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Overview

What is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap is a visual tool that maps out your product's vision, strategic objectives, and development progress over time, making it easy for your team to share and collaborate.

Product roadmaps can be designed for either internal or external groups. That's why defining your audience at the outset will enable you to build a product roadmap that meets your audience’s needs.

Internal roadmaps may be created for the development team, executives, or the sales team.

  • Development team: While roadmaps for the development team can be created in various ways, the most common versions include details about target release dates, milestones, and customer benefits.
  • Executives: Product roadmaps for executives showcase how a team’s work supports the company’s overall goals and business objectives. More often than not, these roadmaps are high-level and organized by month—or by quarter—to demonstrate progress over time, leaving out the ground-level details.
  • Sales team: Internal roadmaps for sales focus on new features and customer benefits to support sales conversations.

External roadmaps are developed for customers and therefore specifically focus on the benefits of the product for customers, new features, and prioritized problem areas. These roadmaps are meant to excite customers about what is coming next.

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8 elements of a product roadmap template

A product roadmap typically includes the following key elements:

  1. Product vision: provides the big picture of what you are working on and why.
  2. Strategy: explains how the product is going to benefit your company’s business goals and how you are going to meet the vision.
  3. Timeline: includes dates and time periods to reach specific goals. As a rule of thumb, timelines should be an estimate, not exact.
  4. Goals: defines desired results that can be measured by a specific metric. The goals should tie back to specific company objectives.
  5. Requirements: is driven by your customers and includes how they feel about your products, the problems they are facing, and what they are looking for. Requirements allow you to determine which features need to be prioritized.
  6. Status markers: play an essential function to track the progress of work and keep everyone on the same page about timing.
  7. Team roles & responsibilities: makes sure that each person knows what to do and what is expected of them.
  8. Metrics: ensures that everyone on the team is measuring things the same way.

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How to build a product roadmap?

Creating a product roadmap can be broken down into four basic steps:

  1. Meet with team members and stakeholders. Before any work can happen, it is essential to consider market trajectories, business objectives, customer value propositions, and any effort constraints.
  2. Determine the product vision. Ask yourself: why are you developing this product? This step should also explain how the product is going to benefit your company’s business goals and how you are going to get there. Answering these questions will help you justify spending time and resources on the product.
  3. Identify your audience. As a reminder, Defining your audience at the outset will enable you to build and tailor the roadmap to provide the crucial information to meet your audience’s needs.
  4. Prioritize initiatives and begin building the roadmap. Now that you have the foundation, you are ready to build your roadmap. But where do you start first? You can begin with this template and customize its various features to add details, set a timeline, and prioritize tasks. If you’re feeling stuck, we recommend prioritizing your product roadmap.

Highlights of Airtable’s product roadmap template

This product roadmap template will let you customize and tailor your plans to meet your needs, enabling you and your team to monitor progress and stay agile each step of the way. Whether you are creating a high-level, long-term product vision to present to executives, or mapping out each detailed step for your development team, this template brings together all of the elements in one accessible place, empowering each stakeholder and team member to have the information they need.

The best part? You can say goodbye to scattered information across emails, meetings, and messages. With all of the details housed in one template, any information you need, as well as product backlog items, can be stored and easily accessed.

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Discover more resources: 10 best product roadmap tools, 7 best product management tools, examples of product roadmaps, what is product strategy, what is product operations.

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