How To Create A Business Roadmap – Roadmaps are essential to coordinate the product development process. They ensure that day-to-day tasks align and contribute to your higher-level business strategy.
They are a building block for any growing business and should be developed alongside project plans and other critical business reports.
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In this blog, I’ll explain what a product roadmap is, who it’s for, and how you can create a product roadmap (including templates and examples). Plus, with the product’s professional roadmapping software, creating a roadmap for your next project will be easy.
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A product roadmap is a high-level picture that charts the vision, direction, and evolution of your product over time. The product roadmap highlights where the organization is, where the organization wants to be, and how it will get there. It serves as a useful guide for teams to plan tasks and execute strategy.
Just so you know, some of our templates are free and some require a small monthly fee. Registration is always free, as is access to the drag-and-drop online editor.
Product roadmaps are created by business owners or managers for the purpose of communicating product strategies, tools, and initiatives to both product developers and external stakeholders.
They are essentially the one document that will keep a product’s development on track and generally ensure that everyone involved in the process is on the same page.
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Product roadmaps can be used in conjunction with other business plans such as the marketing plan and the business plan. They can even help inform your marketing growth strategy.
A product roadmap follows a format similar to a Gantt chart—a type of horizontal bar chart that shows the duration and timing of a series of tasks or initiatives in one place.
Because roadmaps need to be agile and constantly evolving documents, it’s best to design them using strategic roadmap templates and edit them in a product roadmap tool that allows for more flexibility (so be easy to edit and update as priorities change). Your product roadmap should highlight a specific timeline, identify the projects within that timeline, and include the departments that address each project.
Roadmaps have traditionally been made from scratch in Excel or Word, which is quite tedious and time-consuming. Also, the final product looks like a glorified spreadsheet.
Powerpoint Product Roadmap Template
The flexibility of using product roadmap software and working with a roadmap template makes the mapping process much easier (and less time-consuming!).
Before jumping into the roadmap visualization stage, you’ll need to figure out two key details: who you’re creating the roadmap for and how far into the future you want to plan.
This product release roadmap template serves as a countdown to the release, with most of the planning in the first phase. Unique gradient design is probably a creative industry.
The content and presentation of your roadmap should be tailored to your audience, as different audiences will have very different needs.
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External stakeholders, for example, will likely want a top-level view of strategic initiatives, which should be planned over several quarters or several years. They might be more interested in general time horizons such as short-term, medium-term, and future, like in this product roadmap template.
Internal product team members, on the other hand, will want a more granular view of specific roles and tasks. It usually makes sense to plan them over weeks or months, rather than years.
Aside from aligning with your audience’s needs, the time frame should also be reasonable. It should be long enough to produce significant progress on the project, but short enough that it is possible to project accurate timelines.
It is common practice to create product roadmaps by year, by quarter, by month or by sprint. This project roadmap template is divided by quarter.
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Once you’ve identified your audience and decided on a reasonable time frame, you can start assembling the other pieces of the product development puzzle. This includes:
A Gantt chart is a type of horizontal bar chart that shows activities, tasks, or goals along the Y-axis and dates along the X-axis. Each bar on the chart represents a task and extends from the task start date to the task end date (from left to right) to indicate the duration and time of the task.
Start by laying out your timeline from left to right, creating divisions by day, week, month, or quarter. Then add a bar for each scheduled task. Start each bar on the expected start date of its task and extend it to the expected deadline of the task.
I’ll touch on a special case where you might want to vary the bar height later, but in most cases, you’ll want to make sure that the height of each bar is consistent across tasks.
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Next, create some visual groupings within your tasks. Sometimes called “bathroom charts,” task groupings are used to add hierarchy and improve the readability of Gantt charts and roadmaps.
If you are trying to coordinate the activities of multiple teams on a single roadmap, tasks must be grouped by team. If the roadmap focuses on higher-level product goals, tasks can be grouped by initiative.
Sequential tasks that are part of the same initiative should appear in the same row. This helps reduce wasted space and means dependencies between tasks.
Since we naturally read from left to right and top to bottom, it’s a good idea to place previous initiatives (or prioritized initiatives) closer to the top.
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Following these four simple steps will provide you with a perfectly functional product roadmap. If you want to take your roadmap to the next level, you can design it based on the specifics of your product, your goals, and your audience.
Color on a product roadmap is best used to show key information about each task, such as its status or priority level.
For maximum information density, use color to categorize tasks into groups that aren’t already listed elsewhere. This product roadmap template uses color to help divide project phases.
For example, in our sample graph above, our tasks are already grouped by team. We can work with an additional layer of detail by using color to categorize tasks by status (eg, planned, approved, in progress, or completed).
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Another way to add additional information is to treat each bar as a mini progress bar. The fill percentage of each bar can be used to represent the level of completion of each task.
While this additional visual indicator can help ensure projects stay on track, it should be used with caution.
Also, seeing that progress toward your goal can give you a deceptive sense of accomplishment. It can be difficult to accurately estimate progress toward a goal.
Lines and arrows appear on roadmaps to indicate connections between related tasks, similar to what you might see in a flowchart.
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They are often used to indicate dependencies between tasks. That is, an arrow originates in a task that must be completed before the task in which it ends begins.
Another standard Gantt chart symbol is the diamond, which is used to indicate key project milestones such as release dates, revision dates, or sign-off dates. A milestone can be any event that has no duration (that is, any event that cannot be represented by a bar on the roadmap).
Milestones are usually important project checkpoints that should stand out clearly from task bars. It’s usually a good idea to set them in red, black, or dark gray to make them visible:
However, if you have milestones that apply to multiple tasks, or if you want to include more details, such as release dates or numbers, your chart may become cluttered. In this case, it’s best to extract the important deadlines into separate timelines that run alongside your chart, with key dates indicated by small flags:
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It can be useful to include a visual indicator of the current date as a comparator for task start and end dates.
Using a light dotted line that runs from top to bottom makes it equally easy to compare dates between all tasks.
If you want to draw more attention to a critical path in your roadmap, use a single highlight color to outline tasks and emphasize dependency arrows.
Red is usually a safe bet to use as an accent color, but other colors can work as well, as long as they contrast with surrounding colors to create visual relevance.
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Not sure how to choose a standout color? Read all about color selection in our article on communicating with color in infographics.
My final recommendation for creating a product roadmap is to avoid including very minor tasks or extraneous details. The most effective roadmaps focus more on big-picture issues than specific task details.
If your focus is solely on high-level product strategy, a Gantt-style product roadmap may be overkill. There are some simpler options for charting project tasks over time.
A simple project management timeline can be used to describe the major events of the product development process in chronological order. It’s really all you need if you just want to plot high-level goals.
Free Roadmap Templates
You can even add a little more detail to this type of project timeline by scaling each task by its duration. This provides a quick visual summary of a single project
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