Stage 3: Prioritize your product roadmap

After capturing feedback and beginning the product planning process, the time has come for product operations teams to act. We’re talking about identifying priorities, divvying up assignments, and connecting your team objectives to the company’s strategy—and, of course, getting your products out the door as planned. To get it all done, you need to create a product roadmap.

What is a product roadmap?

All high-performing teams have action plans, and for product ops teams, it’s called a product roadmap. A product roadmap conveys the direction, priorities, and progress of a product up until its launch. A strong product roadmap will also tie company-wide metrics (like OKRs) and customer feedback to the overall strategy, so everyone in the organization can be aligned behind a common vision and goals.

Teams should never skimp on this phase of the product operations process. To put it plainly, well-managed product roadmaps are why products ship on time and they’re critical to keeping cross-functional teams aligned.

Three steps to prioritize your product roadmap in Airtable

When you’re working quickly across multiple teams, you should rely on a tool that stores all of your data—while making complex information easy to visualize and accessible to cross-functional partners. Airtable has the flexibility and customization you need to manage a product roadmap with a central source of truth, while meeting the needs of both internal and external stakeholders.

We’ve worked with and learned from some of the best product teams in the world—across hundreds of Airtable customers, product ops experts, and our very own product ops team. Behold: best practices you can use to start building out your product roadmap in Airtable in three steps.

Prioritizing your product roadmap and managing timelines is the phase of product operations that involves:

Step 1. Start creating and prioritize your roadmap

Step 2. Visualize your roadmap

Step 3. Build an organization-wide roadmap