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10 ways to succeed with a product roadmap presentation

How to influence and inspire teams with your product roadmap presentation. 

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The product roadmap presentation can be nail biting for both developers and product managers; one party has worked hard to come up with a vision while the other party waits to see the unknown that is going to affect their work.

I felt this tension when I worked as a developer and I often found myself unsatisfied with the roadmaps product management put together. I didn't fully buy into the decisions, and I'd often walk out of a planning meeting with the sentiment of "Well, this doesn't make sense to me, but if they think so...", or even worse, a "We'll have to figure out things ourselves and make it look like what we do fits this roadmap.

You might argue the problem was likely me suffering from NIH (Not Invented Here syndrome) and you might be right. As a developer, I had a very strong opinion on what was the right thing to do. But now as a product manager, I see what caused this disconnect, and what general knowledge product managers can draw from this disconnect to hit a home run with a roadmap presentation. After all, if the technical team agrees with and understands the big picture, day-to-day design and implementation decisions will be made with the right context, and you’ll get the product you envisioned.

The following are my top ten ways to win over teams with a product roadmap presentation. 

1. Choose substance over buzzwords

While buzzwords like “big data analytics”, "machine learning," or “an Internet of Things initiative (IoT)” might resonate with business stakeholders as high-level anchor points, they aren't helpful and actionable items for technical teams. Engineering needs to know exactly what it is they're building, how it relates to current products, how it should be delivered, and who will use it in the end, and for what purpose.

Setting high-level themes is great for structuring the roadmap and context, but make sure you don’t stop there and have good answers for what is behind each high-level item. For example, if you've called a theme "intelligent services," make sure to break this down into  key initiatives and epics  that are needed in order to deliver this theme.

2. Set the right context

Technical teams need context for why you are building something on a roadmap. No technical team is going to say, "Just tell me what you want and I’ll build it." On the contrary, engineers need to see evidence for why you see demand for a feature. Let data speak, but also tell a powerful story from the perspective of your users. Use personas, and talk about some alternatives that you've excluded, and why. To help the entire team understand the roadmap the "why" matters as much as the "what."

3. Consider commitments carefully

If a feature doesn't seem well thought through or realistic, yet it is still on the roadmap, this should scream red flag. You don't want the technical team getting the impression that they have to build stuff just because you promised it to someone. This could be a commitment to a customer or because because "management wants it." So be wise about making commitments. Even if you have a forcing function behind yourself that requires a particular change, make sure you understand and pass on the rationale to the team, and stand behind it yourself.

4. Make realistic plans

A vision is good, but it’s even better if everyone feels confident that it can be achieved. The plan doesn't need to be precise, but if the first thing your development manager sees when looking at a roadmap is a huge bottleneck – for example, if the roadmap looks design heavy and frontend centered, but the team only has one designer and has struggled with frontend topics in the last few months – then you'll have he or she struggling with the roadmap throughout the rest of your presentation.

Make sure you do a reality check upfront with the team and play with what-if scenarios. You need to have answers, a clear plan of action, and concise consideration about the "how it can be done" before asking for everyone's commitment. 

5. Think big, start small

You need to be aware of where a product and team skills are today versus where you want them to be. It's great to advance into new fields, which might require new skills in the team or moving away from existing technology, but don’t just write down dreams of where you’d like to be in a year. Instead, think about how to get there realistically. Acquiring talent takes time, adopting new technologies takes time, and abandoning existing products requires clear commitments and a transition plan.

6. Build a business case

Business case? Yes. Technical teams care about businesses cases. Maybe not to the same extent as senior management, but an entire development team cares about why something is relevant to the business, if it produces real results, and how this will be measured. Tap into the business-street-smarts of your technical team. Everyone has a vested interest in the business succeeding as a whole, and it can be great source of feedback or additional ideas.

Also, full clarity on the business impact and seeing it happen can be a great motivator; driving results is satisfying beyond just having built and shipped a feature.

7. Balance mundane with motivating

Engineers want to build unique, innovative products that they can take pride in. If it's just the same old story others have told before, it can be demotivating. Make sure you do research to confirm that your story is as innovative as you think. Aside from demotivated developers, the business impact of the lack of innovation is even worse.

With this said, even roadmaps will always be a balancing act between exciting new features, and technically not too interesting must-haves that just have to be done. Try to make sure that even the mundane is motivating on your roadmap. 

8. Think beyond MVP and v1

Creating a minimum viable product, and then a version 1 is one thing, but there’s also everything that happens post-launch: operations, maintenance, feature requests from users, continuous improvements, and new versions of other products and/or platforms that are integrated. A quick think on what the challenges and obstacles might be after a launch will bring these to light without much effort, and engineers will be thankful that you didn't ignore these realities. Rough estimates suggest that the initial effort of building a new feature is often only a third to one half of the total effort spent on it over its entire lifetime. In other words: the aftermath is more costly then the initial build, and some "quick small things" become very costly in the long run.

9. Roll with the punches

Estimates are a good thing. They give you guidance, and are created to the best of a product manager's knowledge at each given point in time. However, many assumptions made for estimates turn out very wrong once you go into implementation or refine a design. Make sure you prepare and present the roadmap so that it’s flexible to changes.

10. Be open and honest

A roadmap is there to provide guidance. It’s not a detailed plan for execution and everyone on a software team knows that. There's no need to sell it as something different than it is. So if you don’t have all the details on a topic yet, be open about it. Share what you have, what the intention is, what the open questions are and highest risks that still need to be addressed. Point out areas that require experimentation and more research to nail down the "what." Just remember to account for this experimentation time in planning.

The bottom line?

Your team deserves a roadmap that clearly paints the big picture, but doesn't neglect realities. Your team also deserves a roadmap that is motivating, exciting, and has enough details so the entire software team knows what to do in the next 1-2 sprints with a feeling of confidence that they'll achieve great results with material impact for the business.

Do you need additional help? Check out the  roadmaps features in Jira Software and a product roadmap template in Jira . Or try Jira Product Discovery , made for PMs, for free.

Martin currently leads Atlassian’s ecosystem team. Having successfully founded a startup in the Atlassian Marketplace before, he’s incredibly passionate about making sure our customers get access to a great choice of high quality apps in our Marketplace, as well as provide a great experience for all developers building on our platform. Outside the office, you’ll likely meet him mountain biking, kayaking, or chasing down the best coffee in town.

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Guide to building a product roadmap (with template and examples)

Editor’s note : This article was last updated on 30 May 2023 with more information about the components of a product roadmap, product roadmapping tools, and steps to fill out the product roadmap templates described herein. We’ve also added some FAQ about product roadmaps.

The world of product management thrives on planning and visualization, and one tool stands out as an embodiment of both: the product roadmap.

A product roadmap is a strategic document that outlines the vision, direction, and progress of a product over time. It highlights what a product team plans to achieve and how they intend to do it.

The ability to craft a good product roadmap is an essential PM skill. In this guide, we’ll define exactly what a product roadmap is and look at some examples. We’ll also walk through how to build a product roadmap and offer some general guidelines to help you choose the right format.

If you’d like to follow along as you go, these product roadmap templates can help you get started.

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a shared, living document that outlines the vision and direction of your product throughout its lifecycle.

The roadmap, at its most basic level, articulates what you are building and why. It also lays out the team’s strategy for delivering value and serves as a plan for executing the overall product strategy.

What is the purpose of a product roadmap?

The primary purpose of a product roadmap is to communicate the strategic direction of the product. It aligns all stakeholders — product managers, developers, marketers, executives, and even customers — around the product vision and goals.

Beyond communication, a product roadmap serves as a guiding tool for decision-making, helping teams prioritize initiatives and features based on their alignment with the product vision and goals.

Key components of a product roadmap

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a product roadmap, a well-constructed roadmap typically includes the following components that, together, help convey the product’s trajectory:

• Vision — A description of the overarching goal or destination for the product. It sets the direction for all product activities
• Goals — The specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives that contribute to the realization of the product vision
• Initiatives — High-level efforts or projects that the product team undertakes to achieve the product goals
• Features — Tangible deliverables or functionality that the product team develops and releases over time
• Timeframes — Rough estimates of when the product team aims to deliver initiatives and features

How to create a product roadmap

Building a product roadmap involves the careful balancing of business objectives, customer needs, and technical feasibility. It’s about understanding what your market wants, what your team can deliver, and how these align with your company’s goals.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose you’re a product manager for a productivity app:

• Your product vision is to be the go-to app for personal productivity
• One of your goals is to improve user engagement by 20 percent in the next six months
• To achieve this, you might initiate a project to revamp the user interface
• This initiative could involve features like a new dashboard, task prioritization functionality, and a daily summary email
• You might aim to deliver these features in the next two to three months

Embarking on the journey of creating a product roadmap may seem daunting at first because it depends heavily on your organization’s unique goals and circumstances. However, broadly speaking, the following steps will help ensure you cover all your bases when building your product roadmap:

• Define the product vision
• Set the product goals
• Identify initiatives
• Detail the features
• Estimate timeframes

1. Define the product vision

The product vision is the long-term destination for your product. It should be an inspiring and guiding statement that provides direction for your product over the next few years.

The vision should be broad enough to allow for flexibility, yet specific enough to provide clear direction.

2. Set the product goals

Product goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) objectives that, when achieved, will bring the product closer to its vision.

Your goals should be aligned with the overall business objectives and provide a clear path to the realization of the product vision.

3. Identify initiatives

Initiatives are the high-level efforts needed to achieve the product goals. They should be strategic and directly contribute to the achievement of the product goals.

Initiatives can span multiple releases and typically involve multiple features or tasks.

4. Detail the features

Features are the specific functionalities or tasks that need to be completed as part of an initiative. They provide the granular details of what will be developed and delivered.

Detailing the features involves breaking down the initiatives into actionable tasks that can be assigned to the development team.

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5. Estimate timeframes

Timeframes provide a rough estimate of when the initiatives and features will be delivered . These estimates are not set in stone but provide a guideline for when to expect certain features.

Estimating timeframes involves considering factors such as resource availability, technical complexity, and business priorities.

Product roadmap formats (with examples)

There are debates within the product community as to which roadmap format is the best. The truth is, none of them is perfect. The best format will depend on your organizational culture, company stage, team setup, and the nature of your product.

Regardless of which format you choose, every product roadmap should consist of three foundational elements:

Each element can come in several variations. Let’s review them one by one:

1. The ‘when’

This is the horizontal axis on a roadmap that indicates the timeline of your initiatives. It can be displayed in the following formats:

Calendar (monthly/quarterly)

Now-next-later.

Mapping your initiatives on a calendar is the most common way of visualizing a roadmap. The calendar should be either quarterly or monthly. Any longer unit will be too broad, and any shorter unit will be too unrealistically precise.

The benefit of using a calendar-based roadmap is that anyone can understand it without further explanation. The downside is that whenever you give people a timeline, it will be treated as a promise, no matter how much you insist it is not.

Below is an example of a calendar-based product roadmap:

Click here for a calendar-based roadmap template .

Note : Before attempting to fill out the template, be sure to select File > Make a copy from the menu above the spreadsheet.

The Now-Next-Later roadmap was invented by Janna Bastow, co-founder of Mind the Product . The idea is to remove the false certainty of absolute dates by replacing them with relative timeframes:

• What are we working on now?
• What will we start next?
• What are we saving for the future?

A Now-Next-Later roadmap can help your organization escape the certainty trap. Instead of wasting time discussing when things will be done, it forces a discussion on what is more important.

However, while the idea of omitting dates makes sense in theory, it’s not always practical.

If internal stakeholders are always asking, “How long are we talking here? Weeks? Quarters?”, you might want to rethink whether the Now-Next-Later roadmap is bringing more focus or confusion.

2. The ‘what’

These are the core items on your roadmap that represent what you will be working on. They might include:

Non-feature initiatives

Also in this section:

• Product roadmap example

Can you mix and match roadmap items?

A product team’s main responsibility is building features users want , so it makes sense that features make up the bulk of product roadmaps out there.

However, if you think features are the only thing that should go on a roadmap, then you would be wrong.

There are many activities that a product team has to perform to facilitate the creation of new features, such as user research, tech debt cleanup , internal tool implementation, and product launch .

Including these non-feature initiatives on a roadmap can increase transparency and help educate the rest of the company about why a seemingly small feature can take so much time.

Again, this doesn’t mean you should put every task on the roadmap. Make sure to only include initiatives that offer strategic alignment.

A feature is a solution to a user problem, but you often don’t know what the best solution is ahead of time.

If you are not sure what features to commit to, it is best to simply state the problems you want to solve on a roadmap. This leaves you with more room to explore different solutions and gets everyone to focus on the core problems .

In addition to stating the problems you want to solve, you can also describe the outcomes you want to achieve on a roadmap.

These outcomes can be either user outcomes (e.g., “Users can find what they want easily”) or company outcomes (e.g., “Increase conversion rate by 50 percent”).

They don’t have to be written as quantitative metrics , but it always helps to have some objective criteria by which to define success.

Below are examples of items that might be included in a product roadmap:

3. Categories

You can use categories to group initiatives on a roadmap. They can be displayed as either swimlanes or tags.

Product teams commonly categorize initiatives on the roadmap by things like:

• Product area
• Nature of product work (feature, growth, product-market-fit expansion , scaling)
• Strategic pillar

You should not group initiatives by more than two dimensions on a given roadmap. After all, categories are there to help internal stakeholders digest your roadmap. Introducing too many concepts will do the opposite.

If you really have to, you can create different versions of the roadmap for different audiences.

How to choose the best product roadmap format

Remember, a product roadmap needs to be tailored to your specific context. Blindly following what other companies (especially FAANG) do is like wearing an outfit tailored-made for someone else — it will look sloppy.

