How to Create a Product Management Roadmap + Examples (2024)

Creating a product management roadmap is a crucial task that sets the direction and vision for your product's development. A well-structured roadmap aligns teams, clarifies product goals, and communicates the strategic plan to stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Whether you're launching a new product or refining an existing one, this article will show you how to build product roadmap to navigate the complexities of the product management process.

What is a product management roadmap?

A product management roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines the priorities, direction and progress of a product over time. It shows what features and improvements will be developed and their expected release date.

At its core, the roadmap states the product's vision, providing clarity on its purpose, target audience, and anticipated market impact. This vision helps align the product team's efforts, ensuring everyone understands and works towards common objectives. 

The roadmap defines what features, enhancements, or initiatives will take priority over others, thus focusing resources and efforts where they can have the most significant impact.

How to create a product management roadmap

To create comprehensive, dynamic and impactful roadmaps that align with business goals, customer needs and team collaboration requirements you need a proper tool. Zeda.io focuses on efficiency, customization, and data-driven decisions, making it an excellent choice for the product development process.

If you're not a tool user yet, sign up for the free trial, and you'll be ready to create your very own roadmap. Next, follow these steps:

Choose a product management roadmap template

Zeda.io provides various pre-built product roadmap templates. It allows you to quickly start with a format that fits your needs. Here are different product roadmap examples you can choose from:

Feature roadmap 

This type of roadmap monitors the creation and launch of product features. It enables you to establish timelines for specific features and follow progress through a schedule.

Feature roadmaps are useful for communicating upcoming features and their expected release dates. 

For instance, a software company might use a feature roadmap to inform stakeholders about new functionalities planned for the next quarter and their anticipated launch dates. This helps the company plan its resources so the development team can meet its goals.

Product portfolio roadmap

A product portfolio roadmap helps you gain a clear overview of your comprehensive product management strategy and timelines. 

By providing a single view, the product portfolio roadmap facilitates tracking progress and ensures the development team’s coordination on the most crucial tasks.

Goal-oriented roadmap

Instead of focusing solely on specific features, a goal-oriented roadmap emphasizes the outcomes or objectives of a product team. It also outlines the steps to reach these goals.

A goal-oriented roadmap contains the following components:

• Clearly defined goals of the product
• Key projects or initiatives that will help achieve these goals
• Important milestones and achievements along the way
• A timeline that outlines when goals and milestones should be reached
• Key performance indicators or other metrics to measure progress 

Status-based roadmap

A status-based roadmap focuses on the current status of various initiatives, projects, or features within a product's development lifecycle. Instead of organizing tasks by timeframes or release dates, this type of roadmap categorizes work based on its current state, such as "Planned," "In progress," "Testing," and "Done."

This type of roadmap is regularly updated to reflect the current status of each task. It allows teams to see real-time progress and identify bottlenecks and delays. It also provides a transparent view of the development process for stakeholders, highlighting completed, ongoing and upcoming tasks. 

Now-next-later roadmap

Focusing on deadline-based delivery isn't always effective. Therefore, the now-next-later roadmap prioritizes customer needs and business opportunities instead of concentrating on timeliness.

The Now-next-later agile product roadmap arranges tasks into three columns:

• Now: This section includes tasks, projects, or features that are currently in progress or will be addressed immediately. These are the highest priority items that the team is actively working on.
• Next: This section includes tasks or projects for the near future. The team isn't working on these items at the moment but has prioritized addressing them once they complete the current work in the "Now" section.
• Later: This section includes tasks, projects or features for the longer term. These items are on the roadmap but are not an immediate priority. They represent future opportunities or longer-range strategic goals.

Building an agile product roadmap enables companies to swiftly adapt and evolve in response to user needs, fostering ongoing innovation. It also comes in handy when balancing vision and execution in the project management process. 

