A product roadmap outlines the journey from your product’s current state to its envisioned future. It plots a course to achieve your goals by detailing the features you plan to release in the coming weeks, months, and years.
Ideally, a product roadmap should keep your team on the same page and rally your organization around key product moments. And it’s not just about getting there—it’s about hitting those important milestones and launches right on the dot, all while keeping your customers’ needs as your northstar.
However, building and sticking to a product roadmap is easier said than done—especially when you’re juggling competing priorities, multiple stakeholders, and constant changes to the competitive landscape. In this article, we discuss how to create a product roadmap in six steps:
An expert-led guide to building your roadmap
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a strategic document that visualizes the “how” and the “why” of your product vision. It serves as a high-level, long-term plan that aligns your product direction with overarching organizational goals.
Roadmaps that hit the mark are grounded in shared data. They’re based on insights about your target audience, your company’s goals, the competitive landscape, and feedback straight from your customers. These roadmaps act as a source of truth, allowing key stakeholders to easily see which features are prioritized and why, as well as when they’re set to launch.
Depending on your audience, there are two main types of product roadmaps: external and internal.
External roadmap
An external roadmap is for stakeholders who are external to your company, including your customers, industry experts, influencers, and so on. Typically, external roadmaps are geared towards increasing sales—they should highlight features that appeal to your target audience and that elevate your market positioning.
An external roadmap should not include detailed information about internal processes. That information is more helpful to the teams working on the product and would likely confuse external stakeholders.
Instead, showcase a general timeframe and the planned order of feature releases. Overall, you want to highlight the benefits of upcoming features as they relate to your audience.
Internal roadmap
Internal product roadmaps are a compilation of product features and the development work you’ve identified with your team. They often highlight the target release dates, milestones, and features your team is working toward internally, as well as architectural improvements to make the product scalable, and so on.
An internal roadmap should also be more than a static document—it needs to be an actionable blueprint that propels the team forward. It also serves as an ultimate alignment tool to bring all stakeholders onto the same page, provide leadership with a clear window into progress, and keep cross-functional teams informed about the latest developments.
To make your internal roadmap as effective as possible, it should highlight different information for different reviewers:
For executives: Give a high-level summary of how the product supports the company goals and vision. Include specific ship dates and rough estimates of each initiative that tie back to company goals and vision.
For sales and marketing: Focus on the benefits and features that’ll help sell your product. What makes your product different from others in the market? Unique selling proposition? Competitive advantage? Include product goals that tie back to marketing goals.
For engineering: This should be a high-level overview of the objectives related to creating the product. Include significant goals and milestones for the engineering team so they understand the bigger picture of the product and make better, more strategic engineering decisions.
Why do you need a product roadmap?
Organizing and prioritizing product ideas without a product roadmap is like trying to solve a 1,000-piece puzzle without a reference picture. The pieces are scattered, there’s no clear vision, and the final picture is much more difficult to assemble. Product roadmaps are important because they:
Align teams: A defined product trajectory keeps cross-functional teams moving toward a common goal. It ensures collaborative work between product managers, developers, designers, and marketing teams moves in the same direction.
Encourage stakeholder buy-in: A product roadmap demonstrates you’re taking a systematic approach to developing your product—not just winging it. That level of transparency not only builds confidence and trust, but also makes it easier for stakeholders to understand and support the product’s development.
Make your strategy a reality: A product roadmap is a bridge that links granular details involved in product planning and development to the overall vision. It explains the “why” and “how” at every level of product development—tasks, features, milestones, etc.—to minimize confusion about execution and how daily tasks fit into the big picture.
Measure results over time: With the journey mapped out, it’s easier to track the product’s performance against defined objectives. Teams can then measure progress toward project goals, identify deviations, and make necessary adjustments to realign with desired product outcomes.
Improve business results: Product roadmaps that foster internal transparency and alignment often bolster business results. They can lead to more effective promotion and sales strategies, enhanced customer loyalty through consistent product delivery, and improved customer satisfaction and market competitiveness.
