The Public Roadmap: Why You Need One, and How to Create It

As a product manager or a product-driven company, you know that staying ahead of the game requires more than just great ideas and well-organized teams. It demands transparency, trust, and a clear direction for your product’s future. 

One of the most essential tools in your arsenal is the public roadmap. In this article, we’ll explore what a public roadmap is, why you need one, the possible cons and how to mitigate against them, how to create and share it, and how to leverage your public roadmap for gathering valuable feedback.

So, let’s dive in!

What is a public roadmap?

In simple terms, a public roadmap is a version of your product roadmap, made public. It is a strategic tool that outlines the future direction of your product, made available to your customers, prospective customers, stakeholders, and anyone else who happens upon it.

Essentially, it’s a blueprint that provides insights into your product strategy – the upcoming developments, enhancements, and major milestones. It gives viewers a clear picture of what they can expect from your product going forward.

“But is a public roadmap different from a product roadmap?”, I hear you ask. Well, in a way, no. A public roadmap is the version of your product roadmap that you are making public. Version is the key word here. Your public roadmap will often be a tailored version of your product roadmap – including the information that external stakeholders will care about, and keeping back the stuff they don’t care about and don’t need to see. But we’ll cover this more in a bit.

Why do you need a public roadmap?

There are a whole host of reasons why having a public roadmap is advantageous. The benefits definitely outweigh the risks (but we’ll come to the risks later). For now, it’s all about the upside. And the upside is significant. 

The benefits of having a public roadmap are: 

Building trust

Having a public roadmap is the ultimate demonstration of transparency. And we probably don’t need to tell you that being open and transparent builds trust.

When a team, company, or brand is confidently transparent about their strategy and plans, it creates open communication between them and their customer base. When customers see you happily sharing what you’re working on, it builds trust. Trust in your honesty and trust in your product and its future. 

Also, if you include a view of the roadmap items you have completed, you’ll be demonstrating that you can deliver and evidencing how you can be trusted to solve customer problems.  

Engaging customers & fostering loyalty 

Having a public roadmap that your customers can see and engage with is a great way of generating a bit of excitement and anticipation with your user base. When customers can see what you’re working on and why, it can spark discussion and encourage customers to share feedback or ideas, boosting engagement. 

And when customers are engaged and excited, they’re more likely to stick around. If you make customers feel involved in the process – invested through their feedback – you’ll find them becoming truly loyal.

Promoting your product

Your public roadmap can also serve as a powerful marketing tool, highlighting your product’s direction and showing how it differentiates. 

Whether it’s published to your website and discoverable by anyone evaluating your offering, or being used by your sales team as collateral to help convert prospects and close deals, your public roadmap is a great tool for engaging potential new customers. It can be used to showcase the unique value your product offers and to paint a reassuring picture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Driving accountability

A public roadmap is one of the most effective ways of driving accountability across the team. When the strategy is communicated externally, with public statements made about the problems you are working to solve, there’s that extra incentive to deliver. After all, if a promise is being made publicly, with your name on it (since you’re the team behind the product), then you’re going to make sure it gets done. 

Making commitments – even high-level ones – publicly, makes you and your team accountable for delivering on that promise. And that accountability is great for driving focus and efficiency. 

Validating your ideas 

We’ve saved the best till last here. This has got to be the numero uno benefit of a public roadmap. A public roadmap provides you with a way to check the assumptions and hypotheses you’re making about the direction you’re taking the product. A public roadmap can be an invaluable tool when it comes to discovery and validation. 

Done right, a product roadmap shouldn’t be the exact plan of what you’re going to do. It’s not a delivery or release plan after all – it’s further upstream than that. A roadmap isn’t the place for exact dates and precise features (you can read more about why timeline roadmaps are a bad idea here). Your roadmap should outline your best guesses about the steps you should take in order to meet your product vision and deliver the value your customers want.

Once you have those best guesses down on your roadmap, you need to check those assumptions and validate your ideas. And the public roadmap gives you a great way of doing just that! 

The best way to validate the ideas on your roadmap is to share it far and wide. To push it out externally and get feedback from your customers. They will see what you plan to do and can tell you if what you’ve assumed is their most pressing problem, is indeed their most pressing problem. If you find lots of customers saying the same thing, then you can act on it. 

Having a public roadmap is the perfect way to get critical feedback on your product strategy before you start building. In this way, a roadmap is similar to a prototype – it’s a prototype of your strategy. In the same way you would build a prototype of a product, put it in front of people and get feedback, so your public roadmap is the prototype for your strategy which you are laying out and getting feedback on. 

Pros and cons of having a public roadmap

It’s fair to say we’ve probably covered the pros of having a public roadmap already (you have been paying attention, right?). But what are the cons? Are there downsides or risks associated with having a public roadmap? 

