How to Create a Great SaaS Product Roadmap

If you’re a product manager working in the tech industry, there’s a high chance you’re working on a SaaS product – if not right now, at some point in your career. SaaS is one of the most prevalent models for licensing and delivering software these days.

Just to be clear, when I’m saying SaaS I’m talking about software products that are hosted in the cloud, distributed through the internet, and bought by users on a subscription basis. Customers are subscribing to a service, and that service is software – hence ‘Software-as-a-Service’.

That’s opposed to on-premise software. With SaaS, customers easily access the service through a subscription and don’t need to worry about installing, manually upgrading or managing themselves on local servers or computers.

Even if you’re not managing a SaaS product yourself, you’ll certainly be using them. Just think, when was the last time you purchased software with a one-off license and had to install yourself, locally? We’re all using SaaS products – whether for work with B2B products (think ProdPad or Hubspot), or at home with B2C products. (think Headspace or Spotify).

If you’re a SaaS product manager, you’ll need to nail your SaaS product roadmap to drive your current and future success. You’ll need to know how to create it, and then understand how to improve and maintain it.

If you’re new to PMing and moving into a new position at a SaaS business, be sure to also read through our Ultimate Guide to Product Roadmaps to cover the basics, then come back here to understand the specific nuances when it comes to a SaaS product.

In this blog, I’ll give you the round-up of all the vital information on what makes a SaaS product roadmap tick, why it’s such a necessary part of your product management workflow, and how to do it right.

In this blog, I’ll give you the round-up of all the vital information on what makes a SaaS product roadmap tick, why it’s such a necessary part of your product management workflow, and how to do it right.

What is a SaaS product roadmap?

A SaaS product roadmap is a visual representation of your comprehensive product strategy, and how you plan to improve your Software-as-a-Service product.

Simply put, it tells people the “what,” “why,” and “when” of your product team’s been doing.

For product managers, your roadmap isn’t just for planning. It’s a dynamic tool that shapes how your team works. It’s the ever-changing blueprint for your product’s growth and evolution.

A well-made SaaS product roadmap serves both as a bird’s-eye-view of your product strategy and vision, and as a boots-on-the-ground guide for your team’s day-to-day (and sprint-to-sprint).

Beyond being a vital planning tool, your roadmap is a fantastic way to improve your communication and transparency. Done right, it can convey your overarching strategy to anyone who reads it, from someone who’s never heard of your product to the C-suite of your company.

It gives a variety of important stakeholders, including your customers, insight into just how you’re going to make that strategy a reality. And it keeps your people aligned on the same goal, giving them directly visible feedback on how their work is influencing the progress of their product.

In other words, it builds trust, both with your team and with your users. And trust is a vital resource when you’re always online.

Why is a SaaS product roadmap different from other roadmaps?

There are a few things that make SaaS roadmaps a different beast from standard product roadmaps, let alone yon old fashioned beasty, the timeline roadmap (like the famously grizzled old veteran, the Gantt chart).

After all, SaaS companies have to constantly innovate while constantly maintaining, all the while constantly reducing their tech debt and (you guessed it!) constantly managing their backlog… 

SaaS products are never “finished” (until, for one reason or another, they are eventually sunsetted). They require repeated and sometimes speedy iteration, and things could go wrong at any moment, requiring flexibility and adaptability.

SaaS companies also need to have a customer-centric focus, because a subscription-based model lives or dies on making sure people think your service is worth the money, and then keeping them thinking that as long as possible.

SaaS products are essentially a single platform that is used by all customers. One platform for all. Therefore, it comes with the challenge of serving all your customers at the same time.

Unlike when you’re building on-premise software for individual (usually high paying) customers and you can build their product however they want it, when you have one cloud based software for all, you have the tricky challenge of balancing the priorities to ensure you have a product that serves the whole of your customer base (and your business). It’s a particular skill – an art even – and it’s what makes SaaS product managers so damn cool 😉.

Outcomes and time horizons, not features and deadlines

A SaaS product roadmap works best when it’s outcome-focused. It also needs to regularly incorporate insights gained from data and customer feedback to inform what makes it onto the roadmap, and whether it needs to be done now, next, or later.

The best SaaS roadmaps don’t limit themselves to specific timelines, at risk of turning into a product factory, focused on nothing but deadlines for the delivery of product features.

Instead many use an Agile methodology, such as Scrum. Agile is all about being flexible, efficient, and constantly learning both about how to improve your product, and what the people using it think of it.

The SaaS marketplace can be volatile, and it makes sticking to old-fashioned timeline roadmaps problematic. That’s where modern outcome-based roadmap formats like the Now-Next-Later approach can really save your bacon.

The Now-Next-Later roadmap, invented by our very own co-founder and CEO Janna Bastow, allows you the freedom to adjust your strategy and tactics on the fly, based on data and the metrics you are tracking. But more on that later!