How to create a product roadmap
A product roadmap integrates strategic and practical elements in a visual timeline for key stakeholders. When properly and comprehensively designed, it can play a critical role in a product’s future success.
Building a product roadmap that is a unifying force for the entire organization is a six-step process.
1. Determine goals and strategy
Before you dive into the murky waters of creating a product roadmap, identify the why behind your product strategy.
Why do you want to build this product?
What are your short-term and long-term goals for this product?
What is your product vision?
Knowing your end goal helps you sort your priorities and convince stakeholders to invest in your product. Next, determine your what.
What kind of a product are you creating?
Are you creating a new product, improving a product that already exists, or creating a product for your internal team?
Will the timeframe of the roadmap be months, quarters, or years?
And finally, understand your audience.
Which audience pain points are you addressing through your product?
What customers will use your product?
How will the product benefit your target market?
These elements should already be fairly well-defined in your product planning research, but it’s worth spelling them out as guiding principles for your roadmap. They should also help shape your goals for the finished product, and the milestones you must meet to get there.
Create SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals and make sure that each task within your roadmap links back to a clearly defined outcome. This helps translate your strategic vision into time-defined, measurable milestones, and keeps your team aligned to overarching company priorities.
2. Gather and prioritize ideas
When you’re gathering ideas and information for your product, there are three main collaborators you can look to for help (after you’ve finished your own brainstorming session, of course.) These partners include:
Customer support: Since customer support is in direct contact with your customers, they have a clear idea of customers’ needs and requirements. Their feedback helps ensure new products or features solve the right problems.
Sales: Similarly, sales teams have an abundance of data on customers. They’re well-positioned to give you ideas for future releases and help you prioritize the most pressing feature updates..
Product user community: Product Hunt, Reddit, Quora, and Facebook groups are all excellent places to gather ideas. Find forums of people who are already using your product (or a competitor’s product) and learn about their pain points, concerns, expectations, and ideas for the future.
It’s more likely you have too many ideas to deal with than having none. Here’s how to prioritize ideas:
Incorporate a wide range of insights: Consider real-world customer data and insights in your vetting process. This includes conducting a competitive analysis that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors' products against your product.
Use prioritization methods: Use methods like Kano (compares product investment with customer satisfaction) and MoSCoW (must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and will not haves) to prioritize your ideas.
Determine if product ideas meet goals: Once you’ve validated product ideas, work with your internal team and leadership to determine which ideas align with your goals and how likely you are to achieve those goals. To remove bias and provide validation, rank ideas based on metrics.
3. Identify components to include
Once you’ve finalized your product idea and are sure it aligns with your goals and vision, the next step is determining roadmap components like:
Milestones: These are significant points in the product development journey, like completing a crucial feature.
Requirements: Requirements help define a product’s purpose and functionality, and a product must meet all requirements before it is shipped. For example, an e-commerce platform might have a functional requirement to support credit cards and PayPal. Alternatively, a medical device will have a compliance requirement to meet FDA regulations.
Dates: Indicate the timeline for various tasks and milestones. Without them, you could drastically slow down your time-to-market, frustrate stakeholders with lack of progress, and ultimately waste time and money. Specify target completion dates to keep development on schedule and to help teams prioritize their efforts.
Costs: Include projected costs in the budget or resource allocation section of your roadmap for each task and milestone. Knowing projected costs allows you to manage financial resources efficiently and make informed decisions about where to invest for maximum ROI.
Features: It should come as no surprise that every product comprises features that need to be prioritized and mapped out on the roadmap. Things like menus, buttons, or toolbars represent a distinct aspect of the product that contributes to its overall value and ease of adoption.
Dependencies: Anything that has a direct impact on a product’s progress and could potentially cause disruptions is a product dependency. They let you know which activities must be completed in which order to ensure smooth workflows and avoid bottlenecks.
