re a B2B SaaS, it’s not unusual for your SDRs and AEs to be the single department with the most significant direct impact on revenue.

But, all of that happens after the product has been shipped.

Why do you need to involve your marketing and sales team in the road-mapping process when their work focuses on selling the finished product?

First, product marketers are your eyes and ears in the market—typically, a product marketer holds hundreds (thousands, in some cases) of customer conversations to understand the big problem a user wants to solve when they sign up for your product. It follows without saying that you can’t build a winning product without designing it the way your users expect it to work.

Your marketers need an inside scoop to understand how your product is evolving so that they can tell your story accurately, position your product for the problem it solves, and help your sales reps understand the value propositions that are more likely to convert leads to paying users.

How to Create a Product Roadmap

Creating a product roadmap is not as simple as writing down dozens of features you intend to build, assigning a timeframe for each one, and just diving into it.

First, you need a flexible tool to handle your team’s long-term vision. Then, you need to understand exactly what your users want and figure out a strategy to get it to them before any entry goes on your product roadmap.

1. Invest in a roadmap software to build and manage your product roadmap

A product roadmapping tool serves as the canvas on which you build your product roadmap, and speaking of which, there are hundreds of options to choose from—Jira, Aha, ProductPlan, Trello,  Roadmunk, Airfocus, etc.

As you filter through options, you need to look for a road mapping tool that helps you:

• Collaborate with your team members via chat, @mentions, and highlights
• Build simple, easy-to-use reports for leadership
• Visualize data in multiple formats, such as Kanban, Gantt, Scrum boards, etc.
• Integrate with your design and development tools
• Break bigger targets into smaller goals and track them all in one place
• Capture ideas and feature requests from users
• Prioritize features using a voting mechanism

If you’re still early into your product management, you can request for suggestions from your network or test run a few options for a few weeks at a time. A product roadmap tool isn’t one you can easily swap in the middle of a project and it’s best to get it right from the beginning.

2. Gather data and feedback from customers and internal stakeholders for new features and updates

This can be done via surveys, polls, 1:1 conversations, and brainstorming sessions where you encourage your internal stakeholders to share ideas they think you need to incorporate into your product to make it a better solution to your ideal users’ problems.

Now, you don’t just dump every feedback you get from your users right onto your roadmap as-is. As a product manager, it’s up to you to translate your users’ demands into technical specifications that your engineering and design team can build.

For instance, users may complain that your application takes quite a while to load. Of course, “speed up our application” is a vague goal, so you need to discuss it with your engineering team, and figure out what’s affecting your user experience.

At the end, your roadmap goals may be something like reducing HTTP requests, optimizing your API requests, and compressing media files to consume less bandwidth—your job as a product manager is to understand what users want, interpret it in technical terms, and direct your engineering team on how to build it.

3. Align your product roadmap with your organizational goals

Every item on your product roadmap should tie into your company’s big-picture goals, otherwise, you risk winning the battle and losing the war.

By this, we mean a situation where your product team keeps shipping dozens of features, but your users are churning, revenue is stagnant, and your product is becoming increasingly unusable.

Before you insert an item into your product roadmap, it needs to solve a specific problem for your users and contribute to your bigger picture goals, such as increasing retention, reducing churn, and boosting user engagement.

4. Define your KPIs and metrics to measure

A KPI is a metric you can measure to help you understand how your product is performing. For instance, you might be looking to activate more users and get them to use your product more often.

So, how do you even measure product usage?

Is it enough for a user to sign in once a year, a month, or daily? How many actions do they need to complete in your application to be considered active users?

The right KPIs will help you measure how many users you’re converting to paid customers, their engagement levels, and how much revenue you can earn from their active usage. Here are some metrics and KPIs for SaaS companies looking to maximize their product roadmap:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) calculates all the recurring payments you expect to receive from your users every month.
• Usage metrics such as daily active users (DAUs), weekly active users (WAUs), etc.
• Signups
• Churn rate measures the rate at which customers stop doing business with your company over a period of time, say a month, a quarter, or a year.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) calculates how much it costs you to win over a new user. The lower, the better since you need to make up for it with your revenue.
• Net Promoter Score measures users’ willingness to recommend you to their friends and colleagues. The higher, the better.

The right KPIs will help you track your product’s growth and its ability to solve users’ pain points.

5. Create a system to prioritize features and updates

Your product roadmap should be designed such that you can prioritize features easily and even crowdsource votes from your product team and customers to help you build features by demand.

For instance, Buffer has a public product roadmap where users can see which items are on the team’s agenda, create new cards, and vote on features under development to push them to the top of the queue.

New Features Click Better With Whatfix

Building a great product is just half the work; you still need to do the legwork to acquire, engage, and retain your users.

After all, 96.15% of your dissatisfied users will stop using your product without even contacting customer support or reading a help document.

At that rate, it doesn’t matter how much money you burn on user acquisition—if you don’t get those users to stick around after winning them, your funnel will remain a leaky funnel, and you’ll slowly lose market share.

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that helps product teams engage new users, teach them how your product works, and reduce churn with on-demand support. Whether you’re a five-person startup or an enterprise SaaS provider, Whatfix offers powerful digital adoption tools designed for SaaS, so that you can:

• Show new users how your product works with step-by-step walkthroughs
• Nudge users to check out new features and product updates with non-intrusive hotspots and alerts
• Automatically translate your product documentation and onboarding resources into 70+ languages
• Roll out native onboarding experiences across web and mobile devices
• Collect feedback with NPS surveys that you can segment to target specific groups of users, and
• Use Whatfix Analytics to measure how effective your guided onboarding experiences are

Whatfix offers guided onboarding and on-demand assistance designed to help SaaS product managers increase retention, reduce churn, and build products their users love.