The product roadmap allows all of the different stakeholders of your product to

plan and coordinate their own future activities. It provides predictability to the
product development process.

Having a prdocut roadmap helps ensure that your product development efforts are
aligned closely with your strategy. And having the key stakeholders aligned around
that roadmap ensures that evryone works together effectively.

Each milestone on the grid should be meaningful bundle of new functionality that
will have significant impact on your business. Creating a roadmap with the right
milestones on the right release dates in a way that implements your product
strategy and has all stakeholders aligned around it is no mean feat.

Roadmaps in Agile

There will be a close relationsip between your product backlog and the product
roadmap. Each milestone shown on the roadmap will eventually have to be turned into
a large set of tasks on te backlog. That milestone will only be completed when all
of the backlog tasks have been finished.
You estimate the dates of the product milestones on the roadmap using a
completely independent set of top-down estimates from your product development
team.

Roadmaps for Early Starge Products

When you are developing a very early-stage product, when you're exploring a new
market, a new customer and product, it would be foolish to try to plan out what you
are going to develop far into the future.
In the scenario they do not have a product strategy in palce. They only have
ideas about unmet customer needs and how to create business value. It's to learn
about the market and the customers and validate the hypotheses that will later form
the bases of the product strategy.
Once the Product bhas achieved product market fir and we are in a position to
articulate a product strategy based on solid market and customer knowledge.

So how do you know if you have a market fit?

If you have a set of active, engaged customers who'd be very disappointed if they
did no have access to your product. Until we get to pProduct Market fit, we should
have a set of hypotheses that you're validating at every given moment.
In this case, instead of a roadmap, you should have a list of development
projects that wull aloow you to validate these hypotheses as efficiently as
possible.

" In case your CEO asks for a product roadmap (if you haven't achieved product
market fit) tell him that you wouldn't be doing ituntil we get to the product
market fit and so you are vaidating the hypotheses currently.

Prodcut Strategy
Key Questions that product startegy should answer
What are your business goals?
How will you measure success?
Who are your target customers?
Which customers do you really want to win?
What are the key needs of your target customers that you think you can meet?
What is the key benefit that your product will provide to these target customers?
Who are the key competitors to your product?
What other options do your customers have?
What are the key differentiators between your product and those of your
competitors?
Once your Product Strategy is in place and your key product stakeholders are
aligned around it, you can start building your roadmap.

Identifying key Milestones

Start by rereading your product strategy -> What are the barriers to achieving this
strategy?
Which ones can be omitted or atleast improved by changing the product some way?
Research the market, your target customers.
Consider thinking about the barriers that prevent your target customers from
adopting your product.
Try to imagine the major product changes that you believe would have the desired
impact on the startegic objective. Often these will be features that your customers
have asked for directly. But sometimes they might be features that will benefit
your customers but haven't even occured to them yet. Milestones can be impactful in
different ways. And sometimes the milestone won't directly benefit the customer,
but would benefit some other startegic objective like opening up a new distribution
channel or lowering your cost structure. These milestones should be major product
changes which will take significant amounts of research, design, and development
work.

As we write down each milestone, we need to make sure to record the strategic
objective that it supports as well as the rationale. Your rationale should be high
level and eary to understand.
Example: If your startegy calls for winning over a specific customer segment and
you knwo that the primary reason they're not currently adopting your product is
becasue it's too expensive, then your strategic objective might be to reduce your
cost of service delivery. You probably want to propose a milestone that would
significantly lower your cost like automating some manual tasks or switching
service providers.
Try to put the milestones in a rough priority order. Brainstrom the milestones with
the product stakeholders to check whether they think of any that you might have
missed. Its best to have a one-on-one discussions to increase the chaances of being
free and sharing their ideas.

At the beginning of each of these meetings, start by reviewing the product strategy
with your stakeholder and then ask them for their ideas about which milestones
would best support that startegy. Once you've exhausted their ideas, review the
other milestones you proposed with them and ask for their feedback as well as their
sense of priorities. At the end of this process, you shoudl end up with a sequence
of product milestones, each of which has measurable impacts on one of your
strategic objectives and which together will implement your product strategy.

Build the Strawman (First Version of the Product Roadmap)

1) Roughly sequence your milestones in terms of their value in supporting your
product strategy. Go through them one at a time and remind yourselg of the
rationale for each one and prioritize them.

2) Shcedule these milestones into your roadmap. Look at the first, highest priority
milestone. Use the effort estimate provided by your product development team, along
witht eh development capacity of the team, to figure out when on the calendar you
could expect it for delivery. ( For instance, of the milestone requires 20
developer weeks and your team has five developers weeks of capacity for new feature
development every week, then you can assume for now that the milestone will be
release in four weeks, assuming the team can get started now.)

2) Now pick up the secon dhighest priority

(or) You can follow another methodology -> You can look at time periods our into
the future, like the next four quarters or the next six months. In this case, you
identify a set of hight prioity milestones that can be completed together in the
first time period and a set of lower priority milestones for the second time period
and so on.

Once you're done and have a completed schedule, run a sanity check on your strawman
from a few perspectives.
a) Does it implement your prodct strategy
b) Try to make adjustments so the impact on the product strategy is
maximized.
c) Ask yourself whether its feasible from a development resource perspective
d) Run it by your dev leader again, and make any adjustments they deem
necessary.

If answers to these questions are 'Yes', then you have got a strawman, and are
ready to share it with your team.

Product Roadmap Meeting

a) Eplain the goal

b) Quickly review your product strategy
c) Review the developmwnt capacity of your team
d) Walk through your product roadmap strawman
e) Ask the team what they wish was different (This will actually surface the
important issues facing the business)
f) Modify the roadmap directly (It's best to modify the product roadmap directly in
the meeting so everyone can see the consequences)

Maintaining The Product Roadmap

Produyct Roadmaps are dynamic documents and when you learn new information about
your customers or market, you need to update the roadmap. When you've learned
something new that makes the old roadmap no longer seem like the optimal course of
action.

Examples:
1) You might've learned information about your customer's needs and desire/ you
might've tried a new pricing model and found out that your customers won't accept
it.
2) It could be about your competitors, like you just read a major announcement from
one of your competitors which makes them more of a threat than you thought
3) You learned about the time or cost of product development. The projects you
prioritized on your roadmap might be taking much longer than anticipated to
complete.