What are the benefits of a product roadmap?
Creating a product roadmap for your team is like planning a vacation with a detailed itinerary. Just as travelers consult maps before a trip to ensure they visit all their desired destinations, teams need roadmaps to hit all their key milestones. Imagine you're planning a road trip: you don't want to miss any must-see landmarks, run out of fuel, or take a wrong turn. Reviewing your route in advance helps you make the most of your journey and avoid unnecessary detours. A product roadmap provides that same directional guidance by:
Creating strategic alignment between all workers and stakeholders
Optimizing the most efficient deployment of resources to develop the product
Managing risks so that you can control unexpected costs or roadblocks
By creating a master product plan in a visualized template, your team members instantly know what deliverables are required and when those tasks must be completed. Therefore, they can use the product roadmap to:
Align critical tasks with strategic business priorities
Allocate time and bandwidth accordingly
Hold themselves accountable to master project deadlines
A product roadmap is amendable based on unexpected circumstances, both positive and negative. For example, teams can coordinate with client support agents to gather customer feedback on current product features. They can use the responses from those feedback sessions to amend the product roadmap and prioritize new features that make customers’ lives easier.
When to use the product roadmap template?
Suppose your team has been tasked with developing a new product feature or capability by the end of the quarter. Before work can begin, your job as the project manager is to build the product roadmap so that the entire company is in alignment with the expectations.
The product roadmap template helps you do just that by:
Creating a visual overview of the product development timeline
Providing a structured task management workflow for the project
Easily tracking which initiatives are on track, blocked, or completed
Think of your product roadmap template as your north star that guides the product development. Let’s say you work for an insurance company, and management wants to expand the product offering with new categories. Let’s also say that your company uses software to manage the different insurance offerings so that customers can add new categories or ask questions about their plans in a user-friendly way.
Your team is tasked with updating the software to include these new offerings. As the project manager for this new development, you can use the product roadmap template to map out the software development, including the resources, roadblocks, and timelines that must be managed to hit the release date.
Once you’ve implemented your plan on the product roadmap template, you can invite team members and other stakeholders to review the development. Upon achieving complete stakeholder alignment, your team can get to work and set priorities.
How to use the product roadmap template
The product roadmap template is a single source of truth in the fast-paced landscape of product development. Use the template and build a visualized overview of the entire product development process and manage your team members, resources, budgets, and deliverables as efficiently as possible.
Developing a new product is a complex process, but the product roadmap template is designed to break down those bigger milestones into more achievable tasks. Be as specific as you can as you map out the deliverables. This will prevent your team members from feeling overwhelmed, and they can focus on high-priority tasks first.
Step 1: List out your initiatives in line with your project goal
On your product roadmap template, use the Q1 initiatives section to list out the initiatives that will help you reach your goal. For example, if the new product feature is part of a business registration strategy, one initiative would be to improve user activation rates.
Each initiative will be represented by a task on the roadmap. To add a new task, simply click the + at the bottom of the “Q1 initiatives” section.
As some of these initiatives might be quite top-level, you can break them down into smaller to-dos via checklists. To do this, simply click “Add checklist item” in the task dialog. Adding checklist items will make the work required to complete each initiative more tangible for the task assignee. It will also provide you with a more granular view of what has been completed so far.
Step 2: Assign task start and end dates
Remember that one of the purposes of the product roadmap template is to give you a visual timeline of how the project will unfold if all goes to plan. Once you’ve added your tasks to the template, you can assign due dates, as well as start and end dates. If some tasks are dependable on others being completed first, make sure you include that requirement as you set the deliverable dates.
To view your task timeline at a glance, click the Timeline icon and “Show project timeline” in the top navigation. This will visualize your entire product roadmap as a Gantt chart. You can easily identify overlapping tasks or periods where your resources might be stretched too thin.
Step 3: Assign your tasks
Next, assign each task to the team member who will be responsible for completing it. Be as specific as you can be with the scope of each task, so that team members know what’s expected of them and can hold themselves accountable to those deliverables. For extra clarity and context, link to Notes or helpful documentation, from within the task.
Step 4: Move tasks across the board as work progresses
Ideally, you should have one section for on track tasks, another section for blocked tasks, and a final section for completed tasks. However, you can tweak these Template sections or add additional ones to reflect your team’s specific workflow.
By moving tasks across the board to indicate stages of the development process, you can easily track progress and identify blockers. As such, you can reassign resources strategically without taking bandwidth away from tasks that are still in progress. A transparent overview into what is happening and when will also help your teams collaborate effectively and work in alignment.
Step 5: Monitor progress and workforce capacity
Keep a close eye on how many tasks move from the in progress section into the blocked vs. completed sections. If you have many tasks reassigned to your blocked section, you may need to rethink your roadmap and reassign resources. On the other hand, if most tasks are being completed without issue, you can confidently report to your stakeholders that the product feature will be delivered on time.