There is no set formula that will tell you how to create a perfect roadmap, but I will share some general guidelines and best practices for choosing the best roadmap format for your product and business:

• If your organization is culturally more traditional, has complex dependencies across different teams, or offers a time-sensitive product, sticking to a calendar-based roadmap will be your best bet
• If your organization is still small or has a product-led culture , a Now-Next-Later roadmap could be a good option.
• If your product is in an established category where features don’t differ much between competitors, having only features on your roadmap is likely enough
• If the nature of your work requires more solution exploration (e.g., growth or innovation teams), having problems or outcomes on your roadmap will give you more flexibility
• If you work on a product so large that shipping a meaningful feature could take months or even quarters, you might want to break your work down into smaller chunks and include non-feature initiatives (e.g., user research) on your roadmap
• If your audience cares more about how you are balancing your bets, you can group your initiatives by product area, size, or type of product work
• If your audience cares about how your plan contributes to higher-level goals, group your initiatives by objective or strategic pillar
• If you are a product leader managing multiple sub-teams, your audience will likely want to see initiatives grouped by team

Product roadmap templates

We’ve created customizable templates for each product roadmap format described above (you can access each template in Google Sheets below):

• Monthly product roadmap template  ( access in Google Sheets )
• Quarterly product roadmap template ( access in Google Sheets )
• Now-Next-Later product roadmap template  ( access in Google Sheets )

Note : Before attempting to fill out a template, be sure to select File > Make a copy from the menu above the spreadsheet.

These templates are also available in Miro and Figma  formats.

Monthly product roadmap template

Time-based product roadmaps are a great way to visualize your product’s journey and development over time:

To fill out the monthly product roadmap template, take the following steps:

• Identify your categories — Start by dividing your roadmap into various categories or strategic themes
• Tag your initiatives — For each category, identify the initiatives that you plan to undertake. These can represent high-level projects or features that are aligned with the specific theme of the category. Tag each initiative for easier tracking
• Understand the nature of the roadmap — Remember that this roadmap is a living document and will change according to the latest information. It’s not a release plan, and it only contains strategic items. The timeframes are only rough estimations​
• Align with product strategy — The roadmap is only part of the product strategy. Make sure to align it with your broader product vision and strategy. Provide links or references to more information about your product vision and strategy, if available​

Remember, the key is to keep it updated as your product and strategy evolve over time.

Quarterly product roadmap template

To fill out the quarterly product roadmap template, follow the same steps as above, but split your timeframes into quarters rather than months:

Now-Next-Later product roadmap template

The same steps apply to the Now-Next-Later roadmap template, except you’re not defining concrete timelines for any of your initiatives. Instead, this roadmap template calls for organizing initiatives into one of three buckets — things to do now, things to do next, and things to do later:

Project plan vs. product roadmap: What’s the difference?

While both a project plan and a product roadmap provide a framework for organizing and executing work, they serve different purposes and operate at different levels of granularity.

A project plan is more detailed and short-term focused, outlining specific tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines. A product roadmap, on the other hand, is more strategic and long-term oriented, detailing the high-level initiatives and features that contribute to the product vision.

The table below outlines the key differences between a project plan vs. a product roadmap:

(Image: A side-by-side comparison of a project plan and a product roadmap with key differences highlighted)

Agile product roadmaps

In the context of agile product management, a product roadmap is a strategic tool, but with an added layer of flexibility.

An agile product roadmap is designed to adapt to changes, learning, and feedback over time. It prioritizes outcomes over outputs, focusing more on achieving goals and solving customer problems than on delivering a fixed set of features.

For example, instead of committing to deliver Feature X in Q2, an agile roadmap might commit to solve Customer Problem Y in Q2, leaving open the possibility of what that solution might look like.

Whereas a typical product roadmap might show expected release dates for these enhancements, in agile, the notion of sticking to deadlines becomes counterintuitive:

Agile development requires an ability to respond to change and address evolving needs at any particular moment. Agile teams also spend less time estimating and forecasting how long something will take and put that time back into experimenting and actually building the product.

As a result, we expect things to change in agile and dates quickly become wishful thinking or empty promises.

Another core principle of agile is fixed capacity. We achieve this by creating stable, long-lived, cross-functional teams. In doing so, we fix our capacity, meaning that scope and/or time are the dimensions that shift. Therefore, it is not possible to pin features to dates in agile.

When we do want to fix dates in agile, scope remains flexible. Both scope and time cannot be fixed in agile:

An agile roadmap, therefore, removes the notion of product deadlines . It still maintains the concept of time (i.e., feature A will come before feature B), but nothing is tied to a specific date.

Software and tools for product roadmapping

Product roadmapping software makes it simpler to keep track of large to-do lists, backlogs, and ideas. A roadmapping tool helps to keep the various teams and stakeholders involved in building a product on track to meet development goals . It can also facilitate online collaboration and communication between employees.

Choosing the right product roadmap software will completely depend on your team, its work style, and your budget and business goals. You’ll want to consider tools that enable you to more effectively:

• Communicate priorities — A roadmapping tool should help you visibly demonstrate why it’s important for a particular task to be completed in the grand scheme of a project
• Engage stakeholders — Stakeholders require updates on progress and what is happening, and roadmapping software should help you produce an easy visual aid to ensure efficient communication and build consensus for your product vision
• Provide visibility into work — Transparency is crucial to building trust with stakeholders. You should look for roadmapping tools that help provide visibility into what your team is working on and why
• Drive efficiency — Your roadmapping software should contain all critical information in one place, making it easier for cross-functional teams to understand priorities and what they should be working on
• Foster collaboration — The best product roadmapping software provides real-time communication tools, enabling teams to quickly huddle (virtually) to answer questions and discuss new ideas

Popular tools and software for creating product roadmaps include:

• Trello — Trello is a visual and easy-to-use project management tool. It’s a kanban-style list-making application that provides a simple way to organize your team’s tasks
• airfocus — airfocus is specifically designed for product roadmapping. It has an easy-to-use roadmap builder and can be customized to meet the needs of the product team
• ProductPlan — ProductPlan prides itself on its ability to help product managers easily build and share roadmaps. It has many templates that can be customized using a drag-and-drop builder
• Productboard — Productboard helps teams organize feedback, prioritize tasks , and create a visual roadmap. By putting a focus on customer feedback, product teams are more likely to focus on meaningful backlog items, which will improve sprint planning , the customer experience, and, subsequently, revenue
• Wrike — Wrike is a product management tool with a focus on improving internal collaboration and communication and boosting employee productivity by ensuring everyone is aligned with the product roadmap
• Aha! — Aha! is one of the most popular product management tools, boasting more than 500,000 users. This product management tool can easily create a timeline with details tailored to specific stakeholders
• Roadmunk — Roadmunk has several product roadmapping features, such as milestones, various roadmap styles, and tracking ownership of tasks. It’s easy to import your data and use the drag-and-drop feature to quickly create a product roadmap
• Monday.com — Monday.com ‘s product roadmap tool is more complex than most other options, so it’s best for larger teams that can really make the most out of all of its features and tools. One of it’s main highlights is its “high-level visual summary that explains the vision and direction of your product over time”
• Asana — Asana is a popular, comprehensive tool for work and project management. It’s quite user-friendly and doesn’t require a lot of time to build it out
• ClickUp — ClickUp is a paid tool, but its free plan is very generous. In terms of product roadmaps, it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as some of its competitors, but roadmapping is listed as an “advanced” feature
• Craft.io — Craft.io is designed specifically for building product roadmaps. It’s highly customizable and has been pushing continuous updates to improve its tools and features

If you’re on a fixed budget, you could do worse than the following free tools for product roadmapping:

• Bitrix24 —  Bitrix24 offers simple product management tools and a variety of views, including a GANTT chart, kanban board, calendar, or planner. It also provides tools to help you efficiently manage scrum teams and projects
• TeamGantt — TeamGantt has a simple drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to customize prebuilt templates. Since it’s all online, TeamGantt allows for easy collaboration between team members
• OpenProject — If you’re looking for an on-premise solution, OpenProject may be a viable product management tool. It’s also available on the cloud
• FreedCamp — Freedcamp is not specifically built for product roadmapping but can certainly be modified and adapted for that purpose. It has unlimited projects, tasks, and users under its free plan and comes with customizable tasks, subtasks, and milestones

Product roadmap strategy, planning, and communication

Product roadmap strategy involves making decisions about what to include on your roadmap and why. It’s about aligning your roadmap with your product strategy and business objectives.

During the planning phase, you might consider factors like market trends, competitive landscape, customer feedback, resource availability, and more. Your roadmap should serve as a visual representation of your strategic decisions so that you can clearly and effectively communicate your vision, goals, and expectations to key stakeholders.

Below are some considerations and best practices for communicating your strategy and short- and long-term plans to key stakeholders with your product roadmap:

• Get your stakeholders excited
• Know your audience
• Collect feedback (and mute the noise)

1. Get your stakeholders excited

It’s the product manager’s responsibility to build and manage a live roadmap that is fluid and resilient. They must convince stakeholders why the investment makes sense, obtain buy-in and the support system from inside and outside the organization, set expectations, and deliver a sense of excitement about what’s to come.

You can generate the support they you to successfully push for investment in a new product or feature by:

• Securing executive buy-in to build and sustain the product
• Specifying short- and long-term needs from all teams
• Demonstrating cohesion with ecosystem partners
• Showing customers why the product is aligned to their needs
• Applying principles that offer flexibility to adapt while minimizing noise

The first step in defining a product is to convince leadership that the offering aligns with the corporate strategy. While a product vision presents this alignment and a cash flow analysis demonstrates the value, it becomes real when leadership views the product roadmap.

The information included in the roadmap should give the executive team confidence that the offering is viable and worthy of organizational and financial support. It should include a clearly defined goal and a list of key steps or milestones toward achieving that objective.

A product roadmap should also articulate the overall product strategy and provide context to explain how it will help the team deliver on the goals spelled out in the product vision.

2. Know your audience

The key to building a good product roadmap is to understand your audience. A roadmap designed to gain buy-in from company leadership looks very different from one meant to appeal to customers. This is where a theme-based product roadmap can really come in handy, as described in this helpful guide by Andrea Saez.

In the following sections, we’ll explain how to create a product roadmap that will gain buy-in from executive leadership, the organization as a whole, partners, and customers.

Executive leadership

A roadmap for leadership needs to capture when the MVP will be available, the target customers, expected revenue, and demographics of product usage. Stakeholders will want to know when attaining total market potential is feasible (general release) and considerations for upsell opportunities. With each feature, they will want to understand the purpose and sequencing.

The main purpose of a product roadmap is to educate and convince leadership that the product or feature is worth their investment. Another key reason is to seek their direction. You have some of the best minds on the call, so you might as well leverage it!

Leadership also needs to know the KPIs you monitor and will expect updates on how you track periodically. A product roadmap sets the stage for critical thinking. It sets expectations on when volumes will ramp so that leadership has a direction on the short and long-term outlook.

Be creative about what you present as a roadmap. Typically, presentations demonstrate a timeline at the top, the critical features, and a two-line summary. That isn’t sufficient in many cases. The narrative that captures the essential customers at each phase is vital.

Peer organizations

Creating product roadmaps for peer organizations requires a much broader perspective beyond the engineering team.

For example, consider the operations team when processing claims; manual processing might be necessary for some scenarios when starting a new initiative. Your ability to identify these scenarios, the number of transactions expected every month, and features that make such processing unnecessary can make or break a project. Consider every team the product touches internally, including legal, procurement, analytics, and implementation (we will gate to sales in a bit).

Turning our attention back to the product development team, understanding what “done” looks like is very important. While a customer or leadership-facing roadmap does not need a detailed view, this is crucial for a development team. The roadmap must break down further to articulate parts of a more extensive feature that needs prioritization versus later enhancements.

Implementation and customer success teams need clarity on when features are available in sandbox and production environments to prepare their teams with the requisite training. The analytics team needs communication when new datasets are obtainable to drive KPI measurements.

Development teams need a roadmap to devise the product architecture. Most successful products work because of a tacit alignment between product management and engineering .

I find it valuable to work with the team to get creative about breaking down a more significant feature. My rule of thumb is that if it takes more than two weeks to develop, a further breakdown might be necessary. This feature breakdown translates into a more detailed roadmap that drives cross-functional alignment.

Note that the feature split should be outcome-driven — it shouldn’t be a breakdown to measure progress alone. You may ask, why wouldn’t a leadership team care about this? To put it simply, they would, and communication is critical if the feature split is significant enough. Frequently, these splits are a matter of UX enhancements, not revenue-blocking ones.

System integrators (SIs) are frequently the medium between the product and the user. Their adoption could make or break your offering.

Consider an ERP system. Product companies such as SAP rely on system integrators such as Accenture to deploy and manage the solution for the client.

Imagine that your product’s enhancement (however well-intended) breaks existing customization. Suppose the SI didn’t see this coming, or this occurs frequently. In that case, the SI might stop upgrading the product because the client now considers the downtime due to an upgrade to be unacceptable. Don’t be that product!

Webinars are a great way to relay the product roadmap for the next quarter. While that constitutes a good start, it is critical to document, especially UI or API changes, and present a forewarning of possible compatibility issues. The bottleneck isn’t the work to prepare for an upgrade but showing poorly in front of the client.

Customers and users

Customers expect your product to provide immediate relief to a current pain point while also demanding that it goes above and beyond.

For an example, take this tale of two vendors. In one of my previous roles, our operations depended heavily on solutions from third-party vendors. Without getting into specific details, both vendors offered overlapping products.

