March 4, 2022 By SmartBiz Team

Want to create a great product with your development team? You’re not alone!

To create a bestselling product, you’ll first need to create a roadmap for your product. Whether you’re creating a new product, or improving a current one, having a roadmap is a must! Roadmaps allow you and your team to focus on the product from start to finish. So, can a roadmap really work for you? Let’s find out!

In this article, you’ll learn what a product roadmap is, and then learn 5 types of product roadmaps to use for your next product venture.

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What Is A Product Roadmap?

“A product roadmap provides an organized layout of your business objectives and a timeline of when which features should be implemented during the product creation process,” says Laura Hendrickson, a writer at State Of Writing® and Essayroo®. “Keep in mind that you’ll need to refrain from adding your lists of ideas and feature requests into your objectives and timeline, until both are completed. Plus, after you’ve established your objectives and timeline, you can then implement your work backlog and or bug reports.”

What Are The Essentials?

The goal of a product roadmap is to showcase your product strategy to every group of people possible. That’s why you’ll need the following essentials for your product roadmap:

  • A working timeline (i.e., Q1, Q2, Q3);
  • Useful features (i.e., team collaboration, implementing SSO, Dropbox® integration, etc.); AND
  • Workable goals (short-term and long-term)

Examples Of Product Roadmaps

“There are various roadmaps to use when creating a product,” says Wanda Riley, a product owner at Paper Fellows® and Assignment Service®. “Learning what your product idea is about and what you’ll need for production will determine the type of roadmap to use.”

With that said, here are 5 of the best product roadmaps to learn from:

  • Single Product

For creating a single product, this type of roadmap is ideal. This roadmap focuses on helping you drive the product’s development, rather than having you stress on building a prototype for executives.

The roadmap takes into account what you and your team will do today and the days after. Essentially, this roadmap shows you your short-term and long-term goals for creating that one product, and even helps you keep track of upcoming deadlines.

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  • Release Plans

Release plans are execution-level roadmaps concerning delivering desired work tasks along with suitable time frames of when you and your team can expect to complete said tasks. This roadmap involves releasing your product to the following:

  • Stakeholders
  • Senior executives
  • Cross-functional teams, AND
  • (eventually) Customers

Unlike the previous roadmap mentioned, you can set milestones for each task, rather than time-bound deadlines. In this way, you have a fixed scope with a regular release schedule.

  • Multiple Product

Suppose you’re developing more than one product. Then this roadmap is ideal, since it combines several single products, thus allowing you to create long-term goals for your product journeys.

However, keep in mind that one caveat of using this roadmap is that you’ll find yourself multitasking, since you’re tracking more than one project. So, be sure to use this roadmap wisely.

  • Now-Next-Later

Now-next-later roadmaps are all about priorities. With slots labeled “Now,” “Next,” and “Later,” teams are able to organize their priorities in a fast-paced environment. Despite having to track things via rigorous prioritizing, this roadmap is ideal for showing to larger audiences.

  • Agile

Finally, the Agile (also known as the “sprint”) roadmap sees project sprints as gold. Here, you’re focusing on short-term details, along with showing the features and stories that spawn from the sprints, thus showing developers the product’s overall strategic direction and limiting distractions.

Conclusion

As you can see, the product roadmaps shown in this article aren’t meant to be one-time solutions. In fact, many of these can be integrated according to the project itself. Each roadmap has a start to finish, and they’re on standby when work begins.

To recap, some of the best roadmaps to consider for your product development are some or one of the following:

  • Single product
  • Release plans
  • Multiple product
  • Now-Next-Later, AND
  • Agile/Sprint

We hope that you’ll use an effective product roadmap for your next product idea. Whether you’re creating a new product, or innovating a current product, it’s worth checking out these great product roadmaps, and having them work for you and your development team.

 

About the Author

Emily Henry is a writer at Custom Essay® and Academized®. Emily is also an editor at Dissertation Help®. As a content writer, she writes articles about products and services, digital marketing, and social media trends. In her spare time, she dabbles in coding and graphic designing.

 
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