Release dates: Release dates are specific points in time when the product is deployed or updated with new features. Incorporating release dates into the roadmap allows teams to plan for product launches, coordinate product marketing efforts, and align with key business events. Release dates are the drumbeat of your product roadmap.
Themes: Themes are overarching concepts that guide the prioritization of product features. They also serve as a framework to align development efforts and effectively communicate the product’s value to key audiences.
To nail down these components, you need to:
Align key stakeholders and get buy-in: Be ready to say “no” when you feel a certain feature request does not work well with your product. Back up your reasoning with data and insights to generate buy-in and trust.
Edit ruthlessly: Prioritize only what has proven value and is closely aligned to the strategic vision that drives the roadmap.
Create user stories and epics: Map your product features into comprehensive user stories and epics (epics are collections of user stories that share a common theme.) These narratives help you understand what features work best in practice for your target audience.
4. Organize tasks and timeline
While you want to develop a thorough timeline for all aspects of your product roadmap, you don’t always need to display every task at a granular level for all stakeholders.
For example, when you’re reviewing the product roadmap with internal stakeholders (like development teams), you may need to present estimated timelines for each task. But when you’re sharing your roadmap with your user base, industry experts, and other external stakeholders, you should leave out specific dates and just let them know a general idea of what’s coming, when.
As you start building out processes and timelines, it’s a good idea to define a measurable outcome for each workflow component. Without clear, incremental targets, it’s difficult to tell if your goals are being met in the given timeline.
5. Assign views
Since the main purpose of a product roadmap is to give internal teams and stakeholders a look into the product you’re planning to build, it’s essential to keep the interface as user-friendly as possible. Creating a roadmap with Excel is needlessly arduous and not user-friendly for all stakeholders who engage with the roadmap.
For example, for your sales team, highlight the release dates and benefits of your product. For the engineering team, include specifics about the product itself and the tentative timeline. For marketing, focus on the competitive advantage of your product over other products in the market.
You don’t necessarily need to create multiple versions of your product roadmap (and work with a gazillion Excel sheets)—you can simply use a user-friendly tool like Airtable that allows you to assign different stakeholders different views of the same real-time information.
6. Update throughout its lifecycle
But the work doesn’t end there. A product roadmap isn’t a stagnant document; it evolves with the product and the business. You need to continue reviewing and refining the roadmap through the entire product lifecycle so you can:
Adapt with the market: Markets are dynamic, and customer needs and preferences may change over time. Update the roadmap to keep the product aligned with evolving demands.
Optimize resources: As you gain new insights and priorities shift, teams can reallocate resources to focus on the most critical tasks and features.
Remain transparent: Updates to the roadmap keep everyone informed about changes in priorities, progress, and upcoming milestones. The result is improved collaboration and a shared understanding among team members.
Manage risks: Market conditions, technological advancements, and other external factors can introduce unforeseen risks. Update the roadmap to help teams address risks promptly to ensure product development stays on course.
Product roadmap types
A few product roadmap examples include:
Epics roadmap: This is a high-level overview of a product’s development direction and key milestones. It outlines major initiatives or projects that contribute to business objectives.
Features roadmap: This type of roadmap gives a detailed view of specific functionalities and enhancements planned for a product. It serves as a comprehensive guide to prioritize and deliver specific product capabilities.
Portfolio roadmap: Provide an overview of multiple projects and how they connect within an organization’s product portfolio with this roadmap. It assists in strategic decision-making and resource allocation across various products.
Release roadmap: This is a timeline of specific product releases and their corresponding features or improvements. It aligns stakeholders’ expectations for upcoming updates.
Strategy roadmap: This roadmap provides a clear look at the direction of a product’s growth and market positioning. It articulates the long-term vision and goals of the product or organization as a whole.
Product roadmap best practices
Subpar product roadmaps get a product developed eventually. Great product roadmaps get products developed efficiently, foster better cross-functional collaboration, and drive sustainable growth in competitive markets. To further amp up your product roadmap, we have a few tried-and-true best practices.