Customize it to your liking

Zeda.io offers several options for product roadmap  customization like:

1. Groups and subgroups: You can add group and subgroup classifications based on features like product, importance, assignee, status, type or custom fields.
2. Timeline and board views: This feature allows you to switch between timeline and Kanban roadmap views.
3. Milestones: You can include important deadlines like releases, launches, etc., as color-coded milestones on the roadmap
4. Selective display: You have complete control over what's displayed on the roadmap. Decide whether you want to show or hide information about specific groups, feature properties, etc

These customization options allow you to drive impact by making roadmaps more visually appealing and easier for all stakeholders to understand.

Make it accessible

Zeda.io enables you to create customized public roadmap views for external stakeholders and customers, fostering transparency and keeping them informed about upcoming features and product direction.

The platform offers a customizable user portal where you can set up various boards to gather customer feedback and ideas. Users can also easily submit their feedback through an in-app widget.

Zeda.io centralizes feedback from multiple sources into a unified dashboard, streamlining the collection of customer insights.

Choose product management metrics

The next step in creating an effective product development roadmap is selecting the right product management metrics. These provide a comprehensive view of the product's performance, customer satisfaction and overall business health. Here are key metrics to consider:

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): A standardized measure of your business’s monthly income from active subscriptions. It helps track business performance, forecast budgets, and manage cash flow efficiently.
• Customer lifetime value (CTLV): The total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your product. This metric helps prioritize features and enhancements that deliver long-term value.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Monitoring CAC helps evaluate the efficiency of your marketing and sales strategies, enabling you to optimize spending and improve customer acquisition processes.
• Retention rate: Indicates the percentage of users who continue using your product over a specific period. Tracking retention rates helps identify potential issues affecting customer loyalty and provides insights for enhancing user experience.
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Measures how satisfied customers are with your product and their interactions with your business. This metric provides direct feedback on customer satisfaction and highlights areas for improvement, helping you to create a customer-facing roadmap.

By focusing on these key indicators, you can create a strategic product roadmap that aligns with your goals and drives continuous improvement.

Learn how to present a roadmap to stakeholders

A product roadmap presentation aims to outline the vision, direction and planned development of a product or service over time. It serves to align key stakeholders, such as executives, product teams, developers, marketers and customers on the product evolution and strategic objectives.

A product strategy roadmap typically includes:

• Goals: Define specific, clear and measurable goals to set up the direction of the meeting. They should span a defined period, usually 3 to 12 months, taking into account budgetary planning cycles.
• Product vision: Present your plans within the broader product strategy and its future direction. Address the essential questions of your plan, such as why, when, and how. Include key details about the product vision, such as goals, user personas, market demand, competitors and potential ROI generation.
• Strategy: Offer a well-defined strategy that provides clarity on priorities, milestones and key initiatives that will drive the product forward. This will give stakeholders confidence in the product's direction and align their efforts and resources effectively. A robust strategy ensures that every aspect of the product roadmap presentation is purposeful, coherent and in line with the broader organizational objectives.
• Audience: Tailor each product development roadmap presentation to the specific needs of your audience. Executives, sales teams, and engineers each have distinct perspectives on product strategy. Focus on presenting the most critical information in your roadmap presentations.
• Feedback: Gather feedback on the product roadmap from both internal and external audiences. Ensure you have ample time to address questions and comments, and diligently record any feedback for future use.

When communicating with stakeholders, always use clear, straightforward language. It enhances the effectiveness of product plan communication, particularly when there are several stakeholders to align.

Conclusion

Crafting a product management roadmap is a strategic endeavor that brings clarity, direction and purpose to your product development efforts.

As you embark on building and refining your product roadmap, remember that flexibility and communication are key. A roadmap is a living document that should evolve with your product and market conditions. Regularly update it to reflect new insights, technological advancements and shifting customer needs.

Ready to take your product roadmapping to the next level? Unleash the future of product roadmaps with Zeda.io today and experience the power of AI-driven insights, customizable templates, and seamless collaboration tools that will transform your product strategy. Sign up for free and start building impactful roadmaps that drive real business outcomes!