The pain point was that data resided in their systems. Vendor 1 did not provide a standard interface to retrieve data for deeper analytics. Vendor 2 did, but there was considerable pressure to set up our AI and automation environments.

During our next quarterly, we requested both vendors to present their roadmaps. When vendor 2 showed us its roadmap, it was apparent that their reps had listened to our needs. More crucially, the roadmap included well-defined timelines. Vendor 1 had plans to deliver significant updates, including ones that would have made our issues disappear. Unfortunately, it never presented anything aside from a motivational speech. This eliminated vendor 1 and we consolidated our solutions through Vendor 2.

The account manager for Vendor-1 admitted offline that he never got the product team’s backing to present anything to the customer. Put yourself in their shoes: Why would a sales manager sell your product to the customer? If you cannot provide a roadmap, pricing, and timing for a product, you might as well not build it.

Another consideration is building a suite of product capabilities that enables incremental opportunities. Think of your product as a set of Lego blocks where the outcomes are more remarkable than the sum of the parts. You are overdelivering to most of your customers when you build something as an all-inclusive product.

A customer-facing roadmap is typically a quarterly or monthly timeline highlighting significant enhancements to the product. It needs to relay in about 15–20 words why the feature drives value for them.

The sales team prefers a similar snapshot. However, I recommend customizing it depending on the sales team’s audience.

3. Collect feedback (and mute the noise)

Knowing what feedback is crucial versus what is noise is essential to building sustainable products.

When introducing a new product, you can always expect feedback, which is god. However, most of it is tactical, and suggestions tend to resolve a symptom rather than a root cause.

As an example, once I had a customer demand a feature for a unique scenario. The sales team was adamant that the product was a no-go until we added the feature. We got on a call with the customer, talked through it, and determined it was an arcane rule that wasn’t even valid.

In other cases, I’ve seen product teams turn an enhancement request into an opportunity for a new revenue stream. The point is to separate the signal from the noise. Don’t be afraid to reprioritize your product roadmap when there is a good rationale.

Get on a call with the customer and have an open-ended discussion; you might discover unpolished diamonds that could lead to new avenues for success. Once you deliver an MVP, get close with the users and measure the product’s results against expectations. Understand the critical pain points. Then, brutally prioritize them against ROI, ease of development, the product’s readiness, and the market.

A well-designed product roadmap can be a powerful tool to help product managers secure buy-in from stakeholders and communicate their vision across the organization. It provides clarity, fosters alignment, facilitates communication, guides decision-making, and ultimately, helps drive product success.

Understanding how to create a product roadmap — and, more importantly, the power it can wield when communicated effectively — is a key step in the product manager career development journey and a crucial factor in getting any product development lifecycle off on the right track.

Product roadmap FAQ

How long should a product roadmap be, does a product roadmap include deadlines, how does a product roadmap relate to a product backlog.

In most cases, your roadmap should focus on the upcoming six to 18 months.

It is very rare for a product team to produce a meaningful plan any further into the future. If you ask 10 product managers how long they tend to stick to their roadmaps, nine of them will tell you less than three months.

Generally speaking, you should avoid committing to deadlines because software product development is full of uncertainties. There is no point making promises when you can’t fulfill them.

Unfortunately, the real world has constraints we can’t bypass, which sometimes makes deadlines a necessary evil. Don’t be afraid to impose deadlines if you have to, as long as you understand that they are the exception, not the rule.

It is perfectly fine to combine multiple approaches on the same roadmap.

For example, you can:

• Share concrete features you will soon build and high-level problems you want to solve in the future
• Pair initiatives with the outcomes you hope they’ll achieve

As a product manager, you own the backlog . Make sure to capture backlog items, drive transparency within the organization, and provide a rationale.

The product roadmap is a fluid document; it may evolve based on a wide range of parameters, such as a change in organization’s strategy, a shift in the market or user behavior, or the arrival of a new competitor.

The backlog needs to be regularly updated and realigned to keep up with changes in the product roadmap. It’s common for user stories and tasks to become outdated during this process, so you should remove these irrelevant items from the backlog as soon as you receive clear-cut direction from the stakeholders.

Remember that product management is 70 percent science and 30 percent craft, so get creative!

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Product Roadmap Presentation: 6 Examples Included Templates

Simon Sinek’s rise to fame is marked by his unwavering determination to challenge conventional thinking.

He consistently questions corporate practices and fearlessly presents bold opinions that disrupt the status quo.

In his book “Start with Why” , Simon Sinek boldly claims that the ‘Why’ behind your actions matters more than the ‘What’. This principle isn’t limited to leadership or personal motivation; it extends to every facet of the business, including product roadmaps. Product roadmaps transcend mere slides or visuals; they serve as the linchpin for strategically aligning internal teams and external stakeholders with the product vision and strategy .

They act as the bridge that connects the visionary ‘Why’ with the practical ‘What’, bringing the envisioned goals within the realm of execution.

So how to create and present roadmaps effectively?

In this article, we’ll reveal the art of creating roadmap presentations that don’t just align internal teams and external users but also set the stage for a successful execution. 

Limitations of relying on PowerPoint

During my early days in Product Management , I was introduced to PowerPoint for building roadmaps.

Our former product manager shared a bunch of Powerpoint templates with us and we loved the flexibility and versatility the tool provided.

However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that it had a number of limitations that we couldn’t ignore.

While it is a versatile tool for various presentation needs, it may not be the best fit for roadmap presentations. 

Please look at the PowerPoint template above that I have frequently used to present roadmaps during the early days.

Maintenance challenges

Roadmaps often evolve with changing business priorities and require a more dynamic platform that can reflect real-time changes and updates.

Anyone who has used PowerPoint would know how easy it is to become disoriented by the misalignments of the visual elements and how hard it can get to maintain and update.

Moreover, given that the Powerpoint roadmaps always sit in their own silos, away from the tools used by the product development teams, any updates in the roadmap have to be manually translated into the development plans each time to ensure consistency. 

Presentation challenges

Modern roadmaps are not just about displaying information but also about engaging the audience.

Powerpoint’s lack of interactive elements can make a roadmap feel one-dimensional, missing out on the depth and engagement that interactive platforms offer.

Consider you are presenting your product’s roadmap at your annual town hall. You might want to resort to multiple views of the visual product roadmap, starting with a bucketized view, then a timeline view, and maybe a private/public view for different types of audience. With Powerpoint, it would mean duplicating all the effort to create each view you need.

Unlike specialized roadmapping tools, Powerpoint presentations lacks the capability to prioritize items on the go, making it challenging to convey behind-the-scenes efforts for choosing certain work items to stakeholders.

Collaboration challenges

Most product teams share roadmaps with stakeholders and external users to get their feedback and input. But sharing a Powerpoint roadmap presentation is like sending a message in a bottle. You have no way of knowing who accessed it, how they interacted with it, or what parts caught their attention. 

It also doesn’t allow users to provide qualitative feedback or upvote features directly on the roadmap.

This missed opportunity for engagement can be a significant blind spot and may lead to a disconnect between the product team and its users.

Relying solely on Powerpoint can be akin to using a compass in the age of GPS. 

Recognizing these limitations and exploring specialized roadmapping tools can lead to more effective, engaging, and insightful presentations.

The dynamic, interactive, and collaborative nature of roadmaps demands a platform that can keep pace.

6 templates for product roadmap presentations

Each style and methodology of roadmapping guides the product’s voyage, ensuring that every stakeholder, internal and external, is privy to the course ahead, its landmarks, and its destinations. 

Crafting your roadmap to echo both the intricacies your sales team and the broad strokes of your product’s journey ensures an informed, engaged, and collaborative voyage toward product success.

1. Kanban view

Netflix Roadmap, as taken from Gibson Hiddle’s blog

The Kanban View, with its intuitive design and inherent flexibility, serves as a potent tool for product roadmap presentation, ensuring tasks and initiatives are succinctly organized under buckets of time (monthly, quarterly or yearly), allowing stakeholders to clearly see where the development is headed in the future.

However, with a Kanban view , there is a risk of oversimplifying complex details as intrinsic dependencies and specific timelines may be underrepresented.

Additionally, the straightforward visual layout may also pose challenges when it comes to prioritization within each bucket, especially in larger and more complex product scenarios.

👉 Real-world Examples: Github Roadmap , Trello Roadmap , Netflix Roadmap

2. Now, Next, Later

The Now, Next, Later framework is an adaptation of the Kanban view and brings a high-level perspective to product roadmaps, distinctly categorizing items into immediate (Now), short-term (Next), and future (Later) buckets. 

It acts as a telescope scanning horizons, providing insights and maintaining a focus that spans from present tasks to future endeavors without committing to exact timelines. It does so without binding itself to precise timelines. This flexibility is especially vital for startups, where the ability to adapt to rapid shifts in priority is essential. Now, Next, Later roadmap can server as a effective product roadmap presentation.

👉 Real-world Examples: Lasso Roadmap , ProductBoard Template

3. Calendar or Timeline-Based roadmap

The Timeline view of a product roadmap (or some people’s saying timeline roadmaps) provides a clear, logical outline of the product’s development cycle, aiding transparent communication and efficient resource management.

It effectively conveys the product’s chronological progression, presenting start and end dates and facilitating stakeholder understanding and anticipating project phases. It also captures task dependencies, offering a realistic view of the project’s progression and helping teams avoid bottlenecks and delays.

👉 Real-world Examples: Notion Template

4. Private and Public roadmap views

Private roadmaps function as the organizational blueprint, keeping detailed strategies, technical specs, and precise timelines shielded from external view. It ensures all internal teams are aligned with the developmental, marketing, and deployment strategy, offering a detailed, confidential space for open internal discussions and strategic planning. 

On the flip side, Public roadmaps invite and incorporate user feedback , encouraging a community-driven development approach. They enable users to interact directly with the roadmap, voicing their preferences through upvotes and comments. This transparent strategy provides tangible data on user preferences and desires, aiding teams in prioritizing and refining features based on actual user input and demand.

Together, they facilitate a balanced development approach, harmonizing user involvement with technical teams and internal strategic alignment to navigate through the intricate path of product development.

👉 Real-world Examples: Usersnap Public Roadmap , Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap , Google Classroom Public Roadmap , Loom Public Roadmap , Airtable Public Roadmap

5. Roadmap swimlanes

Multifaceted organizations often employ multiple swimlanes to visualize parallel developments across different products or departments. 

A Portfolio Roadmap brings together product development trajectories of varied, albeit interconnected products such as Google Search, Maps, Gmail and Drive.

This panoramic view enables business stakeholders and product managers to quickly apprehend the status, progress, and future plans for an entire portfolio, facilitating informed strategic decisions and efficient resource allocation across varied products.

Simultaneously, Department specific roadmap roadmaps carve out a dedicated lane for each department, such as Marketing team or Development team, to detail their particular journey, milestones, and activities. While providing a detailed breakdown of activities, they also offer a lens to visualize how each team’s efforts contribute to the overall product and organizational objectives.

👉 Real-world Examples: Aha! Template , Jenkins Roadmap

6. Goals-based roadmaps

Goals or outcome-based roadmaps adeptly center the strategic narrative on overarching objectives, minimizing the explicit focus on granular details.

This abstraction allows stakeholders to grasp the overarching strategy and direction without getting mired in the specifics of features, which may evolve over time. 

By focusing primarily on outcomes, these roadmaps inherently embed resilience against the tides of technological changes and varying feedback, as they’re not tied to specific features or solutions that may need to shift in response to evolving contexts or insights. 

👉 Real-world Examples: GO template , Airfocus Template , Miro template

Best practices and ideas for roadmap presentation

In the grand theater of business, a roadmap presentation is your spotlight moment.

It’s where visions are shared, strategies are unveiled, and futures are shaped.

Here are some tips on how to craft a roadmap presentation that’s both an informative guide and a work of art.

Tip #1 – Start with the ‘Why’

Apple, under the visionary leadership of Steve Jobs, always began with the ‘why’. Before diving into the intricacies of a product, they delved into its purpose.

Similarly, start your roadmap presentation by addressing the ‘why’. Why this product? Why now? This sets the stage for a compelling, memorable, and meaningful narrative itself.

For internal presentations, I have also found that starting a product roadmap presentation off with a refresher of the product’s strategy can help make your next couple of hours much more peaceful.

Tip #2 – Unveil the BTS work

Akin to the BTS episodes of any show on Netflix, sharing all the effort that went into production (the direction, the schedules, the travelling, the equipment, the retakes etc) makes the audience appreciate the end result more.

Therefore, it is always helpful to demonstrate the discovery process you followed for conducting your market research, brainstorming and validating ideas, generating usability reports, conducting focus groups, surveys etc. This adds credibility.

And never be shy to show the hiccups and the wrong turns during your journey. Because you never know, just like a Friend’s blooper reel, the retakes might find more traction with your audience than the actual episodes.

Tip #3 – Stay away from the sharks

Whether you are presenting to internal stakeholders or external users, both would be interesting to know your product’s positioning through your roadmap. 

I recently attended a product fair where a CEO introduced his product roadmap with “think of it as AWS Cloud”, without differentiating it in any way. I spent the next 30 mins of the presentation connecting all their features with AWS Cloud features. 

It is crucial to establish a differentiating factor against your competition and build your presentation around that. Tesla entered the automotive space several decades later than its competitors like Toyota, Ford, Ferrari and others. However, by differentiating itself as a leader in the EV space, it created a new market landscape for itself.

Tip #4 – Focus on the outcomes

The roadmap features you spent weeks fine-tuning all the details are great. However, the audience is mostly only interested in what it really means for them.

Therefore, in your presentation, it is critical to shift the focus from features to outcomes.

