Product Development Roadmap

Does your company already have a product development roadmap in place? Do you know how to make one? If not, then this article can help you. So, read on.

Product Development Roadmap

To begin, a product development roadmap is a plan for how your product is going to evolve. It answers the questions:

1) What features will be added?

2) When will they be added?

3) Who is going to develop them?

4) How will they be developed?

5) How much will they cost to develop?

6) How much money will they make?

It identifies all the future product features and plans how you are going to release them. So, it’s useful for a lot of things. But there are two main roles for a product development roadmap: a communication tool and an accountability tool.

First and foremost, a product development roadmap is a communication tool. It lets your team members know what they should be working on in the future. It lets your stakeholders know what they can expect to see in the future if they keep funding your company. 

Also, it lets potential customers know what features you’re planning to add so that they can decide whether or not to buy your product. And it lets you know where you’re going so that you can stay on track and make sure you’re delivering what you said you would deliver.

Then, the importance of this communication cannot be overstated. If people don’t know what’s coming up, then it’s easy for them to lose focus or forget about things that need to get done. Thus, resulting in missed deadlines, wrong features being built, or work being duplicated.

Of course, you don’t want that happening on your team. So make sure you have a good communication strategy in place before you start working on your roadmap. This is so that everyone knows how it works and how it benefits them personally. 

Making a Product Development Roadmap

The first thing you need to remember in making a roadmap is that it’s a living document. This means that it will change over time, and that’s fine. It’s better for it to change than for it to be completely useless. 

Sure, you can make a roadmap that never changes, but it’s not a very useful document then. So don’t worry about trying to predict everything in the future or getting everything exactly right. The point of a roadmap is to provide direction, not to make concrete promises.

So, your product development roadmap should be created based on rough estimates of when things will ship and what they’ll look like when they do. And these estimates should be based on the best intelligence you have at the time. For example, if you have a feature that’s 80% complete, it should probably be scheduled for release in two weeks.

Final Thoughts

So, you would want your product development roadmap to be easy for everyone else to understand. You don’t need fancy charts or graphs or anything like that. A simple spreadsheet with a list of features works just fine. The important thing is clarity and simplicity so that people know how things work and what their priorities are in terms of product releases.