Public Product Road Map: a how to guide, an analysis on 50 public road maps and a public database
- What is a public product road map?
A Public Product Road Map [PPRM] is a document that companies share publicly in order to show the developement plans of the product and/or ask for feedback to its users.
To write this blog post we built a database of 50 public product road maps. We decided to share it publicly. Please note that this post is about public product road maps only.
If your company has a public product road map or if you know a company that does, please feel free to add it in the database by putting a comment in a free row here: # LINK TO DATABASE
- Why do companies have a public product road map?
- It can help to gather users’ feedback in a scalable way
- It can work as an additional filter before users contact the customer service “when are you guys integrating Google Calendar?”, “are you fixing the email notification bug?” etc. etc.
- It can promote the community’s activity around a product
- It can put a healthy pressure on the development team, transparency increases accountability
On a side note, in my experience as Venture Capitalist, high product IQ teams tend to have a PPRM or at least have thought about it and decided to postpone it/ cancel it.
- Should I do it?
We found out that PPRMs are almost exclusively used by B2B products that target SMEs, prosumers or developers. Also, we found out that roadmaps with a decent level of activity tend to have >70k monthly visitors on their website (Similarweb estimation). Interestingly enough we found out that the number of users (visitors’ proxy) is only mildly correlated with the activity rate of a roadmap.
- Tell me more. How do I do it ?
1.Use Trello. Very likely the best way to do it. Trello itself recognized the use case and wrote a post about it. If you are interested in Trello usage tips I encourage you to read it.
2.Create an onboarding card. This is a card where the content, rules and expectations about the road map are explained. In our dataset the majority of companies had an onboarding card.
3.Structure workflow from “ideas” to “done” from left to right. Virtually every road map is structured with a left to right system from ideas to implemented features with some steps in between. We stripped out every column (list) title and did a simple recurrency analysis.
4.Manage your editing rights. On a Trello board you can make boards public and still decide if users can like and/or comments cards. You should manage these rights depending on a) the size your company and b) the goal of your PPRM.
Our dataset tells us that the vast majority of companies allow users to like cards. If you don′t, you are limiting the conversation to one side only. We noticed that bigger companies tend to be more restrictive with permissions.
When it comes to comments, permissions are much tighter. Of the more mature companies on average 2/3 forbid users to comment. This is understandable as the time for comments management would otherwise suck up too much time.
Other details to benchmark your public road map:
- What if users don′t respond? Don′t be afraid if you have cards with 0 activity, 100% of the road maps in our dataset had at least 1 card with 0 likes and comments. On the other side, the most upvoted card of the whole dataset got 6,901 votes and it belongs to Trello road map, its title: “More labels/ Tags”. Revert to our public database to check how you compare with more similar companies.
- How many columns (lists) should a road map have? Our dataset average company has 12 lists and our median company has 6. The smallest had 3 and the longest 89
- How about labels? Using labels can be an option (52%) of the dataset companies do so. But there is no indication it brings value
- Do I have too many cards? Our dataset average company has 102 cards and our median company has 71. The smallest had 9 and the longest 528
An honorable mention goes to Buffer, which is the company in our dataset with most users (10+ millions monthly website visitors) keeping a 100% public product road map: it allows all users to both comment and like cards. But if you know Buffer well, you know this is how they roll: they even have public KPIs (!!)