Why is a SaaS product roadmap important?

Having a roadmap for your SaaS product is absolutely vital. You need to know what’s going on, and you need everyone else to know it too. You need a central source of truth – to guide your growth, to manage your backlog, and to prioritize what happens when.

Alignment

In a SaaS company, a whole gamut of teams from the devs to sales, marketing, and customer support… everyone needs to be working in harmony towards shared objectives.

Your product roadmap serves as the central reference point, a living document that is the beating heart of your efforts, aligning all your departments behind a shared vision. 

Without a clear roadmap, your teams might very well wind up working at cross-purposes, making things that don’t really mesh with your strategy or your users’ needs.

The end result? Wasted resources, lost opportunities, and even internal conflicts.

Prioritization

A good SaaS product roadmap will help you to prioritize what features, upgrades, and fixes should be tackled first. It’ll help you make sure your time and efforts are spent on the initiatives that are going to provide the best value.

By keeping your finger on the pulse of customer feedback, watching market trends like a hawk, and keeping sight of your established objectives and key results (OKRs), you can determine which items on the roadmap are most critical for your growth.

It’ll help you with balancing quick wins and long-term investments, striking the delicate equilibrium between working on immediate customer needs and building a sustainable product that will stand the test of time.

Communication

A well-made product roadmap inherently fosters trust and transparency with your customers, investors, and team members alike.

When your users know what to expect and why, they’re much more likely to remain loyal to your product. Your investors will gain confidence in your ability to execute your vision. Your team will stay motivated because they’ll see how their hard work visibly makes a difference.

It also helps you to manage expectations (a vital part of the job!). For instance, let’s say some functionality that your users are clamoring for is on the roadmap, but it’s in your “Later” column. Directly communicating this to customers with a public roadmap will help them understand why you’re it’s on your to-do list, but not at the top of it.

SaaS products thrive on customer feedback. Your roadmap is a structured way to incorporate all of your user suggestions and requests, ensuring that your product remains aligned with your customers’ evolving needs.

Flexibility

The software development landscape is dynamic as it is, constantly changing and evolving. The SaaS world is doubly so.

New competitors, technologies, and market trends rise and fall, sometimes it feels like at a daily pace. That is why your SaaS product roadmap can’t be a rigid contract. It needs to be a flexible guide. 

It has to allow you to pivot, to adapt to circumstances as and when they shift. A new change in the market cropping up or customer needs unexpectedly evolving needs to be an opportunity to take advantage of, not a roadblock to your cut-and-dried plan. That means you need to be able to adjust your roadmap accordingly.

Accountability

A roadmap is a tool for tracking progress. It helps you monitor whether you’re hitting your milestones and delivering on your commitments.

Accountability really is crucial for ensuring that the product development process stays on track. It helps to ensure that your team members take ownership of their work, as they can see how it fits into the bigger picture.

If you find that you’re deviating from your roadmap, from reacting to unforeseen challenges or opportunities, it still provides a reference point for you to make informed course corrections.

What should be on a SaaS product roadmap?

1. Objectives & goals

These are the specific and measurable outcomes you have chosen. Your OKRs need to be aligned with your product vision and strategy. They make your roadmap actionable by defining what success looks like.

These objectives and goals should be easily accessible from your roadmap, allowing anyone who looks at it to understand what you’re doing and why.

The most effective SaaS product roadmaps clearly connect everything on it with its corresponding objective. By tagging roadmap items with relevant objectives, you clearly articulate your strategy, and you demonstrate how you intend to meet your targets.

2. Time horizons

Whether it’s a flexible, agile-friendly structure like Now-Next-Later or a detailed (and dangerously inflexible) Gantt-style timeline with specific dates, time is the backbone of your roadmap. 

Opting for broader time horizons (i.e. Now, Next, and Later – or something with a name that clearly explains what that means in your specific context) rather than detailed timelines provides the vital flexibility you need to be able to adjust based on learning and feedback.

3. Initiatives

This is the granular content of your roadmap and is made up of the specific initiatives and problems that your team is working on.

One important tip: If you frame your roadmap initiatives as ‘problems to solve’ rather than picking specific features to work on, you promote flexibility, innovation, and outcome-based thinking, in one fell swoop.

By using this tactic, you’ll start looking at each initiative as an opportunity, and each potential solution as a hypothesis to be proven. You’ll develop a robust and flexible approach, – if the first method you use to solve the problem fails, you’ll have a plan B, C, and so on.

4. Ideas

Each initiative on your SaaS product roadmap should include all the related ideas (aka “Epics” to Agile folks). These ideas represent various ways you can address problems and delivering value, such as potential features and enhancements.

Ideas can come from brainstorming sessions, suggestions from team members, customer feedback, market research, or previously identified issues.

