You’re trying to create a product roadmap. What tools should you use?

"If you Plan to Present the Same Material to Everyone, Most likely only one segment will understand you, the one you designed the material for and not the rest". I always had to create 5 formats of Product Roadmap, each one tailored to a specific audience and with a key specific purpose. You always need to ask few questions 1) What is the message I want to convey? 2) What is the output the audience is expecting? 3) What decisions am I expecting from the audience? I had the following formats for roadmaps 1) Format for the Technical development team and it had technical aspects of technology 2) Format for the Sales team in the market 3) Format for the Cross Product Line teams for cross launch 4) Format for Top Management 5) External Format.

Jira, a powerful project management tool, is quite handy for crafting and managing product roadmaps. You can use features like Epics and Stories to break down big initiatives into manageable tasks, while custom fields let you capture specific details for your roadmap. The concept of versions and releases in Jira helps track milestones and plan for product releases. Agile boards provide visual tracking of tasks and user stories, and integration with Confluence allows for detailed product documentation. Also, features like Gantt charts offer a visual representation of your product plan. For comprehensive roadmap planning, you might need to explore additional configurations or plugins based on your project's unique requirements within Jira.

There is no single roadmap. Every audience needs something different from you in a "roadmap presentation." * Sales needs something different from internal leadership. * Your best customers, as a group, need something different from any internal group. * An individual customer needs something different from any group of customers. At least, that is the perspective and expectation you should start from. A roadmap is a communication tool. You wouldn't have the same conversation with any of these different audiences. There's no reason to share the same *roadmap* with all of them.

One thing I've learnt recently from my team lead and had got me inspired well was to think about the Why's so the team could think about the How's together. Everyone in the team has an interest to a product whether it is for their kpis, targets, and productivity and sharing that little pie of ownership and transparency to help them achieve their goals with the same product makes a constructive environment for the team to decide together what should work first and what could work later when it comes to deciding the product growth. It is unique to how the business demands a product need, and to have a clear understanding on what those strategies are could help define how to develop the product better.

Remind yourself great things are a process not an "event". First step is to be intentional: "We want to increase sales by 11% in 24 months". It sounds boring but our creativity needs a north star. Then, before jumping in to multiple projects, invest the time to deep dive with your cross-functional team and create several scenarios to get to goal. This is a combo of analytical and creative thinking. Next step is test drive 2-3 top scenarios and use collective wisdom about customer and your knowhow to rank effectiveness of scenarios. You will learn a lead scenario has best probability. Then convert scenario into a game plan of Goal, Strategies, and Projects to succeed. This is actionable but it only works if you stay committed.

You might advocate that instead of the roadmap dictating when features or products will launch, orient the roadmap around what the desired outcome is or what you hope to learn and how that will better inform business decisions moving forward. This should help highlight WHY you’re doing what you’re doing to Executive Leadership instead of having them wondering “But why are we launching that? How does it improve the bottom line or our business?”

In my experience at multiple companies, clarity and simplicity are key to effectively communicating your product pipeline strategy. Keeping it visual is critical, in my opinion. Have the pipeline be a visual representation of the strategy you clearly outlined. And if you keep it simple, then it can be a very flexible tool versus something that takes hours and lots of resources to adjust. Show revenue and profit potential at a high-level, and you can follow that up with more detailed analysis for leadership. I would reiterate, keeping it simple and flexible is critical, as plans may change as you adjust to new competitive threats, consumer demands, financial environment, etc.

A great strategic product roadmap needs to have a desired end-state. This should be like a vision statement: bold, drives enthusiasm, and yet somewhat unreachable. Once you define what your product wants to become, then you can separate out the stages to get there. Use a Kanban, or similar format, to separate out the stages to reach that vision. You'll be able to separate this by what works for your organization. What gates your progress? Is it resource, technology, regulatory? Whatever gates your program, use that as the most obvious way to chunk the work into short, achievable sprints to make sure that you have forward momentum - and demonstratable results.

In my expereince you are going to need multiple formats, levels of detail, and refresh times. Executive Leadership may want to look at themes and how the roadmap is supporting the companies strategic goals on a quarterly basis versus the development team who need a very granular level of detail and what is in the next sprint every week. When deciding your format and tool consider what you want in a more automated format and what you want to customize.

