While developing a new product, certain activities are always carried out in the background by the product development team, which introduces a new concept - product roadmap. A product roadmap gives a macro view of where the product is going and when the development team will achieve its goals, it sets the pace for successful product development by helping the product team communicate their short and long term goals.
An effective product roadmap is not only a timeline that emphasizes product releases and features, but it is also a dynamic document that the product owner keeps updating as the project progresses, based on the actual situation. As such, product roadmaps have a wide range of applicability, with external product roadmaps being applicable to development teams, company management, and salespeople, and internal product roadmaps being shared for customers to view. This post will share the methodology of product roadmap planning and free product roadmap templates.
What is Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a plan that provides a series of tactical steps aligned with the product strategy and a track to move the product in a predetermined direction. Product strategy involves both product and non-product (e.g., marketing campaigns, acquisitions, etc.), and part of the product-related strategy is realized by planning a product roadmap. Product roadmap planning is the result of strategic planning and typically includes the following:
Desired Objectives: the desired goals to be achieved with specific metrics.
Strategic planning: an execution plan detailing the ways in which the business will reach its goals.
Value Assessment: an assessment of the value of the product and what the product should become in the future.
Timeframe: The time period planned for accomplishing the goal, the strategy.
Status markers: A record of each stage of the product, which is used to track the progress of the work.
How to plan the Product Roadmap
Planning a product roadmap requires not only the product manager, but also other departments or teams. Planning a product roadmap has the following 4 steps, in the product roadmap planning, the choice of a tool is also critical, here we recommend a free whiteboard tool - Boardmix.
Step 1: Gather Ideas and Determine Goals
First of all, go to the official website of Boardmix and create a whiteboard. Before planning your product roadmap, you may need to collect ideas from everyone on your team, survey your competitors and define your goals. Here you can use the brainstorming templates in Boardmix to do this, such as “I have a coffee machine, what would I want this product to do”.
Go to the Boardmix community to use the guided brainstorming template for free!
Step 2: Evaluate the workload
Evaluate the workload for each requirement and quantify it. Everyone on the product development team will need to score topics and features to agree on the work required for a particular reference system. At this point, use the Product Roadmap Planning template in the Boardmix to quantify the individual workload for each time period.
Go to the Boardmix community to use the product roadmap template for free!
Step 3: Populate work items
After assessing each individual's workload, populate the work items into the quantification table, edit the broad module themes and sub-themes, and clarify each individual's division of labor.
Step 4: Determine the Requirements Timeframe
You need to think about the approximate timeframe for each subgroup on the roadmap and then choose an appropriate time increment for the project release. As the project progresses, the product roadmap needs to be updated in a timely manner. Here, you can use the timeline template in Boardmix's online collaborative whiteboard.
Step 5: Share and execute the product roadmap
Finally, the planned product roadmap can be saved, shared, exported, etc. It can be used by all members of the team to follow up and execute each task. Boardmix has the features of real-time saving, multi-people collaboration, and exporting to PNG / JPG / PDF / SVG formats, etc. It also supports access to third-party voice/video conferencing software such as Tencent Meeting, Flybook Meeting, Nail Meeting, Zoom, Attention, Enterprise WeChat, etc., which helps you collaborate with your team members together online.
Speaking of here, how to plan the product roadmap to give you a detailed share, I believe that you read this article also can not wait to go to the operation of the drawing, you can open the official website of the Boardmix to create a whiteboard for drawing, this piece of the online whiteboard full-featured, rich in templates, is currently free of charge to register, click on the Boardmix can be registered to use online!
