As a Product Manager, building a solid roadmap will help answer any one of the following questions you will get: What are we building this quarter?. Why is this product being built and where are we with Cool Feature XYZ?. When is this release coming out?
What is a product roadmap and why should you use one?
A roadmap is a visualized plan of what you want to build for your set of features over time.
- The greatest uses for a roadmap are: Provides vision and priority to engineering teams
- Builds motivation and can help in designing solutions
Areas to improve
Areas that can be improved to improve user conversion
When does a product roadmap not work?
Evolving customer, business, or industry needs
- Experiment data
- Early stage product idea
- Unforeseen circumstances can change strategy and direction overnight
- Product board
- Airtable
- Roadmunk
- Atlassian
Transparency to stakeholders
The more information you can provide to your stakeholders, the better they can plan, prepare, and prioritize their own work to help support business functions
- Provides some cover when you are asked to build something else
- Only build your roadmap when you feel like you’ve identified some of the problems you want to solve and why solving them is important
Airtable
Link to other spreadsheets easily
- Can pull data from your own personal spreadsheet into an organization spreadsheet without having to edit in both places
- Users can customize their views by user on the same sheet, making sharing and editing easy
- Easier to share and present roadmaps than a simple spreadsheet
- Google sheets is another good option if you don’t have access to Google Sheets
Consult your internal stakeholders
Everyone always has ideas of what they think is important, it’s up to you to filter for the best ones.
- Users may claim “I need a fork!” when they really needed a spoon, and you need to listen to them all