If it is the external users of the product, you need to focus on how the roadmap aligns with their needs. How does the roadmap solve their pain points? For example, adding the social login capability will allow you the flexibility of SSO, where you don’t have to remember an extra set of login credentials.

On the other side, if it is the executive stakeholders or the investors, the focus should be to present how each roadmap item would help achieve the key business metrics and goals. Using the same example, adding the social login will help reduce the drop-offs during registration and increase our user acquisition rate by 15%.

This perspective resonates more with stakeholders than merely going over the buy in the features list.

Tip #5 – The ending

Once again, I am a big Steve Jobs fan. The master of marketing that he was, leaving an impression on the audience was his forte.

He would always save the big picture and the biggest announcement for the end. His famous “One more thing…” technique has since been copied by many leaders across the industry to conclude their presentation on a high-note.

Leveraging feedback for roadmap presentation and varied board views of Usersnap

Feedback is the lifeblood of any product. Integrating feedback into your roadmap presentations ensures they remain relevant and aligned with user needs. 

The importance of internal and external board views cannot be overstated.

While a public board view with upvoting engages customers and end-users, a limited board view ensures stakeholders are aligned, setting the stage for successful project execution. With the right tools, practices, and request feedback mechanisms, they can be the difference between product success and obscurity.

Usersnap’s varied board views offer a versatile way to present and gather feedback. Whether it’s the public portal for guest users or the limited board view for stakeholders, you can use the power of advanced filters to present different views of your roadmap to different users.

The variety of roadmap presentation styles is tailored to address specific product development needs and audience types. However, leveraging tools like Usersnap, which offer dynamic multiple views and capture customer feedback, can be instrumental in effectively presenting and adapting these roadmaps to various scenarios and stakeholder preferences.

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And if you’re ready to try out a visual bug tracking and feedback solution, Usersnap offers a free trial. Sign up today or book a demo with our feedback specialists.

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Product roadmaps: A complete guide [+ templates]

When I'm managing even a small project, I have a system of notes, file folders, color codes, and lists ( so many lists) that I use to have any chance of keeping the project on schedule. My system works because I'm the only one who has to use it.

As a product manager, you don't have the luxury of maintaining total control over your project planning systems. You have to allow entire teams to share your organizing systems and still find a way to keep everything running smoothly. 

That's where the product roadmap comes in. A product roadmap keeps everyone on the same page as to where a product is and where it's headed next. It's also a status updater, a communication tool, and a governing authority that defines how product work needs to be documented, who's responsible for different tasks, and what milestones and deadlines need to be met. 

This guide will take you through every step of the product roadmapping process and even provide you with templates to get you started.

Table of contents:

What goes into a product roadmap?

Why are product roadmaps important?

Who uses a product roadmap, how to create a product roadmap, 7 types of product roadmaps (with templates), how to present a product roadmap to stakeholders, tips for creating a product roadmap, what is a product roadmap.

A product roadmap (or product development roadmap) is a document that acts as the singular authority for information on a product's progress, including roles and timelines for all related teams and stakeholders. Roadmaps can be as simple or complex as necessary, but they're always easy to understand and accessible to everyone who is or will be involved in the product's development. 

A roadmap is what's called a "single source of truth": it aggregates all product information from every team involved in the development project. Individual teams can also have their own department-wide systems, but all of that information should also be stored in the product roadmap. That way, everyone on the project is referencing the same source for updated information.

What are the key components of a product roadmap?

Roadmaps are unique snowflakes (and honestly as complex): each one is different depending on the type of product in development, the industry the product belongs to, the size and shape of the product team, and the particular needs of the company producing the product. 

All differences aside, nearly all product roadmaps contain these key components:

Product features: Features are the functions the product needs to perform and the problems it should solve. Typically, the development team is in charge of sifting through feedback from users and deciding what features to implement next.

User stories: User stories make up the most basic units on a roadmap within an agile framework. Written from the end user's perspective, they describe the ultimate goal of a product feature. ("Story" and "feature" are sometimes used interchangeably.) Collections of related stories make up epics.

Epics: In agile product roadmaps, epics are collections of stories. They can span across multiple teams (or even across multiple software version launches), and there can be many of them involved in a given roadmap.

Product releases: Features are rolled out to users in planned product releases. Often a completed feature will be held until other features are finished being implemented, so multiple features can be included in one release for optimal CX . 

Product initiatives: Initiatives show how sets of stories, features, tasks, and projects come together to actualize product goals. Initiatives keep teams focused on goal-centric efforts.

Product goals: Goals correspond to product features and outline how and when that feature will be implemented. Goals should be time-bound and measurable, and a roadmap might include multiple goals on the path toward completing a single feature.

Product timelines: Usually, a product roadmap timeline will include not only the dates associated with each milestone, but also a list of the teams and individuals responsible for each process as well as the stakeholders affected by different updates and goal completions.

Product roadmaps keep every member of every team focused on the same goal. It can be all too easy to get caught up in the cycle of completing isolated tasks within individual teams, but with a unified roadmap, stakeholders at every level and in every department know where they stand in the development process and how their individual contributions factor in.

Let's say a software company is releasing an update to one of their products. The engineering team plays many of the key roles in executing the technical aspect of the release and accounts for the biggest chunk of the roadmap. Meanwhile, the UX team has its own tasks to ensure the updates are aligning with user experience standards. As all this is going on, the marketing team is updating social media, scheduling email campaigns, and building awareness for the key features of the upcoming update. At any given time, each of these teams can consult the roadmap to see where their roles fit into the project timeline as they continue performing separate tasks on projects related to other products.

A well-conceived product roadmap has these key benefits:

Improved goal alignment across teams and stakeholders

Improved alignment between developmental teams and broader business objectives

Transparency about timelines and progress toward milestones

More effective product planning

Clear translation of product strategy

Creation of a single source of truth for all teams and stakeholders

Streamlined development strategy

Development of a single, shareable visualization of product timelines, relevant teams, and required milestones

Clear outlining of priorities to fend off non-outcome-driven tasks and keep teams focused

This isn't exactly a shocker: the product manager and their team are responsible for building, maintaining, and facilitating the product roadmap. And if you're the product manager, you want to do everything possible to make sure that only your team manages the roadmap—especially when operating at scale, roadmap planning can very quickly become a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation.

Some concrete tasks that the product management team is responsible for include:

Selecting a roadmap type that fits the product development process

Building the product roadmap

Updating the product roadmap with changes and new information from all teams and stakeholders

Ensuring all stakeholders document their work correctly

Troubleshooting obstacles and bottlenecks in the product development process

Product managers will probably have to interact with other departments throughout the company to build a roadmap that aligns with greater company goals. Once a roadmap is created, it applies to everyone with a role to play in its execution. For example, marketing teams might reference it to align their publicity deliverable timelines, and customer service teams may need to plan for an influx of support tickets around the release date.

Explore the best product management software options to create and execute actionable strategies.

Product roadmaps can vary widely in complexity, from shorter-term timelines (like a now/next/later roadmap) to complex ones that span years (like a detailed capacity roadmap). And when a product manager is plotting out a full development cycle, they'll often use a combination of roadmap styles for different aspects of the process.

A comprehensive, full-scale product roadmap is a beast of a document, so the best way to build one is the same way you would eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

1. Identify the product strategy: The product manager needs to have a strong grasp on the product strategy, market fit , and company goals in order to ensure the product roadmap aligns with and supports these broader initiatives.

2. Gather stakeholder perspectives: Working closely with your teams and stakeholders, collect firsthand information about the work, what it requires, and common problems.

3. Determine product goals and features: From the information you've gathered from stakeholders, identify what the product's features will be and break them down into actionable goals using the specs for your minimum viable product (MVP).

4. Define feature priorities: Once you've accumulated a general list of potential features, it's a good idea to prioritize them, so you can schedule gradual releases or delegate resources to high-priority features first. Consider common frameworks like Cost/Benefit, Value/Complexity, Story Mapping, MoSCoW Analysis, or Kano Analysis.

5. Match goals with releases: Once you've determined the parameters of your MVP, you can map the steps and milestones necessary to produce the earliest version of the product and schedule your first (beta) release.

6. Set a timeline: Tie your features, goals, and releases to scheduled milestones, consulting directly with stakeholders before setting deadlines to make sure they're feasible.

If your team uses a project management framework like Agile , you can apply it to your roadmap to keep your teams organized and so tasks or sprints can be assigned according to their usual workflows.

Starting a product roadmap from scratch? These templates each provide a structure for different facets or views depending on the scope of your particular roadmap. 

You can use just one to focus on a particular aspect of your process, or you can combine multiple templates to create a more comprehensive plan for your product's development. Don't let our preset labels limit you, either—we've also included blanks for you to modify and use however works best for you.

1. Theme roadmaps

It's essential for a project manager to start the roadmapping process with an understanding of the company's larger product strategy and business goals. 

A Themes x Features roadmap can help keep your thoughts organized as you start to determine where your planned features fit into these broader initiatives or "themes."

When you begin to break your features down into smaller goals and the projects dedicated to achieving those goals, a Themes x Projects roadmap can help keep all of the decisions you make about smaller processes and milestones in alignment with broader business goals.

2. Product portfolio roadmap

When first starting to map out the basics of your product roadmap, the four main items you need to determine are the product's goals, features, projected releases, and the teams that will be involved in the product development project. This high-level view gives you a framework to start with before filling in more details, and it also allows you to keep track of multiple products you may be managing at once.

3. Releases x Features roadmap

This roadmap zooms in to organize one very specific aspect of your project planning: which features will be grouped into each release. With a Release x Features roadmap in hand, you can run your plans by developers to ensure each group of features isn't too large to be feasible, and you can get more accurate estimates as to how much time will need to go into each release.

4. Capacity roadmap

Once you know what your product features and goals will be—but before you tie product milestones to a timeline—you need to determine who will be responsible for the different tasks involved in the product's development. A capacity roadmap aligns different tasks with the departments responsible for them and the period of time in which that team will be working on those tasks. Our version also allows you to assign tasks to different teams within a department. 

5. Task management roadmap

Different types of roadmaps allow you to view the same issue from different frames. With a task management roadmap, you're focusing on tasks and teams—just like in the capacity map—but the focus here is on determining when, generally speaking, those teams will tackle those tasks. You can also fill in what other things each team has on its plate, so you can see when they have the most availability to work on your product.

6. Now/next/later roadmap

Most product roadmaps are laid out across several months, fiscal quarters, or even years. A now/next/later roadmap takes the opposite approach and zooms in for a "snapshot" of the product development process in its current state. Now/next/later roadmaps can be especially useful for getting a project or process back on track after an obstacle or delay.

7. Product vision roadmap

It's a product manager's job to always know what's coming next, and that includes which development projects and new goals are lined up after the completion of the current product. A product vision roadmap is a strategic way to simultaneously brainstorm future opportunities and begin to plan what projects are on the horizon for your product team.

Bonus: Blank horizontal, vertical, and matrix roadmap templates

The templates above offer just a small selection of the different tasks, processes, and goals that can be organized using a roadmap. If you want to start a more custom roadmap from a truly blank template, you can download the basic structure of these by layout to fill in your own labels and titles:

Even a perfectly executed roadmap doesn't mean much if it doesn't get buy-in. And to get buy-in, you need to be able to present it effectively to both executive stakeholders and the development teams responsible for executing (cue the nail-biting). Here's how to position your roadmap to give it the best possible chance for adoption (while keeping your vision and nail beds intact).

Tailor it to your audience: Since you may be presenting to multiple audiences with different roles in the organization, it's important to tailor your roadmap presentation to them. Implementation teams may be concerned with scoping and having long enough timelines, while executives may be more interested in implementation costs and time to value.

Map back to company goals: Ultimately, your roadmap should advance the broader company goals. Show your audience how successful execution will connect to what the company as a whole values and strives for.

Tell a story: The best way to get people invested in your roadmap is to take them along its journey. Frame it with a beginning, middle, and end, just like any story, so you can walk stakeholders through the process and make it less abstract.

Show proof: It's not enough to say what you want to do—you need to also be able to prove the accuracy of your estimates for timelines, resources, and outcomes as much as possible. Back your claims up with real data to make the presentation believable.

Make it airtight: If there's an element of your roadmap that still feels a little rocky, the last thing you want is for someone to ask questions about it. If you feel any hesitation about any part of your roadmap, iron it out first, so you don't end up scrambling during the presentation. If you can't, acknowledge the gap straight on.

Be realistic, not optimistic: This is basically the old "under-promise, over-deliver" adage. Stakeholders want to know your roadmap is viable, not that it's going to be finished in record time. Resist the temptation to strive for impressive promises and instead lean on real data and unbiased projections.

In the end, everyone wants to prioritize the most impactful projects. A well-designed product roadmap will communicate value, give all teams a single source of truth for timelines and expectations, and help keep everyone focused on goal-centric work. 

Here are a few key takeaways to help you get the most out of yours:

Cater your roadmap presentations to your audience.

Be as realistic as possible about timelines, deliverables, and values.

Keep your roadmap concise.

Always relate features, stories, epics, and other tasks to agreed-upon product goals.

Align the roadmap to the greater company goals.

Make the roadmap accessible to every stakeholder, but limit editing permission.

A product roadmap won't eliminate all the work required to keep your product's development on track. As you scale, you'll want to automate internal processes as much as possible, like syncing information across platforms and sending update notifications to different teams.

Related reading:

How to get your team aligned

4 ways project management automation makes your job easier

How to streamline sales with AI and automation

12 of the best ways to work smarter, not harder

This post was originally published in May 2022 and was most recently updated win contributions from Bryce Emley in June 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• Software & web development
• Product management

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Home Blog Business Product Roadmap: A Complete Guide for Product Managers

Product Roadmap: A Complete Guide for Product Managers

Product Roadmaps are an essential tool for any organization looking to clarify its product development process. Much is being said about how they can help teams visualize and keep an effective product development agenda over a specific period, but what does it truly bring to business professionals rather than a working standard in many industries?