The format of your product roadmap should be depend on who is viewing this product roadmap. If you are showing this to stakeholders or your boss, you'll probably want a one-pager Google Doc that is more detailed and informative with data. If you are showing potential customers, it could be a section on your website or a public Notion page. If you are doing it for yourself, sometimes a piece of paper and a pencil is the best.

Keep it simple - don't let your tool manage you. Just because there are sophisticated tools that promise massive customization and collaboration, your organization may not be able to keep up. Start small, and use the resources you already have, including whiteboards and spreadsheets. Use a tool that can be shared across your team. You want to keep remote teams on the same page - and show changes in near real-time. Once you get through your first few sprints, debrief. Identify what your key needs are, what is working, and what failed the team. Then assess what you need.

Crafting a Dynamic Product Roadmap, consider these factors: 1. Strategic Alignment: Ensure your product aligns with business goals. 2. Maturity Level: Choose tools based on your roadmap sophistication. 3. Audience Needs: Tailor communication to resonate with your audience. Top Tools: 1. Productboard: Unify strategy, prioritise features, and gather user feedback. 2. Productplan: Collaborate seamlessly, ideal for dynamic roadmap adjustments. 3. Prodpad: Align product strategy, user feedback, and feature prioritisation. A roadmap should vividly answer: Where are we going? How will we get there? What steps will we take? Choose tools that empower this narrative for a successful product journey.

I have a couple of favorites! Project Management: For larger, complex projects, Jira excels with advanced issue tracking and agile features, facilitating seamless task management. Collaboration Tools: Slack's real-time communication outshines Teams, providing efficient team interaction and collaboration. Version Control: Opt for GitLab or Bitbucket, both akin to GitHub, based on team preferences or specific feature needs. Prototyping: Figma stands out with an intuitive, minimalistic interface, simplifying interactive prototype creation. I stick to the company's tools for roadmap planning, analytics, monitoring, and user feedback. Choices are often based on familiarity and precedent, ensuring continuity.

Before selecting a tool, you should follow these steps: 1. Think: Ideate and figure out exactly what your goal is. 2. Draw: On paper, draw out what you are trying to build. 3. Write: Write out clearly what you are doing and why. Writing out in words forces you to clarify your thinking. Only after you have done these three steps, should you choose a tool.

Your product roadmap is not a fixed document. It should change as your product and market conditions change. You need to experiment with different features, strategies, and goals to find out what works best for your product and customers. This can include A/B testing various features, trying out different pricing models, exploring new markets, and more. As you experiment, you'll need to change your plan based on what you learn. If a particular feature doesn't work, it might be time to focus on something else. On the other hand, if a specific strategy is working well, you should put more effort into it.

Evolve swiftly and lead persistently - you need to be able to iterate rapidly while listening for market changes. As the data changes, you need to be resilient- adapting and reinventing in order to stay relevant and meet market demands.

Launch before you think it's ready. Your earliest fans will love the product and will actually enjoy finding issues for you. Your haters won't use the product anyways. Launch fast, learn fast, and build fast.

The answer here can depend on your organization, and what their expectations are for gaining senior leadership alignment. I have found that keeping it visual and simple, and easy to understand, is critical to getting alignment, and to making adjustments along the way.

Arguably, tools besides a simple spreadsheet are just a fancy way to get attention of the lazy reader. PMs can start with a spreadsheet, list the product roadmap candidate in the desired detail, then use a variant of the reach, impact, effort approach at minimum and plug the product objective (aka desired, measurable outcome). For more advanced prioritization, a weighted scoring approach will become necessary as greater reach vs impact on a smaller audience, or against efforts are all dictated by the life stage of the product and / or environmental constraints. E.g., if the regulators need you to address privacy concerns, the effort becomes a non-factor, you just have to do it. Finally, sort it based on the audience and need of the hour.

Your product roadmap should be clear on: 1. What you are building 2. Why are you building it 3. Who you are building it for If you don't deeply understand your ideal users, you will never have a great product roadmap because your users should be are the forefront of your decisions.