What is a roadmap? A map which has multiple directions to reach the destination. So, finding a right direction to reach the destination is all about product roadmap. Indirectly, direction can be altered, modified, changed, and created but destination should not be changed. What is the destination here? Vision of the product is the destination. Eventually, building a product roadmap is choosing a shortest possible and feasible route to reach the destination.

Having a vision for a product or business is very much important to plan the activities and drive the show. Defining the product future, where do you want to see in next 5 years? What is the market share would want to grab? Which area/domain would you like to have dominance? What is the plan and measures you would like to take to be pioneer? Making money in a shortest possible time or creating an admired brand? Ultimately, how or where do you want to see the product/business? is all about having vision.

Setup the date and duration

Having vision without a plan and target date to achieve, reaching a destination without direction and time to reach would remain as dreams. So, setup the time and duration to build a product. Eventually, the roadmap will be developed with what to deliver and when to deliver.

Often, when to deliver becomes a puzzle because a product has multiple features to be developed. Those features need to be organized and prioritized per compliance, customer need, innovation, market demand, feasibility, and complexity.

Essentially, roadmap doesn’t have any specific duration, it could be prepared for 5 years or 5 months. However, considering the practicality it will be prepared for an year which has feature prioritization for each quarter. How to prioritize the features?

Priority -1

Compliance is the top priority. For instance, products related to healthcare, banking, insurance must fulfill the compliance. So, features related to compliance are prioritized to implement. If the compliance features are not implemented in the specified time period business may end up paying the penalty.

Priority -2

Customer is the business user, any product which is being developed to fulfill the user requirement so, customer asked requirements must prioritized to develop. If customer is not happy, product will not be sold out. If the product is not sold out there is no revenue.

Priority -3

Bugs with medium or low level priority which the system is still working with have to be fixed as soon as possible. If they are not getting fixed, it will have an impact on the functionality.

Priority -4

Innovation is something which could change the game and set the trend either. However, customer usually has no expectation about innovative features. Eventually, once the compliance and customer need are fulfilled innovative features can be implemented.

Majority of the cases, based on the engineering team’s request and technical complexity, the prioritization may get changed but the final date and the route to travel is fixed.

That is how the roadmap has to be prepared.

TemplatePoint is the best source for any product templates

Another good read

How to do market research