In this article, we will cover in detail what a Product Roadmap is. Its story and application in Agile environments, such as the SCRUM methodology. We’ll navigate each step of the road, from ideation to how to successfully present a Product Roadmap. As an extra, stay tuned for common pitfalls in Product Roadmap creation and how to prevent them, as well as our recommendation for Product Roadmap PowerPoint templates. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What is a Product Roadmap

Who owns the product roadmap in scrum, who is responsible for managing the product roadmap, who uses product roadmaps, why should you create a product roadmap, types of product roadmaps, which content to include in a product roadmap, 4-step process to build a product roadmap, how to plan technical debt in a product roadmap, how to prioritize items in a product roadmap, how to define metrics of success in a product roadmap, how to add multiple products to a single product roadmap file, design suggestions for product roadmaps, microsoft excel, microsoft powerpoint, microsoft project, google slides, zoho sprints, interactions with microsoft planner, how to present a product roadmap, updating a product roadmap.

• Reasons why your Product Roadmaps may fail

Best PowerPoint Templates for Product Roadmaps

Closing thoughts.

Whenever we mention a Product Roadmap, we refer to a high-level action plan of how a product or service will develop, laying out the goals to achieve over a time period. It is a versatile tool that can be adapted to showcase the evolution of a product/service to be released, as well as to upgrade an existing product or service with new functionalities. 

We can say a product roadmap is a shared document between different stakeholders that outlines a product’s vision, priorities, future outlook, and evolution over time. It serves the role of aligning the organization toward a fixed set of short and long-term goals that are strictly relevant to the product’s performance, whilst at the same time defining how these goals shall be achieved and by whom. Much like other types of roadmaps, a product roadmap is the execution plan of a product strategy.

What is a Roadmap in Agile

If you browse product roadmaps, their definition, or tools to create one, you are likely to come across mentions of roadmaps in Agile. For what refers to Agile practices , an Agile roadmap is a critical tool to understand the context in which daily work unfolds, as it is the guidance by which all efforts should be focused – hence the importance of sharing an agile roadmap with the entire group of people involved in the product development.

However, we must clarify that any product roadmap is not where to-do(s) tasks from individual projects are laid out. The product roadmap is a reference document where vision and strategy align; therefore, tasks required to complete an evolution stage in the roadmap have to be previously defined, with a timeframe for completion, and dependencies established (i.e., which tasks have to be completed in order for the upcoming ones to start).

SCRUM frameworks are the common application of product management roadmapping tools, and it is a common question to ask who owns these product roadmaps. The Product Manager is the owner of any product roadmap and the solely responsible for involving stakeholders and keeping them accountable to fulfill the tasks in time. 

Sometimes, Product Owners overlap in their role functions, transitioning into product managers, which is why people tend to confuse who is the actual owner of a product roadmap.

To be on the safe side, we would like to make this clarification. 

A Product Owner is a person that builds the vision for a product, meaning they handle the business side of the project.

The Project Manager is the person that handles the technical decisions of the product development. 

If the Product Owner and the Product Manager roles aren’t fulfilled by the same person, we highly encourage involving the Product Owner at each stage of the product development.

The product manager is the person in charge of the entire product lifecycle. Among the responsibilities of the product manager, we can find:

• Work as the strategic leader for the technical aspects of the product development.
• Gather ideas, relevant data, and strategic insights for any planning session.
• Coordinate the roadmap planning meetings.
• Communicate the strategic vision for the product clearly, so all team players are aligned with it.
• Organize and moderate the scoring discussion (meeting in which the team agrees on feature ideas for the product development).

At a corporate level, executives, customers, teams, and other relevant stakeholders are the audience of any product roadmap. Depending on whom shall see the document, is where you need to tailor the “vision” of this document to their interests. Let’s put some examples.

The Production Team of your organization will focus on the technical aspects of the product implementation and the deadlines to meet. The value of this document is linked to communicating, as detailed as possible, the information relevant to product features, their stage of development, or any upcoming change that may alter future tasks in the original plan.

In contrast, an Executive Team will focus on the strategic part of the product roadmap, how the vision for this product is aligned across all stages, which are the expected market numbers, deadlines, etc. And that’s just a side-by-side comparison of two Internal Roadmaps – we will expose the different types of product roadmaps later on in this guide.

As we mentioned earlier, product roadmaps are tools for strategic vision alignment . They bring clarity about a project’s outcome and help stakeholders to stay in touch with different areas and the impact of their work. 

Depending on the hierarchy level, the influence of product roadmaps may vary in daily work. For the leadership, this tool provides updates on pending and completed work, like a snapshot of what’s happening and what’s bound to happen. It reduces the unrequired technical jargon so leadership can focus on what boosts the team’s performance.

On the side of a product owner or a product manager, counting with a product road map, this tool helps unify teams, improving internal communication and putting the focus into effective task completion. 

For the team, learning how to define a product roadmap is the first step toward identifying dependencies in your product and sorting out which tasks should take priority. Teams should document the backlog of each sprint, which, in turn, helps to address where a revision of the original strategy happened, why it was triggered, and which was the outcome of such a resolution.

Internal Product Roadmaps

Internal roadmaps guide the efforts of any organization, and they can be tailored depending on the team reviewing the product development work. We can find internal roadmaps for sales, internal roadmaps for executives , and internal roadmaps for developers .

Internal roadmaps for executives highlight how to boost customer satisfaction, reach new markets, and drive growth through the new product. The vision is focused on terms of the company’s growth, and it must reflect the metrics that prove a good criterion. 

Internal roadmaps for sales have a bit of a hybrid purpose since they can also be used as external roadmaps. This implies that it’s not uncommon for sales representatives to show insights into the sales product roadmap with customers to boost the chances of closing a deal. In such cases, the internal roadmaps have to trim the expected launch dates in the sales presentation to avoid any potential compromise that cannot be fulfilled in time.

External Product Roadmaps

External roadmaps are documents shared with customers and prospects. Its relevance is to showcase the product’s benefits in their lives, hence why it is critical for these documents to be visually appealing and easy to understand. 

Any internal process is trimmed out of the external roadmap and has to offer realistic expectations. Do not list features you already know your team won’t be able to fulfill for the release stage.

Epic Roadmap

Epic roadmaps are mostly used in Jira software, and their purpose is to help Agile and DevOps methodologies to organize their work. We must understand three core concepts to comprehend the purpose of an Epic roadmap.

• Epics are cumulative workloads that can be broken down into smaller, simpler tasks.
• Stories are the sub-tasks that build one epic. If you break down an epic, you get a number of stories.

Initiatives can be defined as a collection of epics aligned toward the same vision.

Features Roadmap

This is one of the most commonly used roadmaps and is typically used externally. They help to communicate when new features will be released, and to which area they are focused (i.e., Consumer, Scalability, Performance, etc.)

Portfolio Roadmap

Whenever we need to display multiple products on a single view, portfolio roadmaps make this task an easy feat. They are tools used mostly by the leadership level, as they allow us to take the full dimension of projects running in parallel and how are HR and technology efforts allocated for each section.

Release Roadmap

Marketing and sales teams are the main users of this type of product roadmap since it is a tool to communicate all the activities linked with the release of a product. It is an outline in a timeline format of the dependency tasks to fulfill before the release, who is in charge of each task, and how they correlate between departments.

One clear example is to coordinate training sessions involving sales representatives and customer support about a new feature to be introduced in a product. Both departments must be aware of the ins and outs of this new functionality to attend to the customer’s demands properly. Still, the training course must be completed before the estimated release date.

Strategy Roadmap

A strategy roadmap is a high-level document used by the leadership to outline the areas in which an organization’s focus must change and why those changes are required concerning the organization’s vision. It is the step prior to a Strategy Plan as it implies the sequence in which changes ought to happen; in contrast, the strategic plan focuses on how to accomplish each stage and by which timeframe they should be completed.

Theme Roadmap

The term themes in product management refer to high-level goals to be completed in a specific timeframe. In Agile terms, themes are made of Initiatives, Epics, and Stories, as they cover significant areas of interest in a company. 

To clarify this point even further, let’s we will illustrate a typical Theme-based Roadmap example:

A technology giant wants to increase customer loyalty by improving their existing features according to customer feedback ( Theme ). They identify three pillars in which their efforts can take action: smartwatches, mobile phones, and tablets ( Initiatives ). The company proceeds to introduce an upgrade to its upcoming smartwatch model to enhance GPS tracking for outdoor swimming ( Epic ). To accomplish such a goal, they previously had to improve the time span of water resistance, water resistance depth, introduce weather forecasts and sync no-swim area warnings from information retrieved by the coast guards ( Stories ).

Technology Roadmap

Technology roadmaps are low-level documents that aim to organize and prioritize tasks for the production team. It is an internal document, and product managers can instantly address tasks that demand more human capital and monetary resources. It can be used in conjunction with the Capacity Roadmap for inter-department collaboration.

A software roadmap, a crucial component within the broader technology roadmap, specifically outlines the development lifecycle, key milestones, and updates for software projects. This distinction is vital for clarifying the roadmap’s scope, as it allows for the detailed planning and execution of software-related tasks while maintaining an overview of all technological advancements within the organization. Agile methodologies, commonly employed in both hardware and software development, highlight the roadmap’s flexibility and adaptability. An example of an agile-based technology roadmap, which might include a dedicated software roadmap section, can be visualized using our Agile Product Release PowerPoint Roadmap Template . This approach ensures a holistic view of technological progress while giving special attention to the nuances of software development.

Now-Next-Later Roadmap

This product management tool is ideal for prioritizing tasks, as we get the three-time dimensions each organization constantly moves in between: Now (present tasks), Next (upcoming, immediate tasks), and Later (planned tasks, either mid-term or long-term).

Tasks must be strictly linked to the product’s vision and serve a quantifiable business objective. Some software solutions like Jira offer native functions to create this kind of roadmap. If you prefer to count on a visually-appealing solution, you can check the Now Next Later slides for PowerPoint. 

Opportunity Roadmap

Sales departments use an Opportunity Roadmap as a  tool to align future initiatives with problems their potential customers currently experience. It serves as a backlog of ideas that help build feature roadmaps, giving enough time to test and experiment with results before defining them as features to be added to the product.

Customer feedback, market research , business goals, insights from I&D teams, etc., feed the information to build an opportunity roadmap. 

Capacity Roadmap

It has multiple aspects similar to the release roadmap. Still, it helps departments to communicate by acknowledging when the right resources for each stage will be available and how much time they consume per task. They are critical for management and leadership to acknowledge if production resources are properly allocated per task and if budget adjustments ought to be made.

How to build a Product Roadmap

In this section, we will explain how to create a product roadmap. Let’s get started by analyzing which content to include in a product roadmap and then we present a 4-step process to create your product roadmap.

The first step you have to take on how to build a product roadmap is to define its type, as content requirements are different from each other. A technology roadmap will list the number of technology-related tasks the development team must complete and by which timeframe, as well as indicate to which area they belong (infrastructure, UX/UI, mobile app, web, etc.) 

It is critical to trim the information to only list the key points that make the document understandable at first glance. Overindulging in information results in dense documents that look intimidating to read or take an immense amount of time to update. Both outcomes are failures in product roadmap design.

Step 1 – Tailor the product strategy

Acknowledging the strategy goal and initiatives for the product development is the starting point of any product roadmap. Stakeholders must understand the “why” behind a product and align decisions to support that strategy course. This can also be reinforced if your product strategy gears around your potential/actual customers, their needs, and your market strategy. All those elements should be informed in your product roadmap.

Step 2 – Organizing ideas

As previously mentioned, the influx of ideas retrieved from customers’ insights plays a key role in a product’s success. Internal teams must approach ideas from a multi-disciplinary view and sort them according to how they shall serve the product regarding scalability, performance, brand growth, etc.

How do we then prioritize ideas? It is undoubtedly a problem, especially if two different departments (i.e., development and sales) have contrasting views about features or conflicts in terms of technology. Sort out this brainstorming process by scoring these ideas based on the KPIs that back up your product strategy. You can represent this process by using bar charts or percentages and culling them according to this criterion:

• Pending Review
• Already Implemented
• Future Iteration

Step 3 – Listing Features and Requirements

Organizations can use a feature product roadmap to align their efforts and proceed to develop new features by their priority level. An ideal classification would be:

• Key Feature
• Marketplace

Then, we can cross-reference the features with the technology roadmap and the opportunities roadmap. This three-tier process helps teams pinpoint which features are critical for the product performance and which are merely design-based decisions that won’t result in losing customers or exposing sensitive data.

After the features are sorted by category and priority, product development teams must update their technology roadmap to meet the deadlines for introducing new features.

Step 4 – Work with releases

We don’t have to associate the term “release” with a fully-completed product. Much like what happens in software development, with beta versions being released for users to test new functionalities, your product can have a similar process that also drives flow into development.

These release dates must be realistic, with backup plans that don’t compromise the release of another feature (to avoid triggering a chain reaction that hinders the final release date). Be sure to cross-reference these release dates with the capacity roadmap, so you have an overview of when your resources can meet the estimated deadlines. 

Addressing the impact of technical debt is one of the critical responsibilities of the product manager. This accumulation of work is natural in product development. Still, it is not a direct consequence of taking shortcuts – sometimes deadlines must be met, and product developers must secure functionality with short-term solutions. 

Our recommendation is to work with a factor of safety for milestones, which implies giving an extra margin of time that can help fix the low-effort technical debt. At the same time, you can list a technical debt swim lane in your product roadmaps, identifying the individual technical debts by area or relating them with an internal code that references the features roadmap. 

