When you manage a product, you’re managing it through it’s entire lifecycle, which means spending a lot of time deciding what additional changes to make to an existing product. That means that you’ll likely need to maintain a product roadmap to decide what you are and are not going to change in your product through the course of its life. Here are some tips for creating and maintaining a product roadmap for your existing product.
The 3 essential ingredients for a product roadmap. Roadmaps are a tool in every product manager’s belt that have been around for years, but many of the basic principles often go unsaid and unexplored. Hannah Chaplin takes a look at the ingredients you need in order to create product roadmaps that will appeal to prospects, excite your customers, and help grow your business.
(via @pendoio)
How to validate your product roadmap. Product development roadmaps are guides to how your product will evolve over time. It’s okay if they change when you learn new things about your customers’ needs, your business goals, and how they intersect. The roadmap just needs to be directionally accurate, not a blueprint for what must happen. J Cornelius explains how to stay in tune with your customers’ needs in order to keep your roadmaps directionally accurate.
(via @ninelabs)
Creating your first product roadmap. You’ve just launched your product and have started receiving fantastic feedback and validation from your clients. You’re also getting feature requests from your customers, partners and suppliers. They are all asking you when you can deliver their requested features, yet some of these features seem less priority than others— so, what do you do? It’s probably time to communicate your plans for your existing product through a product roadmap. Andrew Quan explains how to create your first product roadmap for an existing product, which you’ll see is art mixed with science.
(via @pro_coalition)
The 6 Steps to roadmapping. A product roadmap is a strategic, living artifact that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a product team’s future work and the problems it needs to solve. Roadmaps are successful when they make realistic promises, value functionality over pretty visuals, or are strategic documents instead of feature-specific release plans. To create a roadmap, gather inputs, cluster them into themes, then prioritize and visualize those inputs. Sarah Gibbon covers those 6 key steps to roadmapping that you can apply to roadmaps for a UX team or a product roadmap.
(via @nngroup)
Where do product roadmaps come from? Ask any good product manager and they’ll say that they are never at a loss for ideas. There is always more to build than they have resources for. But what distinguishes the great from the good is knowing which ones to build. Deciding what goes on the roadmap and what does not. Paul Adams explains how his team builds product roadmaps to avoid over resourcing new products and under resourcing existing products.
(via @intercom)