Yes, there are a few things you need to be aware of. Mainly so you can mitigate against these risks and to help you field any objections you get from the team or leadership when you declare you want to set up a public roadmap. Because let’s face it… it might make some people nervous.

The risks associated with having a public roadmap are:

Managing customer expectations

When you publish a public roadmap you are giving your customers a window into your product strategy and plans. You are making a statement about how you plan to develop the product. That will inevitably create a degree of expectations within your customer base. The risk here is that if expectations are not met, you’re going to have disappointed customers on your hands. 

Luckily, this is an easy one to fix. Don’t put dates on your public roadmap and don’t be feature-specific! It comes down to ensuring you’re communicating a strategy, not making firm promises. 

Don’t fall into the trap of overcommitting to dates and exact features. This leaves you no flexibility to work in a lean way and experiment, learn and adapt. If you make commitments to dates and functionality but your discovery suggests a better way of solving that same problem, you’ll likely miss that date and not deliver that exact feature. Suddenly your public roadmap goes from a force for good to a noose around your neck, restricting your ability to pivot and deliver the best solution. 

The best way to manage expectations and avoid disappointing customers is to use an outcome-based roadmap format for your public roadmap. One that shows time horizons and problems to solve, rather than timelines and features. The Now-Next-Later roadmap is one such format. 

Pressure and fear in the team

The other risk that goes alongside making a public declaration of your product plan is the sense of pressure the team might feel. You don’t want a public roadmap turning your happy team into a bunch of highly stressed and fearful people who are terrified of missing deadlines and feeling the wrath of important customers.

But again, this risk is easily mitigated if your public roadmap uses time horizons and not timelines, and focuses on themes and goals and not exact features. 

Then, your public roadmap becomes a positive thing for team morale –  a source of pride and celebration of what they’re working on and the innovation they are driving. 

If you get the balance right and don’t overcommit on your public roadmap, it will drive positive accountability rather than fear and stress.  

Giving insights to competitors 

You might find that this is the biggest objection you get from people within your business – the fear that a public roadmap will reveal all your secrets to your competitors. You’ll be making it super easy for your competitors to know your plan and steal your ideas!

But seriously, competitors are gonna compete. Try not to sweat it too much. Remember, winners watch the line, losers watch the competition 😜 . 

Let’s be honest, most companies aren’t Apple and aren’t doing super secret launches. How crucial is it that your competitors know nothing about your plans? Like, really? In most cases, the competition is busy building their own stuff. At worst they’ll be copying what you’ve already built and shipped, rather than what you have on your roadmap. 

The benefit you’re going to see from sharing your roadmap with the most people possible and validating what you’re doing, will almost always outweigh the risk of competitors acting on what they’re seeing on your public roadmap. 

Plus, you can mitigate the risk by structuring your public roadmap around the ‘problems to solve’ rather than exact features or designs. That way the competition won’t know exactly what you’re planning to do – just the themes you’re exploring.  

And remember, you don’t have to put things on your roadmap if they don’t need validation from your customers. So if anything is sensitive for any reason, leave it off the public view of your roadmap. But, just try not to pass up the opportunity to get validation on as much as you can. 

Keeping it up-to-date

There’s a final, minor risk to having a public roadmap, and that’s the risk of forgetting to update it and having a stagnant-looking roadmap out in the world. 

It doesn’t look good if roadmap initiatives aren’t moving, nothing new is being added and your completed pile remains static. 

So, if you’re going to have a public roadmap – and we hope we’ve convinced you that you should – you either need to be disciplined with your updates, or, better yet, use a roadmapping tool that means your public roadmap is powered by your underlying roadmap so updates are dynamic. More on that soon…

What to include on a public roadmap (and what to leave out)

When it comes to a public roadmap, you need to think as much about what you don’t put on there, as what you do. You need to consider the audience and tailor the message. If you want your public roadmap to really hit home, you need to make sure the content is relevant and the level of detail is appropriate for an external, customer audience. 

Here’s a quick chart to give you a sense of the level of detail, and the type of initiatives you’re going to want to have for all your possible stakeholders. When it comes to your public roadmap, you’re thinking about the folks in the top right corner. 

What to include

Here are our top suggestions for what you should include on your public roadmap: 

The problems you want to solve

Label your roadmap maps with the ‘problem to solve’. Specific feature functionality is less important than a clear benefit statement about why a customer should care and how it will improve their lives (working or otherwise).

What’s recently launched

Alongside your future plans, make sure to include a view of the roadmap initiatives that you’ve recently completed. Not only does this help customers see stuff they might have missed, but it helps demonstrate that you have a track record of executing your strategy.