This technical debt roadmap must be placed inside the technological roadmap, which is relevant to the product developers. Ideally, teams should review technical debt after sprints to avoid delaying tasks when the project reaches its final stages. Such practice helps teams to address the importance of efficiency in workflows.

Defining which tasks should take priority or become part of a critical path is challenging if we’re not in touch with the product’s vision. For this reason, we invite you to follow these suggestions to speed up the process and know when a task should be prioritized over others.

User’s insights

Working with user feedback is a way in which product managers can locate what’s strictly required to improve for a better UX performance. For example, if an application crashes when the user tries to access a specific function, that situation doesn’t appear in the testing environment. It is a top priority for the development team to go over that problem.

Users can also suggest features they would like to see in future updates. Still, we can learn much about consumer behavior by implementing tools like website heatmaps .

Respecting the critical path

There is a compendium of co-dependent functions to ensure our product’s functionality. That’s known as the Critical Path , and we can speak in terms of a general critical path or a function-dependent critical path (meaning the items required to make a feature work). If improving or troubleshooting some of those features is a pending task, be sure to prioritize this kind of work over adding new functions.

Value vs. Complexity

We don’t have to assume that all critical tasks bear the same complexity level. In the same line of thought, not all complex tasks bring product value, but in some cases, complex tasks are required to ensure the functionality of our product.

To preserve a non-biased approach to this dilemma, we can create a 2×2 matrix in which we can organize pending tasks according to this criterion:

• Tasks that bring value and have low complexity.
• Tasks that bring value and have high complexity.
• Tasks that do not bring value and have low complexity.
• Tasks that do not bring value and have high complexity.

Start with the tasks that bring value and have low complexity, followed by the ones that meet the no-value/low complexity criteria. Why? Because it is a good way to keep technical debt at bay. If a task that brings value and has high complexity is also part of the critical path, then that said task should be the top priority. For the tasks that don’t bring value and have high complexity, organize them according to the closest value reference they may bring; otherwise, ditch them altogether or opt for value-worth alternatives.

Scoring model

This approach works similarly to the 2nd step on how to build a roadmap. Your team should implement a scoring model by which stakeholders assign a score to each task by category, cross-referenced with their expected business value. Variables such as complexity, implementation costs, risks, and operational costs must be considered; then, you can rank tasks by that scoring model.

The main advantage of using a system like this is that you give voice to your team members rather than blindly assigning tasks without considering their insights.

Gathering ideas from an Opportunity Roadmap

After all vital tasks were prioritized, it is worth checking what our Opportunity Roadmap may bring in terms of innovation. Remember, this tool is crafted after I&D research and market research, among other actors.

Quality ideas may be neglected as other tasks take higher priority in the task queue. Give your team 10 extra minutes to discuss potential ideas to extract from the opportunity roadmap, then classify the approved ideas using another of the methods discussed in this guide.

We can name countless KPIs or OKRs for product management , but the reality is you need to ask yourself these questions to define which metrics of success your project requires.

Which metrics are compatible with my product

E-Commerce products have their own set of metrics, such as impressions, CTR, bounce rate, etc. These metrics are by no means applicable to the manufacturing industry, where OEE, throughput rate, capacity utilization, and many others are the values we ought to track for an efficient product development process. 

Which are the stakeholders for the metrics I track

Depending on the audience of the product roadmap, you need to tailor the metrics to present to show improvement from the last iteration or signal potential production problems. For the leadership level, production costs, time spent per product, market value, etc., can be metrics that guide decisions or impact release dates. On the other hand, the development team will focus on metrics relevant to the technical area, as it is the method by which they benchmark the team’s performance.

Listing multiple products on a single product roadmap is commonly done by the leadership level. It gives us an instant overview of parallel production, particularly emphasizing teams’ performance. It is, however, a challenge on its own due to these potential hazards:

• If you work with multiple products, the detail to showcase per product is limited. You cannot compact information and expect the same level of understanding as with individual product roadmaps.
• Updating is a complex task for product managers, and it can lead to delays or overlapping content.
• If you present multiple products, the leadership can have different views on your prioritization system, inducing delays on individual projects to speed up other flagship products for the company. 

To create a quality multi-item product roadmap, please follow these steps.

Step 1 – Define the goals for the roadmap

Place yourself in the shoes of the audience. Which items will pique their interest? What is it that they intend to learn from the roadmap? Then, look to align the goals of each product to the overall objective to present: innovation results, performance improvement, technical problems, etc.

Bear in mind the organization’s vision and work your way to make each product highlight how they fit into it. You can also hire a product management consulting firm that can help you plan and create a multi-product roadmap.

Step 2 – Select the products to list in the roadmap

The placement of each product in the roadmap document is not a random sorting. They should be listed according to their priority level in alignment with the company’s goals. If two products share the same priority tier, put first the one with a more completion rate or a shorter timespan for its development, then list down the second option. 

Step 3 – Designing the product roadmap

Work your way to present the document by using a product roadmap template . As a tool, it simplifies the design-related options and gives you a framework by which each product has the same number of goals and key initiatives to showcase. 

It is vital to offer a clear picture of each product’s goals, which are the metrics of success used to determine evolution over time, and the value they deliver to the organization. 

We advise restricting the color palette to no more than 3 contrasting colors, as otherwise, it would distract the interest from the content to design decisions. As a plus, include the resources deployed per project and which are strictly required for each project to continue advancing. It is a good practice to prevent resource reassignment when you expect it the least.

Step 4 – Create cross-references between the general product roadmap and each product roadmap

In some cases, the leadership may lose focus on vital aspects of a product, hence requesting a more “detailed” view. If you were cautious enough, by assigning a code system to each product, you could present the documentation linked to each product professionally. This can mean the individual product roadmap for that project, reports, analyses, etc. 

The first design element you must take into consideration is that product roadmaps can be represented in two formats: timeline or swimlane (similar to a Gantt chart), which are used for time-bound tasks, and cards (their implementation resembles a deck aligned on a board – they are not time dependant).

Work with color as a friend to easily identify tags, categories, statuses, or priorities. Don’t focus on creating beautiful color schemes – sometimes clearly contrasting colors are what the roadmap needs to visualize the information quickly. 

For timeline diagrams, implementing a bar fill helps to instantly visualize an epic or story’s completion percentage. Depending on the software you use, updating these bars can be a nightmare for complex projects, so we recommend using this design technique on low-scale projects that will be updated constantly. From a psychological side, it is a gamification tactic that helps workers feel inspired to keep completing tasks as the bar gets filled.

It is important to understand dependencies on product roadmaps, and much like flowcharts , lines, and arrows are visual aids that help us understand the relationship between tasks. You can use a color scheme to differentiate between critical and common dependencies. As a practice, that helps to prioritize upcoming tasks. Remember to highlight the critical path with a unique color or line weight, especially if the document is shared across departments. 

Tools to build a Product Roadmap

Jira is the option preferred by Agile projects. It provides an easy-to-use user interface with powerful tools such as Kanban boards, reporting templates, DevOps tools, dependency & capacity tracking, etc. 

Timelines are entirely customizable to the user’s preference, not altering the document for all members in the organization, which helps users to feel more comfortable with the method used to understand the information. Another fantastic feature is that we can create tasks from the roadmap view, so there’s transparency across all levels of the organization and accountability. All users can see who is in charge of the task and when it’s expected to be delivered.

We can find integrations for the Adobe suite, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 & legacy versions, Slack, Zendesk, Zoom, Dropbox, etc.

As part of the Microsoft Office (now Microsoft 365) suite, MS Excel offers plenty of tools to create any product roadmap from scratch. The problem lies in one variable: Excel’s lack of a user-friendly approach when managing formulas. 

If your document is to be managed by several users, be cautious about restricting functions that only the product manager should alter and preserve a backup copy to prevent disaster. Documents linked by reference from other documents are susceptible to experiencing bugs because one person mismanaged a data input, creating a trail of errors across all related documents. 

Unlike what happens with PowerPoint, design-based choices in Excel are restricted, so if graphics are a priority for your team, opt for PowerPoint.

If you intend to work with professional product roadmap templates, PowerPoint is the option. Saving time with design decisions is a life-changer. You can tailor the document to your branding style, import tables from Excel, and do many other productivity tasks due to its integration with the Office ecosystem, add-ins, and third-party tools.

We recommend you check our detailed guide on creating a roadmap in PowerPoint and our selection of roadmap PPT templates .

Regarding roadmaps, Microsoft Project is the tool for the task. Although ideally, you can work your way only with MS Project, the usual method business professionals use is a collaboration between Project and PowerPoint: you create the required assets in Project, using all the tools offered to design a product roadmap. You export Microsoft Project files into PowerPoint to give the design aesthetic to your presentation or report.

An important feature to highlight is that you can alter the information inside PowerPoint itself or in the original Project file, then update the imported data in PowerPoint.

Google Slides is the free alternative to creating a product roadmap in PowerPoint. You can work with product roadmap templates for Google Slides – which offer almost the same functionality as PowerPoint ones – or start from scratch. Regarding integrations, you can import data from other Google Slides documents, Google Sheets, or third-party extensions.

All the information is preserved in a cloud-based format, meaning multiple users can access and edit the document in real-time.

Zoho Sprints is preferred when working in Scrum teams as it provides easy in-depth collaboration between parties. You can work with native roadmapping tools, task scheduling & tracking, among other project management tools. The UI is friendly to approach, with a drag-and-drop system that helps team members visualize each task.

You can work with the integrations provided for Microsoft 365, Google Drive, Zapier, Zendesk, and more. 

Microsoft Planner is a web-based application offered by Microsoft in their Microsoft 365 subscription plan. This project planning application is also compatible with Android and iOS, but its versatile use allows business professionals to speed up processes. You can run your product management meeting in Microsoft Teams, bring up tasks from Microsoft Planner, or even create them ireal-timeme. Such tasks are then available for all members across the organization.

This Kanban solution allows you to export data directly into applications like MS Excel or PowerBI. You can visualize your team’s progress on each task or initiative; therefore, it is an ideal application to align your team’s effort without requiring extra expensive software solutions.

After defining your goals, selecting your tools, and designing your product roadmap presentation, it is time to deliver it to an audience. Here are some insights from our expertise on how to make a successful product roadmap presentation. We also invite you to check this video that summarizes the process of creating a roadmap presentation.

Consider the context

You need to be mindful of where you are presenting your roadmap and the stakeholders involved in the meeting. Your approach has to be crystal-clear about your expectations from the meeting, the precision with which you showcase the information, and how to command instructions from your team at the end of the meeting.

Technical groups expect proof-based results from what you consider progress or a delay and why they should work on a new feature instead of prioritizing another. In turn, the marketing team doesn’t want to know the technical reasons why a feature cannot be implemented if they need it as a key strategic element in their sales propaganda. They will understand monetary/capacity-related reasons but lose themselves in lengthy technical jargon.

Consider the commitments you made

This is related to keeping your product roadmap as realistic as possible. The document is shared across different levels of your organization, with them using the information to fit the needs of their working area. For example, you cannot list a feature you know is impossible to deliver on the expected date or, worse, impossible to build. Why? Because different departments may be reaching out to potential buyers or investors promoting such features, to find out later it was a ruse. 

Keep a backlog of the interactions you made with all stakeholders involved. Then, check the changes made in the process and see how they align with your prior commitments. If you face breaking a previously-accorded commitment, gather fact-based information to expose the case as clearly as possible, offering actionable alternatives as compensation. In this regard, keeping product roadmap documents updated is vital to prevent last-minute surprises during product roadmap presentations.

Acknowledge the interests of different stakeholders

Product roadmap presentations are not an event that happens in one instance only; they are ongoing meetings in which you have to discuss the advancement of your project. But what if said progress may be controversial for some parts?

Planning stakeholder interviews at the initial stages of the product roadmap creation serves to comprehend those interests and build trust. It can bring insights into which modifications to the project may suit a group of stakeholders and how to prepare your arguments to defend the project when positions don’t align. 

Stick to a presentation agenda

Product roadmap presentations can turn into nightmare-length events if you don’t lay out the objectives of the meeting on the first slide. You need to consider the required time to introduce the milestones completed before the meeting, your observations regarding the process flow, what could be improved, and your expectations for the upcoming meeting, plus give extra time for a Q&A session.

Depending on the audience for your presentation, you can repurpose the agenda slide for presentations with different teams. During the Q&A session, practice active listening, and note down or record (if allowed) the comments made by stakeholders. That information can be used as a reference for new action courses.

Deliver a distributable

It is a good practice to allow stakeholders to analyze the contents of the product roadmap some minutes prior to the meeting, so they focus on what you have to mention rather than analyzing graphs and charts while you speak. You can work with these formats to distribute the document:

• Physical (printed format)
• Cloud-based (Notion, Google Slides)
• Internal platform access

Just as important as defining priorities and building a roadmap, updating that product roadmap is one of the core responsibilities of product managers. 

The product roadmap update ratio depends on how often meetings are hosted. Once a month is a good practice, but complex, large-scale projects can work with bi-monthly or quarterly revisions. 

What should you include in a Product Roadmap update

There are 4 critical points to address in a product roadmap update:

• Customer/Team Feedback: Grab insights from internal and external resources to your project for an accurate picture of where the project stands. This information should feed the technology and features roadmap with changes to be made.
• Technical Debt: Don’t wait until the last minute to address technical debt. During your product roadmap revision, give enough time to each department to report their technical debt, then devise a plan for how you can reduce it during the next sprint.
• Progress : It is time to see the full picture, so compare your progress metrics to the success metrics you initially established. Discuss with your team the highlights and how to fix whatever issue affected optimal performance or progress rate. 
• Changes backlog : Since you are updating the roadmap, it would be wise to keep a backlog of all the important decisions that led to the roadmap update and the reasons behind them. Although a bit tedious, this practice can save an insane amount of hours when contrasting opinions put work to a halt. And yes, going back 2 or 3 updates to check why you made a certain decision is a scenario that happens far too often. 

