Product Roadmap

If product roadmaps should show dates is a controversial question. Some people have passionately argued that dates should be banned from roadmaps; others claim that they are useful. This article discusses the pros and cons of using dates on product roadmaps to help you decide which option is right for you.

As product manager and product owners, we need to forecast the likely development of our products. This creates a shared understanding of the benefits and features a product will provide thereby aligning the development team and stakeholders. But which timeframes and planning horizons should we take into account? And how far into the future should we look? Read on to find out my recommendations.

Release planning and product roadmapping are both important practices to achieve product success. But what’s exactly the difference between a release plan and a product roadmap? How do the two tools fit together? This post answers these questions so you can apply the two planning artefacts effectively.

A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. This post shares ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.

Products don’t exist in isolation. Instead, they are often related to other products, which they help sell or they share features and components with. Think, for instance, of the Microsoft Office suite or the iPod product line. If your product is part of a family, then you will benefit from a portfolio roadmap, a plan that shows how the products are likely to grow together. This post introduces such a plan, the GO Portfolio Roadmap, and it describes how this roadmap can help you manage your product family.

The product roadmap is a great tool to describe the likely growth of a product. But there are three common mistakes I see people make: View the roadmap as a guarantee; show epics and user stories on the roadmap; and speculate about the likely development of the product. This post discusses the three product roadmapping mistakes to help you avoid and rectify them.

A product roadmap is a high-level plan that shows how a product is likely to develop over the next few releases. While that’s true for any roadmap, there is no one right product roadmap format. Instead, you should choose the roadmapping approach that works best for your product. This post shows you how to do it.

The product backlog is a great tool to capture ideas and requirements. But it is less suited to describe how the product is likely to develop in the longer term. This is where the product roadmap comes in. But how do the product backlog and the product roadmap relate? Is the backlog derived from the roadmap or is it the other way round? Should the product owner be responsible for both artefacts? Read on to find out my recommendations.

The GO product roadmap is a goal-oriented product planning tool designed to work with Lean Startup and Scrum. By focusing on goals, the roadmap shifts the conversation from debating features to establishing shared objectives. This post explains how you can apply the GO product roadmap–from deriving it from the product strategy to keeping it updated.

Product roadmaps are an important product management tool. But applying them effectively can be challenging. Roadmaps are too often focused on features, and product managers spend too much time getting the stakeholders to agree on when which features will be developed. This post introduces a new product roadmap template: the GO product roadmap, a goal-oriented roadmap that combines goals and features in a novel way.