Strategy roadmap
A strategy roadmap illustrates goals and initiatives on a high level, which makes it ideal for presenting product vision and direction to:
Executives who must buy into a timeline, resources, and budget
Internal teams implementing strategy
Outside investors
Portfolio roadmap
A portfolio roadmap is useful for demonstrating a planned release across multiple products.
It provides a single view of the company’s overarching product strategy, and then breaks down multiple planned product releases as well.
This is critical for assigning resources and ensuring that the right products and features are finished at the appropriate times. It also helps internal teams better understand how their work matters to other internal teams, keeping teams in a symbiotic relationship.
The most flexible, dynamic roadmaps are those that can be sliced up into different views and accessed in the cloud. This is why a relational database like Airtable is such a great tool for building a product roadmap. Airtable lets you arrange and rearrange information in different ways without compromising its integrity or creating version-control issues.
In Airtable, you can view your roadmap in a calendar view, a grid view, a kanban view, or a visual gallery view. You can also view the entire roadmap at once, zoom in on specific parts or areas of accountability, or filter for certain types of information.
Calendar view
A calendar view can be especially helpful in a product roadmap because it allows stakeholders to map out timing.
Kanban view
Using kanban boards in workflow management helps you visualize your work and maximize efficiency.
Grid view
In grid view, information is listed in a linear way, much like a spreadsheet. But unlike a spreadsheet, the data does not live in the cells themselves. Instead, information is stored as records that can be pulled into other views and formats easily.
Gantt format
Yet another way to view a product roadmap is as a Gantt chart. This view lets you keep related tasks in order, automatically reordering the roadmap with updates when timelines shift or changes occur.
Use Airtable’s Product planning with Gantt Template
4 steps to build a product roadmap:
Start by spelling out and clarifying your product goals and vision. This means knowing not just what you’re trying to accomplish, but how you’ll measure accomplishment, using milestones, metrics, and KPIs. Your roadmap will take the “what” and “why” of your idea and map it to the ”how.”
A good product roadmap will force you to rank ideas, features, and customer requests in terms of importance. Doing so early on is a great way to set up your team for success.
Tip: Rank roadmap items using the MoSCoW Prioritization technique:
Must have: Mandatory Needs
Should have: Important ideas that offer unmissable value
Could have: Good initiatives and good ideas that will be slightly missed if left out
Will not have: Ideas that definitely won't make it
Product features are the very heart of your product. They describe the functionality and value you’re offering to customers. Determining the priority order of features is the whole point of many product roadmaps. The MoSCoW exercise above may have already helped you with this.
The audience for the product roadmap often determines how it should be formatted. Consider the following scenarios:
The roadmap is presented to a group of investors as part of a product pitch.
The roadmap is shown to the engineering team in monthly all-hands meetings
The roadmap is shared with select media outlets to get the word out about the product in advance of product releases and help build buzz.
All three scenarios require a roadmap that looks a little different. As you create a presentation, keep the audience and their priorities or level of technical knowledge in mind.
As you’re doing the legwork to create a product roadmap for any audience, here are four essential best practices to keep in mind.
Understand your audience — Research the type of information your intended audience may want, and design accordingly. An executive group will be more interested in budgets and resources than an engineering team.
Keep it high level — No matter who you’re presenting to, the product roadmap should never delve into feature development, marketing plans, or daily to-do’s. Keep this one general.
Let the story shine through — Know your narrative and keep it in mind as you build out the roadmap, making sure you’re telling a cohesive story about your product from beginning to end.
One of the most famous lines in literature comes from Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Products are just the opposite. While happy, successful products are all unique, failed products tend to fail for a single reason: they weren’t well thought out in the first place. In other words, they had faulty product roadmaps or a family of developers that didn’t follow it.
Give your product a fighting chance by creating a rock-solid roadmap at the start.
Airtable’s highly customizable, cloud-based solution for creating product roadmaps is also shareable with your entire team. And it’s easy to get started with Airtable’s product roadmap templates and other Agile development tools.
Learn more about Airtable templates, our Product Ops Solutions, or check out our Product Roadmap Template and dive right in.
About the author
Airtable's Product Teamis committed to building world-class products, and empowering world-class product builders on our platform.
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