Reasons why your Product Roadmap may fail

#1 – limiting autonomy at the team level.

When the product roadmap deadlines are too restrictive, teams feel they are losing their autonomy and usual workflow to serve the needs of other departments. This harms the company’s culture, the innovation potential and builds resentment between coworkers as some teams may feel others have more time to perform the required tasks. 

The best approach to prevent this problem is to have an open mind about updating the product roadmap due to suggestions from different teams and having useful feedback after each sprint is completed. Agile methodologies focus on constant improvement, not a fixed mindset, which your team should embrace as a core value.

#2 – Losing perspective of your customers

How often do we delay deadlines because we feel the current project stage is not “perfect” or that another iteration may solve extra, unsolicited problems? Product developers often fall prey to focusing too much on individual features rather than seeing the full picture. Perhaps your customer doesn’t care if your application’s loading time is reduced by 2.4 seconds, but they shall certainly care if they cannot go through the checkout stage.

First, base your working methodology on fulfilling epics, not picking random stories because “they look important.” Keep an eye on the hierarchy of processes, then opt between tasks of the same level by priority. Measure your progress by contrasting the performance of this new iteration with the feedback received by your customers. Fix crucial items that don’t allow a quality user experience, then move on to the accessory items.

#3 – Working with a faulty tech stack/team

If your product management workflow still depends on pen & paper, it’s time to address whether your organization’s processes are outdated. Archaic work methodologies consume vital time for the product development cycle and demand a higher budget. Instead, put the investment into automating tasks and how to enhance existing processes.

Acquiring new tools for crafting a product roadmap is only one step on the ladder. Your personnel has to master a variety of functions in those tools to perform their daily tasks. They need to work on communication techniques that drive value, not attend meetings to fulfill a task. Using the “constant improvement” mindset, set time aside for your team to attend continuing education programs, which can be hosted in-company, so the content aligns with your organization’s needs.  

#4 – Messy or difficult-to-understand information

Suppose the product roadmap goes in the “too detailed” direction; the information may seem misleading since the strategy is cluttered with unnecessary pieces of information for the target audience they have. For example, providing a technology roadmap to the sales team, filled with technical jargon, when they need a clear external product roadmap to show potential customers.

Focus on two core items: the strategy and the target audience for the roadmap view. 

In this section, we will list what we consider the best PPT templates to use in product roadmap presentations.

1. Agile Product Release PowerPoint Roadmap Template

This editable product release template can be used to help to visualize deadlines and requirements for agile product release sprints. In a two-background format, this roadmap template signals stages in contrasting color schemes, allowing us to allocate three different releases per slide. Each stage is subdivided into segments containing the sprints.

Presenters can alter the length of each segment according to their needs and list brief information in the provided placeholder text area.

Use This Template

2. Now Next Later Slide Template for PowerPoint

If you are looking for a visual method for how to sort tasks according to priority, then this template can be the answer to implementing a Now Next Later product roadmap into your project. With catchy 3D graphics, this product roadmap presentation template brings multiple formats to list tasks and then sort them according to the period in which they will take action.

This tactic PowerPoint diagram helps to break down different stages of a product development life cycle and allocate tasks conveniently.

3. Swimlane Timeline Templates

The swimlane model is a graphic method in which we can showcase parallel processes and get an instant overview of their progression rate. This product roadmap PPT template helps to communicate the status of a project in different dimensions (i.e., marketing, UX, infrastructure, etc.), as well as to create a multi-product product roadmap presentation due to its easy-to-understand timeline format.

This presentation file contains 4 editable phases of a project, contrasted with a 5-Quarter timeline, with an indication mark for the current presentation date. Use this high-level product roadmap tool to provide detailed information on your project’s status.

4. Product Roadmap Gantt Chart Template

There are multiple methods to approach the design of a product roadmap, and using the Gantt Chart format is a classic. This Gantt Chart template offers a first slide with a layout organized around a timeline. That timeline template can be interpreted as the time required for product development and is contrasted with the 4-Quarter time organization. Presenters can add milestones by editing the dots included in the timeline and listing information in the text placeholder areas.

The second slide is a multi-project approach with individual timelines. To preserve a decluttered design, the text placeholder areas do not contain boxes but rather fully editable one-line legends. Its grayscale color scheme makes it adaptable to any corporate presentation file.

5. Product Roadmap Cards PowerPoint Template

Not all product roadmap presentations have to follow the timeline format. Using a card layout for feature product roadmaps usually helps visualize more information or easily sort out tasks by category.

Each card on this PowerPoint template lists a title placeholder area, subtitle, brief description, and two optional button-format text sections, in which presenters can include relevant information such as internal codes for the parent initiative or epic and category. The colors used in the card titles can serve as a visual cue to reference either category or initiatives.

6. Folded Product Roadmap Timeline Template

Using a 3D product roadmap presentation template is a great method to catch the interest of stakeholders at the initial product development meetings. With a folded 3D format, this product roadmap slide can represent the “Now Next Later” metaphor, visualizing horizons from the past, present, immediate future, and long-term vision.

7. Free Roadmap Slides for PowerPoint

If you desire to introduce the roadmap metaphor as visually clear as possible, then this free roadmap PowerPoint template should participate in your presentations.

Fully editable placeholder text areas. We list a selection of road signs to explain detours in your plan or how to face opposing paths.

8. 7 Arrows Milestones PowerPoint Roadmap Template

Working with arrow diagrams is an effective solution to indicate the path a project is taking from inception to its release. With the 7 Arrows Milestone template for PowerPoint, you can introduce the different phases of your product development with professionally-designed PowerPoint shapes.

The main slide contains the full path, which is later highlighted per slide to discuss each of the seven phases the project will transit.

9. 4 Steps Technology Roadmap PowerPoint Template

For those seeking a classic corporate aesthetic, this technology roadmap template is ideal for any product development presentation. The bottom part features a placeholder text area to indicate the strategy to which this technology roadmap serves. Next, we have an arrow diagram to list the different stages the roadmap has to transit, with a blue to green gradient in the direction of completion. Finally, we have the top section where we can introduce up to 4 different technologies for this product roadmap.

10. Curved Roadmap with Poles Milestones PowerPoint Timeline

We complete this list with a visual metaphor template of a roadmap, listing a selection of milestones across a path. The yearly indication can serve to bring a historical background on how the ideas that led to the product development took shape and which related initiatives can be referenced.

Product roadmaps are vital for product development teams to track progress and align the organization’s vision across short-term and long-term goals on each project. Their usage is the first step in crafting a product strategy as they help transparently convey information, outlining the vision, direction, and priorities for a specific period.

This product management tool isn’t restricted to the usage of new products; as we have seen, it is an essential tool for outlining product upgrades or revisions. Their value in agile practices is widely known, so we must acknowledge their potential for daily work and strive for excellence in multi-disciplinary team collaborations.

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20+ product roadmap templates and examples

Last updated: March 2024

Product roadmaps are multipurpose visual tools. Every product manager needs one — several, actually. A strategic roadmap can reveal a compelling story about your product goals. A release roadmap highlights the timing of when you will deliver new functionality for customers. And a features roadmap can align your agile development team on timing and priorities. Together, these different roadmaps paint a complete picture of your product plans.

But where to start? What is the best approach for your product development team ? Some teams can get by with building and managing product roadmaps in static spreadsheets or presentations. (And we have plenty of those that you can download for free from this guide.)

Most teams quickly tire of playing version control whack-a-mole. It is hard to showcase progress when you are worried about outdated roadmaps floating around. All that value you plan to deliver to users and to the business gets overshadowed when an executive presents a now-obsolete roadmap to stakeholders.

Many organizations experience transformative gains by choosing a robust roadmapping tool like Aha! Roadmaps . It includes everything you need to build breakthrough products — from setting strategy to creating product plans and measuring value. But sometimes, you will want to sketch out ideas that you can quickly visualize on a timeline. For this, we also offer lightweight whiteboard templates .

Build a roadmap on a whiteboard — try it now .

Start using this template now

As your products and processes evolve, you may be ready for more robust and flexible roadmaps that are automatically updated and connected to your daily work. For example, the roadmap below — created in Aha! Roadmaps — provides a snapshot of strategic initiatives that can be drilled into to reveal the associated work items.

Try Aha! software for free

Not sure where to start with roadmapping? This guide includes some practical guidance, examples to inspire, and product roadmap templates you can start using right now. (There is also an FAQ about product roadmaps at the very end for quick answers.)

Guidance and product roadmap examples:

Roadmap components

How to build a product roadmap

Roadmap examples

Free product roadmap templates:

Starter product roadmap templates

Strategy roadmap templates — including templates for goals and initiatives

Portfolio roadmap templates

Release roadmap templates, epics roadmap templates, feature roadmap templates.

Agile product roadmap templates — including templates for scrum, kanban, and SAFe®

Strategy roadmap video

Portfolio roadmap video, features roadmap video, components of a product roadmap.

Time and work. Distill a product roadmap down to its essence and those are the two main components that you will find. There will be some sense of timing, whether it is detailed down to specific dates or generalized to categories such as “now, next, later.” And there will be some representation of work, whether those are comprehensive releases filled with features or basic themes the product development team will pursue.

A product roadmap should answer:

Why are we doing this?

When are we doing this?

What exactly are we doing?

The products you build today represent the future of the business and a meaningful investment from the organization. Strategy is the underpinning of a successful roadmap. The items you choose to add to your product roadmap should be validated against your product goals and initiatives , rolling up to overall business strategy.

Some of the components you can expect to see on a product roadmap include:

Goals: Measurable, time-bound objectives with clearly defined success metrics

Initiatives: High-level efforts or big themes of work that need to be completed to achieve goals

Release: Delivery of a new customer experience

Features: New or improved functionality that delivers value to users

Epics: Large bodies of work that describes major areas of functionality, delivered incrementally across many releases

User stories: Functionality described from an end-user perspective — including what the user wants to do and why

Timeline: Time scale can range from days and weeks to months, quarters, and sometimes even years

Status: Indicators that represent progress and risks

Dependencies: Interrelated work that could impact progress

Milestones: Significant points in development

Product teams use a roadmap as a vehicle for communication — helping leadership and the broader cross-functional team rally around upcoming product plans. The type of roadmap you choose to build should be based on your intended viewers. Different types of roadmaps will help highlight different elements of your product plans. But before we get into specific examples of product roadmaps, let’s examine the five basic steps to building one.

Define strategy

Zero in on the "why" behind your product, beginning with a strong product vision . Vision and strategy inform everything you include on your product roadmap.

Manage ideas

Gather input from partners, customer-facing internal teams, and of course, customers. Organize and prioritize the feedback — this will help you make trade-off decisions about what to put on your roadmap.

Define features and requirements

Keeping your strategy in mind, examine your prioritized ideas. Begin sketching out product plans and new functionalities with your team. Then, promote the product features you want to deliver to your roadmap — detailing requirements, assignees, and deadlines.

Organize releases

Once features are outlined, think through your delivery timeline with releases . Many teams use a Gantt chart to show phases, milestones, and associated dependencies.

Choose the right view

You can visualize your timeline in several different ways depending on your audience. Roadmapping software allows you to toggle between views, so you can show the most relevant information. Read more on this below.

As a purpose-built roadmapping software company, it is no surprise that we have written extensively on this topic. Use the resources below to dig into building a product roadmap.

What is a roadmap? A complete guide to roadmapping

Introduction to product roadmaps

Roadmap best practices: How to build a brilliant roadmap

Product roadmap FAQs

• Product roadmap examples

How to choose a product roadmap tool?

How to build a roadmap for a new product?

Product teams rely on different types of product roadmaps to present information in varying levels of detail. What you choose to show depends on your audience and the information you want to communicate.

We have gathered a number of examples and templates below. Many of these can be found in Aha! software . And we have also included free downloads for product teams that want to try out various formats before committing to a tool.

Example product strategy roadmap

A strategy roadmap visualizes progress against product goals, along with the initiatives the team will pursue to achieve those goals. You may choose to roll product goals up to higher-level business goals to show exactly how the product development team’s work will support the organization’s objectives. The example below comes from Aha! Roadmaps .

Example product innovation roadmap

A product innovation roadmap focuses on how a company will achieve an innovation strategy. The example below, included in Aha! Roadmaps , features strategic goals, initiatives, and critical areas of investment.

Example agile product roadmap

An agile product roadmap shows major themes of work on a loose timeline. It is common to see an agile roadmap with date ranges only — usually spanning the length of a quarter or two. The Aha! Roadmaps example below shows releases and epics.

You will need to share your product plans with a variety of stakeholders — from executives to customers to partners — at various stages throughout the product development process . With these audiences, you want to share just enough information. Diving into the details of exact timing or detailed functionality will distract from your message. These starter roadmap templates below are best suited for documenting and sharing very high-level information.

First up is our Now, Next, Later roadmap template in Aha! software. This one is built on a whiteboard so is ideal for quick, early-stage planning.

Below it you will find two additional starter roadmaps that can be downloaded as PowerPoint files.

Start using this template now

Strategy roadmap templates

Your product strategy defines what you want to achieve (your goals) and how you plan to get there (your initiatives). Visualize both of these elements with the help of a strategic roadmap — giving you a big-picture view of your path to product success.

The first template below is a strategic roadmap template built on a whiteboard in Aha! software. Below it you will find goal and initiative roadmaps for download.

