How To Create A Product Roadmap
/Introduction
I've been exploring Generative AI, and I couldn't stop thinking about how much trip planning would really benefit from this new technology. My family and I absolutely love to travel, but the experience can be challenging. So I decided to start a project to solve issues related to planning travel itineraries. I realized that I needed to take actionable steps to understand if the idea I am working on is viable and if it serves the needs of users.
Most of my career, I have worked as a tech lead, which kept me close to the product process but not firmly in the land of product management, a role I've always been fascinated by. There's a lot of skill overlap, and I couldn't shake the feeling that there was more to it than I was seeing in my interactions with the product managers I've worked with.
So I thought to myself: do I have a product? Or am I just falling into the common pit that all developers do, when we just code a solution to make our own lives easier. Luckily, I have some amazing contacts in my professional life that I think are experts in Product Management, and I discussed this with them. With their guidance, and some formal research, I developed the plan I have detailed in these articles.
Steps to Develop a Product Roadmap
I intended to take meaningful steps to understand if my idea has market fit, identify a target audience, and focus on the most important pain points of the problem.
These articles outline the process anyone can use to validate an idea and set a strong foundation for a product. This will work for brand new ideas, or when you are modifying an existing product.
Anyone can follow the simple process outlined in these articles to learn a lot about their product, resulting in a feature roadmap, informed by technical analysis and research. This means when you are ready to start working on the product, you have everything aligned for an effective start of development.
The 3 main phases are:
User Research - determine who we are building for.
Feature Definition - describe the most important features of our product.
Product Roadmap - create a plan for developing our product.
Each one should be complete before moving onto the next phase. You will do each of these steps in order, and you likely will go through the entire process many times throughout the product life cycle.
User Research
The first phase is understanding who you are building this product for, and what their most significant pain points are. This is critically important if you want to build a successful product that solves the correct problems.
Perform research to answer the following important questions:
Who is the target user (demographics, usage patterns, personality)?
What are their main goals (relating to the problem we are trying to solve)?
What are the biggest pain points they experience when trying to achieve their goals?
Because you likely have limited time and budget, you will need to clarify the research methods you will use, and plan your research. You will develop personas, and high-level aggregate information that is common to all of our users. After identifying a target audience, you then invest time in formal user interviews and research to gather information. Finally, you will dig into the data to identify important details, and create visuals for presentation.
OUTPUT FROM THE USER RESEARCH PHASE
After we have completed this research, we will have a definition of the target user of our product, and a high-level list of the pain points we are going to focus on. The most important output of this phase is a strong empathy with the user, which will drive the product direction, and inform everything we do as product leaders.
Feature Definition
Now that we have identified the users of our product, and the key problems we want to solve, we will spend some time formalizing a feature list. We will use this time to evaluate the ideas, and begin to prioritize them. In this phase, you are less focused on the overall product roadmap, and will use this time to understand each individual feature.
You will evaluate the features based on certain criteria including:
Market trajectories - trends in a particular market or industry that help guide a company's plans.
Customer insights - Deep knowledge about what customers want, and what they do
Overall company goals - Objectives and targets that a company aims to achieve, to drive its long-term success.
Constraints and effort to complete features - Obstacles or challenges that might make it tricky to create a new product or feature, along with how much work it will take to overcome them.
OUTPUT FROM FEATURE DEFINITION PHASE
When this effort is complete, you will have a detailed list of the various features you plan to implement with high-level details about each of them. The information this summarizes makes it incredibly easy to think about the complexities of the product in all sorts of different scenarios. This is useful when talking about features with users, stakeholders, and developers, which you will need to do when prioritizing them into a roadmap.
Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a document that outlines the priorities, direction, and progress of a product over time. The goal of this document is to align the project resources around goals for the product, and describes the priority order/focus for completion and how each feature relates to the others. You created a list of features you need to deliver in the previous phase, and now you will plan how they can be completed in a coherent manner. This document is informed by the research we completed in the previous steps. The roadmap is not to be used as a timeline tool, and is intended to be a focus pipeline. Be careful to only define the next 3 to 6 months, because people will associate schedules with the roadmap. Since we are Agile, we will focus on near term goals (this quarter) and include only light details for items that will be done later.
Generally, the roadmap will describe what we’re building, and it’s also important to include why. Features on the roadmap should be tied directly to the product strategy, the persona being addressed, and should change based on user feedback or changes to the competitive landscape.
You will use this roadmap to engage with members of the team (product owners, executives, managers and developers) to build consensus about how your product will evolve over time. Team members will be able to refer to the roadmap to understand which features have been prioritized, and to learn context about their normal work and direction. A properly developed roadmap is an essential tool to help teams remain aligned towards a singular product vision, so everyone understands priorities, and why they were scheduled in the way they were.
OUTPUT FROM PRODUCT ROADMAP PHASE
After completing this effort. You will have a roadmap that has the projected work broken down into manageable epics. Each epic will be further broken down into user stories that contain details about the specific implementation plan.
RESOURCES
Develop a high quality MVP quickly
What is next
Learn more about the details of each phase in the following articles:
User Research - determine who we are building for.
Feature Definition - describe the most important features of our product.
Product Roadmap - create a plan for developing our product.
Special thanks to Malak Janus who was instrumental in helping me derive this plan and write this blog post. Also special thanks to Bryce Howitson for the early feedback and review.