What is a product roadmap and how to build it the right way

How to look at your digital product from a broader perspective and what are the benefits of doing so? 

Developing a product can be difficult. Without a properly established long-term product strategy and goals, prioritizing and managing your app development can be chaotic. There are many people involved in building a product — engineers, product managers, marketers, sales team... Without a clear vision, you won't be sure that the whole team knows which direction to go.

With help comes a product roadmap. It’s a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. It's a plan of action that aligns the organization around short and long-term goals for the product or project and ways to achieve them.

Why are product roadmaps so important?

What's important is that a product roadmap not only shows what to build, but also why. Thanks to this, the entire team understands the problem that the app they're working on is solving. And this makes it easier to prioritize and come up with new ideas to improve the product. 

What should be included in a product roadmap?

Let’s take a look at what should be included in a product roadmap in detail. The steps outlined here may vary in the different sources you find. In this article you will find a description of the most important elements that should be included in a product roadmap to ensure the best possible outcome. 

Strategic goals (product strategy)

Putting strategic goals into the product roadmap is providing a kind of a broad view on the product. Yet not redundant at all. As mentioned above, it’s highly important to keep the internal teams and external stakeholders on the same page when it comes to the purposes and strategic vision of the product. 

Product strategy is usually established by the product manager, but in fact, it’s the work of everyone involved in the process of product development.  

Product strategy is the "why" behind the product. It’s a process of defining what you want to achieve and how you plan to get there. To do it well, you must deeply understand the market you want to hit. Ask yourself the following questions: what challenges do your customers face, what are the other solutions on the market, how can your product stand out from the crowd?

To define the product strategy, think about business and market factors regarding your app:

• your goals
• your product vision
• the monetization method you choose
• market positioning
• user personas
• competitive analysis.

Key releases and features related to the goals

Key releases are moments when a new version of the app with key features for users and for products are released. Sometimes it means a new implemented feature and sometimes an update to an existing one. 

When planning the product strategy, every app creator, along with the development team, should list the key features that shape the business purposes of the product. At this stage, the whole team should understand the product vision and decide which features are the most important. This stage also includes planning when the releases will occur and what features will appear in a given version of the app. 

User stories 

User stories, in a product roadmap, are simple descriptions of features told from the perspective of the user. Why is it so valuable? The product is made to serve the users by meeting their needs. That’s how you can then meet your business goals. It should never go the other way round. 

User stories are a kind of user-centric work framework and allow the development team to be extremely creative in providing the user with the result they expect. They are written in non-technical language as they are supposed to look like they’re said from the user point of view. User stories should be short and simple descriptions. Reading the story by any member of the team should result in them being aware of what they have to build and what value they have to deliver to the user. 

So user stories open further discussions about product features. If, from a user perspective, you can notice something is missing, some defects or lacks, you can simply eliminate them at this point. It’s better to do it now instead of changing things after the app is released! 

User stories are often short sentences, such as:

“As a [user], I [can], [so that/because].”

User

Of course you know who the user is. The point, however, is that you can just leave the word "user" in this sentence, and you can replace it with your user type or persona's name, for example. Whichever option you choose, it should be made clear that it is very important to get to know this user. Who will be the user of your app? Is it Ann from New York? Lee from Shanghai? Or maybe Michael from Mousehole? To find out, creating a user persona will help you.

Can/want to be able to 

What do your users need? How can you help them with your product? What do your users want to do in the app? As soon as you find the answers, you’ll be able to create user stories and build a product to serve them in the best possible way.

So that/because

This isn’t something that always occurs in user stories but it’s also worth considering the user's further goals. Why do they want to perform a specific action using your product? What’s their purpose? Understanding this will also help you plan features. 

Example

An example of such user story, let’s say in a food delivery app could be: 

• As a user I can find restaurants I like and order food from the menu.
• As a user I want to be able to change the ingredients of the dishes.
• As Ann from New York I can get my meal delivered fast, because I’m in a rush.
• As Michael from Mousehole I want to be able to order local food in the app but pick it up myself. 
• As Lee from Shanghai, I can find out when my order is going to be delivered, so that I can plan the time while I wait for it. 

Epics 

Epics in product roadmaps are descriptions of product features that cannot be delivered as defined within an iteration and are therefore too large to be estimated. Following the words of Atlassian, they are large bodies of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories, or sometimes called “Issues”. Epics are really big task groups that take a long time to complete, e.g. 2 months. Stories are smaller parts in a project, they are implemented in e.g. two weeks, a week or less. 

An example of an epic could be: “Extend the current ordering system to make it easier to understand for new users”. 

How does the development team create epics?

Generally, the product manager is responsible for creating and maintaining the epic. However, the whole team should always be involved. So product managers engage the engineers, designers, sales team and quality assurance specialists to make sure that everything is clear concerning the product goals and the epics are created properly. 

Productboard suggests the following best practices in creating an epic: 

• Involve the whole team when writing the epic
• Structure the specs of the epic (in a 4-section structure: introduction, product requirement, technical requirement and design requirement)
• Select a metric for the epic – listing what metric are you trying to improve with each epic
• Ensure the epic doesn’t take too long or too short to complete 
• Identify blockers in the work process.

Overall timeline

The product roadmap also specifies the overall timeline of the product development. At the very beginning, when there is little material about the product and the idea is only outlined, it isn’t easy to determine how long it might take to create it. In fact, it may even be considered impossible. When the tasks can be broken down into smaller parts, the situation changes significantly. Product roadmaps allow you to define a timeframe for each smaller element of the project, and thus it is also possible to determine the average total time. 

Timeline is presented on a calendar and is supposed to show which tasks will be performed at a certain time by a particular person or team. It is also related to decisions about priorities in the project and shows the path of the product development.

Advantages of product roadmaps

To sum up, when it comes to advantages of creating a product roadmap, it is:

• Keeping the external and internal teams on the same page, 
• Helping to understand the product development process and its purposes, 
• Opening the whole development team’s eyes on the product and company vision, 
• Helping the product management team decide about the most and less important tasks, 
• A great visual summary helpful for project management,
• A guide in bringing the application to market according to company goals and user needs. 

Conclusion

Product roadmap keeps the whole product management and development under control, allows teams from different departments to understand what, when and why will be built, as well as what is most important to the customer, so they can better understand the product they are working on and its users.