Use agile processes
Agile processes are reflective of a team’s work method, and it’s a good idea to design your roadmap around existing workflows and systems, as opposed to rebuilding operations from scratch.
Visually, an agile product roadmap usually breaks up development cycles into sprints, making it easier to identify dependencies and mitigate risk.
Incorporate visual elements
You can use a variety of visual elements to add interest in your product roadmap, such as:
Gantt chart view to show a high-level overview of your product
Swimlanes to visually show which team member is responsible for which task
Workflow paths
Keep your vision at the forefront
Here are some ways to stay true to your organization’s vision for the product:
When creating features, don’t get hung up on product features that prove to be irrelevant or obsolete.
As the product management lifecycle evolves and progresses, don’t shy away from revising the product roadmap.
Aim for equity within a roadmap, incorporating the concerns of key stakeholders but not leaning too heavily into one person or team’s influence.
And always avoid duplicating a competitor’s approach or changing yours because a competitor’s approach differs.
Present with SOAPBOX framework
When presenting your product roadmap, follow the SOAPBOX framework:
Subject: Topic of your presentation
Occasion: Context of the presentation
Audience: Who you’re addressing—focus on the departments and stakeholders who will directly engage with your roadmap and the type of guidance each will seek from it
Purpose: Your goals for the presentation
Before: What you should do before creating and delivering the final presentation?
Objection handling: What key objections or questions do you need to be prepared for?
eXecute: How to execute the most compelling presentation ever?
And while you’re presenting, avoid getting too deep into the weeds—keep presentations at overview level.
Build an adaptable roadmap
Adaptability is key to responding to market shifts, customer feedback, and emerging opportunities. To create an adaptable roadmap, try these tips:
Incorporate feedback loops: Establish feedback loops, or a cycle of gathering feedback, making improvements based on that feedback, and then sharing the updated product again. This process is a continuous conversation to improve a product and should include stakeholders, customers, and cross-functional teams.
Lean on data-driven insights: Base roadmap adaptations on data rather than assumptions. Utilize metrics and customer feedback to inform decisions.
Plan in shorter cycles: Try planning only a few months ahead of time instead of a full year so you can reevaluate the market and pivot more easily.
Update stakeholders regularly
Regular, summarized updates to stakeholders helps build trust and allows the whole team to identify potential issues early.
The easiest way to do this is with a customized view that updates automatically, so stakeholders can see what’s going on in real time. For this, you’ll need a user-friendly roadmap tool that can save multiple views.
Choose the right product roadmap tool
If you’re thinking of starting to build your product roadmap and don’t want to get bogged down with multiple Excel files and manual spreadsheets, invest in a connected apps platform like Airtable.
As Jeremy Ho, Software Engineer at Uber says, “Airtable has changed the way I organize and view my information. It gives you the freedom and structure to design a solution that fits your needs, and evolve that solution progressively over time."
Don’t want to create a product roadmap from scratch? Look no further. Here’s a free product roadmap template to help you get started right away.
Airtable’s product roadmap template allows you to customize your product plan according to your needs. Create a high level product vision for your executives or map out a detailed step by step plan for your development team—our template brings all the elements of your product plan together in one place.
An expert-led guide to building your roadmap
5. Assign views and update throughout lifecycle
And lastly, assign views for different stakeholders and constantly update the product roadmap through its lifecycle. A product roadmap is not a stagnant document, it evolves with the product. Review and refine roadmap as needed through the entire product lifecycle
When assigning views for different stakeholders, consider which views make sense for which stakeholders.
For example, for your sales team, you’d like to highlight the release dates and benefits of your product. For the engineering team, specifics about the product itself and the tentative timeline so they can start creating the product. For marketing, the focus should be on the competitive advantage of your product over other products in the niche.
You don’t necessarily need to create multiple versions of your product roadmap (and work with a gazillion Excel sheets), you can simply use a user-friendly online tool that helps you with assigning different views to different stakeholders with ease.
And keep sharing progress updates as milestones are reached with your internal and external stakeholders to keep them in the loop with what's happening.
