Product Roadmaps Relaunched

Chapter 6. Deepening Your Roadmap

What you’ll learn in this chapter

How themes and features can work together

Using stage of development

How to communicate confidence

Identifying target customers

A little context helps you spend less time explaining the roadmap and more time executing it.

Secondary components can help you spend less time explaining each item on the roadmap.

In Chapter 2, we identified primary and secondary components of a product roadmap, and some complementary information you may want to consider to provide context. Up to this point, we have focused primarily on the primary ones, including:

• Product vision

• Business objectives

• Themes

• Timeframes

• Disclaimer

In this chapter, we want to sketch out how the additional details provided by the following secondary components can increase clarity, readability, and value for stakeholders:

• Features and solutions

• Stage of development

• Confidence

• Target customers

• Product areas

Although we consider these additional components “secondary” because the roadmap is still valuable without them, the level of detail they add makes it easier to communicate, helping immensely with buy-in and alignment. This means you’ll spend less time explaining the roadmap and more time executing it. See Chapter 9 for guidelines about putting together the right mix of these components depending on your audience.

Additionally, the added detail will help you think more critically about each item on the roadmap. As we touched upon in Chapter 5, many product people fall into the ...