Product Roadmap

Product roadmaps are living visual documents used to describe the progress towards the high level vision, strategy and future direction of the product, providing aspirational goals and a guiding light for the work being done in the teams. They are often used as a visual aid to help with options and scenario planning, and product discussions with stakeholders and customers.

Good Product Roadmaps are continuously updated with recent information relating to the progress towards the goals incorporating any adjustments allowing the roadmap to evolve as more is known.

Roadmap Components

Time Based

• Boundaries - These can be self imposed deadlines, budget constraints or other boundaries that need to be respected
• Milestones - These are indicators along the timeline when events, features or deliverables are expected
• External Events - Events outside of the team such as competitor releases, or compliance deadlines for example 
• Last Responsible Moments - These are the last possible moments when a decision has to be made in the timeline. In the run up to these last moments of responsibility data can be collected through iterations, prototypes or testing for example, which can then help to inform the right decisions to be made once
• Releases - These can either be predicted moment in the timeline when releases are expected, or in the case of continuous delivery, a timetable of release dates irrespective of which features are completed 
• Sprints / Iterations - These are defined time-boxes used by the teams for delivery, and a feature may be delivered in one or more Sprints or iterations

Scope Based

• Goals & Intent -  The goals and intent behind the product roadmap and the associated features provides a reason or context for the work and why it is needed
• Impact / Outcome - The intended impact or outcome of a feature when it is delivered can be useful to understand what a stakeholder or customer can expect to do when it is delivered
• Features - These are the broad features that are expected to be delivered on the timeline and may well be broken down into epics and user stories for finer granularity
• Prioritisation - Which features are more important than others in order to achieve the desired impacts or expected outcomes
• Status - The current state of the feature
• Dependencies - Features that present dependencies between each other and may impact the ordering of features in the roadmap

Roadmap Themes

• Portfolio Roadmap - These roadmaps tend to focus on the high level representation of the features and releases in the timeline and are intended for conversations between Product Owners and internal stakeholders as a visual aid to coordinating efforts across the portfolio
• Strategy Roadmap - These roadmaps tend to focus on the outcomes and intentions behind the features with respect to when these can be delivered and the respective benefits realised, and influence product based discussions between Product Owners, stakeholders and customers
• Release Roadmap - These roadmaps focus on the release patterns in the organisation and when features are expected to be released, tend to be technical in nature and used in discussions between the Product Owner and Developers
• Feature Roadmap - These roadmaps focus on representing the flow of features and can be used in conversation between the Product Owners, stakeholders and customers

See Also

• Product Owner
• Release Strategy
• Story Mapping
• Impact Mapping