Product roadmap types
Depending on your audience, there are two main types of product roadmaps,
External roadmap
External roadmap is for external stakeholders like your potential user base, industry experts, influencers, and so on. It highlights features of your product that would help increase sales.
Internal roadmap
Similarly, an internal product roadmap is for internal stakeholders like your engineering team, leadership, sales and marketing teams. It is the compilation of your product features and the development work you have identified with your team.
Depending on who you’re reviewing the product roadmap with, it features different things.
Some common versions highlight the target release dates, milestones, features that need to be worked on, architectural improvements to make the product scalable, and so on.
Internal roadmap for executives
When you’re presenting your product roadmap to leadership and executives, you need to show a high level summary of how the product supports the company goals and visions. It contains specific ship dates and rough estimates of each initiative.
Internal roadmap for sales and marketing
The internal product roadmap for sales and marketing should be focused on the benefits of your product and the features that will help them sell your product. What makes your product different from others in the market? What's your unique selling proposition? What is your product’s competitive advantage?
All these things should be highlighted in the roadmap you present to sales and marketing teams.
While the internal roadmap for executives contains goals that tie back to the company goals and vision, internal roadmap for marketing and sales teams should contain product goals that tie back to the marketing goals.
Internal roadmap for engineering team
An internal roadmap for the engineering team contains a high level overview of the objectives of creating that product. It includes major goals and milestones for the engineering team to complete. It not only helps engineering teams understand the bigger picture of the product, but also make better, more strategic engineering decisions.
Product roadmap best practices to remember
To further amp up your product roadmap, we have a few tried and tested best practices for you.
Agile or not?
Agile processes are reflective of a team’s work method, so organize in a way that’s reflective of your company’s standard processes and best practices rather than designing a roadmap that they’ll have to re-shape workflows around.
Visually, an agile product roadmap usually breaks up development cycles into sprints, where epics and themes consist of several sprints.
Consistent visual elements make the roadmap more effective
From color coding to paths, keep your visual elements consistent throughout the roadmap. Inconsistencies can not only make it visually unappealing but also ineffective when presenting to stakeholders. You want your stakeholders to easily understand what you’re presenting.
You can use a variety of visual elements to add interest in your product roadmap, such as,
Gantt chart view to show a high-level overview of your product
Swimlanes to visually show which team member is responsible for which task
Workflow paths
Adapt as necessary, but stay true to your organization’s unique vision
What is your organization’s vision for this product? Stay true to that.
Here’s how.
When creating features, don’t get hung up on product features that prove to be irrelevant or obsolete
As the product management lifecycle evolves and progresses, aspects of the roadmap will require revision
Aim for equity with a roadmap that incorporates the concerns of all stakeholders but is not shaped too much by one person or team’s influence
And always avoid duplicating a competitor’s approach or changing yours because a competitor’s approach differs.
Presenting your product roadmap
When presenting your product roadmap follow the SOAPBOX framework,
Subject: Topic of your presentation
Occasion: Context of the presentation
Audience: Who you’re addressing - focus on the departments and stakeholders who will directly engage with your roadmap and the type of guidance each will seek from it
Purpose: Your goals for the presentation
Before: What you should do before creating and delivering the final presentation?
Objection Handling: What key objections or questions do you need to be prepared for?
eXecute: How to execute the most compelling presentation ever?
And while you’re presenting, avoid getting too deep into the weeds - keep presentations at overview level.
Start creating your product roadmap right away
If you’re thinking of starting to build your product roadmap and don’t want to get bogged down with multiple Excel files and manual spreadsheets, invest in a collaboration platform like Airtable.
It makes it super easy for teams to not just share their product roadmaps with stakeholders, but brings ease and clarity to the entire roadmap creation process.
As Jeremy Ho, Software Engineer at Uber says, “Airtable has changed the way I organize and view my information. It gives you the freedom and structure to design a solution that fits your needs, and evolve that solution progressively over time."
An expert-led guide to building your roadmap
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