How Today’s Companies are Product Roadmapping to Boost Business

Janna Bastow

January 2, 2014 4 minute read

A product roadmap is a view of how a company is going to achieve its overall objective, showing each of the key areas of focus that will be tackled as they build towards the product vision.

Manage your Product Portfolio Roadmap on ProdPad

Product roadmapping helps the product team and high-level management realize their goals by putting in place a long term plan, which will ascertain what schemes and initiatives need to be put in place for their product to be successful.

As far as product development goals, product roadmapping determines how your product’s design will be changed and altered over time and how you will utilize technology to make this happen. Roadmapping helps to sequence the steps in your business plan, without getting tied into the specific dates and deliverables that might be tackled down the line.

The Product Roadmapping Process

Building a product roadmap is a process that contains many elements and steps for it to be successful. The process of product roadmapping synthesizes information on:

The new product lines your business will design, develop, and produce.
The new software and tools you will require to do these developments.
The timescale (without specific dates) and order of these developments.
It can even help you decide which technologies to invest in, to get a design that is appropriate for your company.

Roadmapping requires a strategic approach to exploit its uses as much as possible. It cleverly shows which areas of focus will be considered, helping to broadly allocate resources while showing a plan for a product that’s gradually improved and built upon. The top-down approach, of looking at the grander product vision to give a sense of direction, is made so that any proposed projects are relevant and contribute to the image that your company has in mind. Mapping out your results and objectives in a careful and considered manner is the best way to do a strategic roadmap and will help you to achieve your goals.

The Objectives of Roadmapping

The principal aim of roadmapping is to induce an innovative and long term plan for the product, considering what the business needs, what the users and customers want, and what technology needs to be in place to get there. When building and changing your product roadmap, you should have these 3 objectives in mind:

Examine the prospects of your company’s future in an unbiased and neutral manner.
Progress onto the next stage after assessment to develop responses to anticipated market needs and make sure that you preempt any requirements that your customers may have in the future.
Appreciate and align your technology development and implementation plans with the changing nature of the market.

Using ProdPad to Manage your Roadmap

desktop board slides with roadmap — Export your product roadmap so you can include it in other files

With ProdPad, we make this process of creating and managing your product roadmap a whole lot easier.

Once you capture your product vision in ProdPad, you can put your roadmap together using ideas and user stories already in your backlog, and update it with a simple drag and drop interface. You can then tag and color code your roadmap so it’s easy to understand how each area is related to the next.
The roadmap is managed by broad time horizons: Current, Near Term and Future. This helps manage stakeholder expectations by not recording specific promises on delivery dates that are too far down the line to be exact on, and allows you to outline a plan for delivering your product vision that’s anywhere from 18 to 36 months long, the typical length of a roadmap.
If you’re managing more than one product, you can manage multiple product roadmaps in ProdPad, and view either individual product roadmaps, the roadmap for a specific product line or grouping of products, or a roadmap for your entire product portfolio.
Once your product roadmap is done, you can export it easily. Export the printer friendly version to bring to meetings or stick up on the office walls, or paste a copy into an important presentation like your Board pack, or simply embed it on your site or intranet like we have: https://www.prodpad.com/our-roadmap/