What to avoid

Here’s what you’ll want to avoid adding to your public roadmap:

Too much content

You don’t want to overwhelm people. Make sure your public roadmap is easily digestible and not overfull. If your public roadmap is nicely streamlined, and not full of things that you’re not going to get to in a while, you’ll have a faster cadence with items progressing through.

That’s better than throwing everything at the roadmap right away and having a bunch of roadmap cards that just sit there going stale. If you keep it lean and show an appropriate amount of things for the velocity of your team you’ll have a more active, dynamic roadmap.  

Jargon

Remember your audience. Don’t get over technical, or use internal terminology and jargon that could obscure your message. If people don’t understand what they’re reading, they’ll switch off. 

Specific features and designs

You’ll want to think about how granular to go on your public roadmap. It’s better to keep the roadmap items as the themes you are exploring or problems you’re working to solve. This way you aren’t committing to specific features, but instead making a promise to solve a particular problem. You then have the flexibility to experiment, validate, measure, and adapt the eventual solution you deliver.

This way, rather than delivering something because you declared you would many months ago, you’ll be delivering something that actually solves the problems and achieves your objectives. 

Dates

We’ve talked about the pitfalls of including dates on your public roadmap already. You’ll be signing yourself up for less flexibility, less discovery and experimentation, disappointed customers, and stressed-out teams.

Avoid the danger of committing to dates and choose an agile roadmap format like the Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

Internally-focused initiatives

You need to think, ‘Is this roadmap initiative solving a customer problem?’ If it isn’t, leave it for your internal roadmap only. That could be because the problem being solved is more of a commercial, business problem – like growing revenue – or because it’s just plain irrelevant for customers – like technical infrastructure changes. If there’s value in getting something validated by your customers, add it to the public roadmap. If not, leave it off. 

And look, while we don’t want to blow our own trumpet, you really should take a look at our own public roadmap – that’ll give you an idea of what to include, and what to keep back. 

How to publish a public roadmap

This is all about the tool you use. You need to consider both the user experience of finding and viewing your roadmap, and your workload in terms of updating it. 

Different roadmap tools will support different roadmap formats. What’s important is choosing one that gives you a public roadmap that not only looks good but can be easily understood. Simplicity is key.

If you use ProdPad for the job (which you definitely should 😉) then you’ll be able to communicate your roadmap in an outcome-focused way, using broad time horizons.   

The beauty of using a roadmapping tool that allows you to build and publish a tailored public view is that your public roadmap will be dynamic and you won’t have the overhead of having to manually update the public version of your roadmap, wherever it lives. 

You don’t want to have to double your efforts, creating and updating your internal product roadmap and then having to duplicate and create a lot of that same content for your public roadmap. 

With ProdPad, you simply decide which roadmap items should be kept internal and which are good for the public roadmap, and tag them accordingly. You’ll then automatically feed your public roadmap with the relevant items.

Next, you need to think about where to put your public roadmap. Our public roadmap is loud and proud on our website, but some people add it to their customer portal. It’s worth bearing in mind that your roadmap can support customer acquisition just as much as existing customer engagement, so having it on your public website has its advantages. Here again, you’ll want a tool that allows you to easily embed your roadmap on your website. 

Finally, you should include a feedback capture facility on your public roadmap, so you can take advantage of the opportunity to validate your assumptions and test your ideas. 

Example of a public roadmap

Here’s an example of a public roadmap (published using ProdPad) from BleachCyber, a cyber security software product. Their public roadmap is super simple to understand. It’s clean and clear and gives their customers just enough information to get an understanding of the areas they’re working on Now, Next and Later.

How often should I update my public roadmap?

You should update your public roadmap as often as you update your regular roadmap. That might be monthly, every couple of weeks – it depends on the cadence of your team. Just be careful that you don’t forget about the public version of your roadmap. There’s nothing worse than a stagnant roadmap.

How to use a public roadmap for gathering feedback

Again, this is about having the right tools at your disposal. You’ll need to add a feedback facility to your public roadmap which explicitly asks viewers for their thoughts and comments. 

Here at ProdPad we’ve added our Feedback Widget to our public roadmap and enjoy a constant stream of comments, input, and ideas from our wonderful customers and awesome community.  

Then, all you need to do is make sure you’re doing something with that feedback. After all, this is the big advantage of having a public roadmap – getting that validation for your strategy. Testing it out before you start building. 

So go on, go public!

We’ve had a public roadmap from the very start and we’ve never regretted it. We promise you won’t either. Start a cheeky free trial of ProdPad and have a go at building a public roadmap now, while it’s all fresh in your mind.

Get one out there as soon as you can – you won’t regret it.