You’ll need to sift through these ideas in your product backlog and pick the ones that you think are worth pursuing, associating them with the respective roadmap initiative.

The best roadmap format for a SaaS product

Maintaining a fixed timeline can be challenging when the ground keeps shifting under your feet.

Unexpected issues, market shifts, and customer feedback can all force you to pivot on a dime, frustrating and annoying your stakeholders and damaging their trust.

Traditional timeline-based roadmaps can really struggle to meet the ever-changing demands of developing a SaaS product. That’s why Agile, outcome-based formats like the Now-Next-Later roadmap (our preferred choice here at ProdPad) shine as the preferred choice for SaaS product development. 

Timeline roadmaps often lead to rigid commitments. SaaS products, by their nature, require flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and competitive pressures. Desperately trying to stick to fixed timelines is counterproductive – it forces you to rush development, miss opportunities, and just churn out feature after feature.

Rather than blinkered by focusing solely on features, the Now-Next-Later format centers on the desired outcomes and goals associated with each feature or initiative. Each item on the roadmap can be explicitly linked to specific objectives, allowing you to track progress towards achieving those objectives.

This outcome-driven approach ensures that every effort aligns with your goals/OKRs, keeping the product development efforts strategic and impactful because they are directly tied to the most important business outcomes.

For an in-depth explanation of the different roadmap formats you can create for your product, take a look at our Ultimate Guide to Product Roadmaps.

8 steps to create your SaaS product roadmap

The first thing you need to consider is the direction of play. The initiatives included on your roadmap should be informed from the top down, and the bottom up.

If you make sure that each item on your roadmap is addressing both a business objective (top-down) and a customer problem (bottom-up), you will be ensuring that you’re promoting this alignment. 

You will also be well served by ensuring you are performing user research and checking in with your most important stakeholders, both internal and external. By familiarizing yourself with their needs, expectations, and constraints, you can gain a clearer picture of what you should be prioritizing.

Once you’ve established an effective flow for generating your initiatives, and have communicated with your stakeholders, you’re ready to start building your SaaS product roadmap by taking these steps:

1. Establish your product vision and strategy

Begin by defining your product’s long-term vision. What are the product’s objectives, and how does it address customer needs? This vision serves as your roadmap’s guiding principle.

2. Set clear goals and objectives

Ensure your product goals align with your vision and overall business strategy. Utilize product goals and OKRs to define measurable outcomes.

3. Select your roadmap format

Review the roadmap format options and choose one that suits your product management approach and stakeholder expectations. Lean formats like Now-Next-Later offer advantages.

4. Create your initiatives

Start by brainstorming ways to achieve your vision and objectives. Consider solving customer problems that align with your product goals. Analyze customer feedback to identify common needs and match them to your vision and objectives. Examine your idea backlog for valuable insights.

5. Prioritize your initiatives

Prioritize at the initiative level, aligning your work with the product strategy and objectives. Consider the value, feasibility, and urgency to determine what’s Now, Next, and Later.

6. Add ideas to initiatives

Populate your roadmap with initiatives in priority order, then detail how you intend to solve problems and achieve product objectives. Mine your idea backlog, explore customer feedback, and brainstorm with your team. Use prioritization frameworks to surface valuable ideas.

7. Review and adjust

Share the draft with stakeholders, collect their feedback, and make necessary adjustments. Remember that a product roadmap is a dynamic document and should be regularly reviewed and updated.

8. Publish and communicate

Determine who needs access to your roadmap and at what level of detail. Tailor versions for each stakeholder group using a roadmap tool like ProdPad. Don’t forget to communicate your product strategy and plans to your customers, allowing them to see your vision. 

Why you need a public SaaS product roadmap

We’ve written before about how a well-crafted product roadmap is a vital tool for success, and that making it public can be a genuine game-changer for your business.

Not only will it align your team, communicate your vision, and ensure you’re light on your feet when responding to changes in your customers’ needs and the market as a whole… It’ll also drive engagement and build trust with your users, encourage accountability within your teams, and it’s a very effective way to validate your ideas. Just a few perks, then!

By embracing outcome-focused roadmaps like Now-Next-Later, and making the roadmap you’ve come up with public, you’ll go a long way toward maximizing the positive impacts it has on your SaaS business.

Incidentally, ProdPad makes it easy to publish and maintain your public roadmap. Both your internal and public roadmap are the same document, you just need to filter out the more inwardly-focused initiatives, and keep it focused on what will interest your external stakeholders. Check out ours to see what we mean!

Final thoughts

Whether your SaaS product roadmap is a bunch of Post-its being moved around a whiteboard, or is itself being handled by a SaaS product like ProdPad, hopefully you now know what makes it unique, and why you really need to get on top of yours.

It’s an important thing to master for any product manager who wants to keep innovating, stay flexible, and have a user base that trusts them and their team to build the right solutions at the right time.