Understanding Product Roadmap
What is a product roadmap?
Product milestones plotted Vs time.
Why is product roadmap needed?
Product roadmap offers product stakeholders some predictability on product development. It helps all the stakeholders along the entire value chain process to accordingly plan their activities. Apart from the direct stakeholders who are involved in creating a roadmap, many others will also benefit from having a clear roadmap. Most of us expect and love some predictability isn't it? :D. Apart from the obvious stakeholders, product roadmap can help many others like,
- HR can support hiring accordingly
- Designers, architects, Engineers can plan work accordingly
- Even partners, customers and investors can benefit from the clarity on the product milestones on the roadmap.
Can we use product backlog itself as product roadmap?
Product backlog is directed by the product roadmap. Roadmap will focus on big picture, giving clarity to stakeholders at a high level. While backlog will have more detailed information on execution. But yes, when the product is still in the initial stages like just having launched a MVP. In many such cases it is not possible to have a clear product roadmap because, many experiments are being conducted and validations for the hypothesis are going-on etc. Product strategy and roadmap can be articulated better when we have good clarity on product-market fit.
What is more important than having the product roadmap itself?
Product roadmap is just a piece of document unless all necessary stakeholders are aligned to it
The support and alignment of all key stakeholders towards the product roadmap is more important than the product roadmap as a document itself. A product leader can create a wonderful product roadmap. But without the active cooperation and support from product development, sales and overall business unit, the product roadmap can just become a piece of document. The implementation of product strategy through the roadmap in a compulsory execution fashion is a sure shot recipe for failure.
How can we get accurate estimates for product milestones?
Focus more on the sequence of milestones than the exact dates. The product milestone dates can be an approximate representation. As long as there is no too much deviation and sequencing is intact, the purpose of roadmap is served that it gives enough clarity to stakeholders. And if we gain some new insights during the process we are able to determine more realistic dates, update the roadmap milestones :-).