Goals roadmap templates

Rally your team around your overarching objectives and provide context for what needs to be accomplished and when. The roadmap templates below give you two different ways to visualize your goals. The first template shows a timeline for completing individual goals. The second goals roadmap template shows how releases for a portfolio of products contribute to your goals over time.

Initiatives roadmap templates

Initiatives represent the high-level efforts needed to achieve your goals. Choose an initiatives roadmap to provide progress updates to leadership and other stakeholders. The first template shows a timeline for completing different initiatives and the goals they support. The next one goes a level deeper and shows how specific product releases across your portfolio contribute to business initiatives.

If you manage multiple products, you need a roadmap that showcases your entire portfolio and helps internal teams understand how their plans relate to each other. This first portfolio roadmap template is available for whiteboards in Aha! software — helping you get the team aligned on portfolio strategy with a simple view before turning it into a more structured plan.

The downloadable Excel roadmap below it shows release timelines and date markers for each product within a portfolio. You can also expand swimlanes and include initiatives for each product. And below that, the PowerPoint portfolio roadmap template uses simple swimlanes to show relevant releases for multiple products.

The first release roadmap template included in this section is available as a whiteboard template in Aha! software. Use it to visualize the dates, deliverables, and dependencies of your release plans, then move detailed plans into a Gantt chart in Aha! Roadmaps — so everyone on the team can track how work progresses.

Below the whiteboard option, you will find an Excel template you can use to highlight phases and tasks within your release plan. And the PowerPoint below it shows upcoming releases, top features, and planned delivery dates.

The epics roadmap templates below offer different ways to visualize your epics over time. You can customize the timelines to fit your needs, use markers to indicate releases or milestones, and change colors to indicate groupings or statuses. The first is an epics roadmap whiteboard template in Aha! software — the others are downloadable for Excel and PowerPoint.

Feature roadmaps are detailed. This type of roadmap is all about near-term product plans — perfect for keeping the internal team on track. The first one is — you guessed it — a feature roadmap whiteboard template in Aha! software. The other two can be downloaded for Excel and PowerPoint.

Agile product roadmap templates

Agile product teams often use elements like themes, user stories, and tasks to structure work. This structure can carry over to your agile roadmap.

The template below spotlights epics — with swimlanes to show how the work aligns with strategic themes. If you do not subscribe to a specific methodology, this is a good agile roadmap template to begin with.

Scrum product roadmap template

This scrum roadmap template is designed for engineering teams that follow scrum methodology . It shows where specific user stories fit within upcoming sprints. This simple roadmap is helpful for sharing development progress updates and communicating when new functionality will be demoed for stakeholders.

Kanban product roadmap templates

If your team follows kanban methodology , the roadmap templates below will look familiar — they resemble kanban boards . The first is a kanban board template on an Aha! whiteboard and the second is a PowerPoint download. Use either when you need to set expectations for internal and external stakeholders without committing to a specific time frame.

SAFe® product roadmap template

This Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) roadmap template will help you visualize your program increment (PI) milestones and objectives over a six-month time frame. A SAFe® roadmap offers visibility into current PI deliverables and forecasted PIs. It also helps to ensure that near-term plans align with overall business priorities before PIs are committed.

If you would rather start PI planning on a whiteboard, we offer a collection of PI planning whiteboard templates.

Product roadmap videos

Thus far, the templates in this guide are available as whiteboard templates in Aha! software or as static files. For detailed planning, it is more effective to build a dynamic roadmap within Aha! Roadmaps . That way, you can connect everything on your roadmap to real Aha! records and get to work. The videos below show you how.

Editor's note: Although these videos show core functionality within Aha! software, some of the interface might be out of date. View our knowledge base for the most updated insights into Aha! software.

Highlight the goals and initiatives that the team will pursue.

Show planned releases across multiple products.

Communicate the timeline and details of new product functionality.

FAQs about product roadmaps

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a visualization of your product plans — from your strategic goals and initiatives down to individual product features. Product roadmaps indicate where your product is headed, your timeline, and the work required to get there.

Product managers use product roadmaps to communicate progress and priorities. Roadmaps are essential visual tools in presentations to internal teams or external stakeholders, like partners or customers. A solid product roadmap also helps product teams assess how new requests for functionality align with the product's strategic direction and work that is already planned.

If you are just getting started, our introductory product roadmap guides offer a good foundation:

What elements are included on a product roadmap?

A roadmap typically includes the following components :

Product goals

Strategic initiatives

Key releases

Features or feature sets (epics)

Overall timeline

Visual elements (e.g., colors and swimlanes)

What are swimlanes on a product roadmap?

Swimlanes on a product roadmap are visual representations of different groups of data. For example, you might use swimlanes to display all of the features that make up a release.

How often should you update your product roadmap?

Product roadmaps are dynamic. As your plans change, so should your roadmap. How often you update your roadmap is up to you — but it is important that your product roadmap reflects current goals and progress. This keeps the team aligned on priorities and promotes transparent communication. The most efficient way to do this is by using purpose-built software that automatically integrates strategic planning with roadmapping. That way you can be sure your product plans are always up to date.

With the right tool, roadmapping becomes an art — helping everyone get excited and aligned on upcoming product plans and milestones. Together, you can create a shared understanding of how you will reach your product goals. When you do, you make the team and the product stronger.

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Product roadmap template

Use this template to showcase how planned work aligns with strategy.

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Product Roadmap Presentation Template

Show colleagues, stakeholders, and clients the direction of your product development with the Product Roadmap Presentation Template.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Product Roadmap Presentation Template 

The Product Roadmap Presentation Template outlines the direction of your product development. Use a product presentation template to show what you want to create, why you think your customers will value it, and how it aligns with your company's strategy. 

What is a product roadmap presentation? 

A product roadmap presentation is your opportunity to share product plans with your internal and external stakeholders. It presents the key information from your product roadmap , explaining how new products and product features align with business objectives and provide customer value. 

At the end of the presentation, product managers will have a chance to answer questions about product direction. It's a collaborative process, aligning your team and getting everyone on the same page. 

What should you include in a product roadmap presentation? 

Every product roadmap presentation is different. However, there are some common topics that crop up in most presentations:

An introduction and agenda

Tell your audience what the presentation is about and what it’ll involve. That way, they know what to expect and how long it’ll last. 

Your purpose and product vision

Show your audience the reasoning behind the new product (or new features) to give them some context. For example, customer feedback shows that buyers are looking for an additional product feature. That way, your audience can see the rationale behind your product strategy. 

The product’s target audience

Be clear about who you’re trying to target with your new product. It could be your existing audience, or you might want to reach a new audience in a different market.

Your product roadmap

Show your audience what you’ve outlined in your product roadmap, but keep it top-level. They don’t need to know all the ins and outs, so make sure you only outline the key information. For example, you can showcase the anticipated timeline but don't go into detail about each deliverable along the way. 

Any feedback and questions

At the end of the presentation, provide your audience with the opportunity to ask questions. This will be your opportunity to have a discussion with them and get their feedback. 

When should you deliver a product roadmap presentation?

There are a few situations where you might need to deliver a roadmap presentation. Here are a few of the most common: 

To get approval from business leaders

Before you can make any changes or launch new products, you need approval from management. Delivering a product roadmap presentation is a good place to start. Why? Because it shows them everything they need to know about the new product. They’ll see how your product themes feed into the company-wide strategy, how it’ll offer customers a better product, and whether it’s a viable product. 

To create a release plan

Creating a product roadmap presentation gives customers and business partners an idea of what to expect in the future. Think of Apple as an example. They don’t have specific release dates for their products, but the business provides regular updates of what improvements and changes they plan to make in the future. It keeps everyone in the loop and builds anticipation. 

To get your team on the same page

A product roadmap presentation is a perfect opportunity to get your product team (and anyone else involved in the product roadmap) on the same page. From the get-go, everyone has the same expectations and is fully aligned with the goals. 

How do you create a product roadmap presentation with Miro?

Miro is the perfect online presentation creator to quickly build a presentation. The Product Roadmap Presentation Template is ideal for collaborative teams. It’s intuitive, easy-to-use, customizable, and distributed teams can access it from anywhere. To get started, select this free template and follow these steps. 

Step 1: Add your roadmap to the template

Start by adding the key pieces of information from your roadmap into the template (it’s easy to add files if you want to upload images from the roadmap). Try not to overload the presentation with details from the roadmap. You only need to provide a high-level view of the crucial pieces of information, such as the timeline, budgets, and customer insights. 

Step 2: Customize the presentation template

With the key information in place, you can visualize where everything else will sit in the template. With Miro’s template, you’ll have access to our pre-made slides. They’re fully customizable, so you can move things around to suit your specific presentation. You can also add or remove slides, edit the placeholder content, and add your own company branding. 

Step 3: Add supporting information and context

Now you can start to flesh out the presentation. You’ll add your introduction and agenda, followed by the main purpose. Then, you can outline who your target audience is and add your market research to provide context. If you have data and customer insights to share, you can add shapes , charts , and link internally and externally to any relevant reports. 

Step 4: Get feedback from colleagues

When the template is complete, share the presentation with colleagues to get feedback and make any necessary changes. Using Miro’s digital workspace, it’s easy for teams to collaborate throughout this process — even if they’re working remotely. 

Step 5: Deliver the presentation

Select presentation mode to deliver the presentation in full screen. Use the arrow buttons or keys to move the presentation along (only the slides in the frames you selected will be visible).

How long should a product roadmap presentation be?

It varies depending on how many products and features you need to discuss. Around 1–2 hours is ideal and allows plenty of time for brainstorming at the end.

What’s included in this Product Roadmap Presentation Template?

In this template, you’ll get access to Miro’s ready-made presentation slides. Each slide in this template is a frame with placeholder text. Simply edit the content in the slides, add or remove new slides, and change their order to create your ideal presentation.

Get started with this template right now.

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How to ace your roadmap presentation

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Roadmapping doesn’t end once you’ve built your roadmap. The purpose of your roadmap is to visualize a transparent plan across your organization .

To ensure your roadmap is effective (and actually, you know, executed), you’ll need to align each team in a roadmap presentation.

Basically, your roadmap is just words on a page (or screen or whiteboard or wall) until it’s been validated in some form of roadmap presentation or meeting. During a well-executed roadmap presentation, you have the chance to show stakeholders that you understand their motivations — and they have a chance to publicly affirm their alignment. But if your presentation flops, so might your product or marketing strategy.

Wanna learn about the entire roadmapping process from beginning to end? Check out our roadmap guide here to learn the definition, why roadmaps are important and how you can use them to ✨shine in front of your decision-makers

What is a roadmap presentation.

The most important point to remember before your roadmap presentation: this is not the place to get buy-in for your plans. That might seem contradictory. (After all, we just described roadmap presentations as an opportunity for stakeholders to “publicly affirm their alignment.”) But it should be just that: an affirmation of alignment that was already established prior to the meeting.

(If you’re butting heads over the alignment process itself, we’ve written about how to get roadmap buy-in from each department in our product roadmapping guide. And, more specifically, how to get buy-in from executives .)

A roadmap presentation is far more than the words you actually say. Think of it as an alignment exercise whose success depends on what happens before, during and after you take the stage.

This is an essential chance to understand stakeholder motivations and forge consensus before moving forward with your plans.

To get nuts-and-bolts-y, we’ve found that roadmap presentations generally fall into one of two categories:

Short-term updates

Taking place weekly or biweekly, these frequent syncs tend to get in the weeds, covering the particularities of what’s getting built and how that affects other departments. This type of sit-down would be more common on smaller teams. And because these catch-ups happen regularly, formal buy-in before the presentation is not imperative. But the roadmap still needs to be communicated prior to the meeting to avoid any major surprises or backlash.

Long-term updates

For bigger organizations and teams, the roadmap presentation will likely happen monthly, bimonthly or even quarterly. For these conversations, buy-in before the meeting is critical. These meetings can often involve high-stakes projects that rely on massive alignment and dependencies . Show up to your presentation without everyone on board, and you’ll probably leave feeling pretty beat-up.

Before your roadmap presentation: How to prepare

When it comes to roadmap presentations, the pre-game is just as important as the main event. There are three areas you should learn inside-out to ensure a productive meeting:

Know the high-level strategy

Let’s use a product roadmap as an example. You’re going to build feature X, Y and Z — but what’s the big-picture goal those features address? Without being able to speak to the high-level strategy — and the tradeoffs that must be made to prioritize within that strategy — everyone will just start asking for whatever is most advantageous to them. Be able to speak to product vision and company vision — and how your roadmap aligns with both targets.

Check out Roadmunk's free, ready-to-use product roadmap template and make it your own.

Know the stakeholders

We mean actually get to know them: their motivations, their deadlines, their pressures, what’s keeping them up at night. Again, trust is crucial . For example, marketing and sales needs to feel that product decisions are sound — otherwise they might go rogue. This won’t happen overnight. But it’s important to invest the time.

Know the resource constraints

One of the most common (inevitable?) pushbacks you’re going to get is related to time. “Why can’t we move faster?” To counter this complaint, it’s absolutely crucial that you have an inside-out knowledge of your resources at any given time. You must be able to clearly articulate the resources required to execute a given task — and the tradeoffs that will be made if you swap in something else. It can also be useful to discuss historical timelines, reminding the room of how long things have taken in the past.

During your roadmap presentation: What to actually present

There’s no one way to slice your roadmap. So what should you actually show during your roadmap presentation? We can’t tell you exactly how to build a roadmap that suits your particular organization ( that’s where our template library comes in handy ), but we do recommend that you aim to meet at least a few of the following criteria:

1. Flexibility: Does your roadmap distinguish between what’s planned and what’s still TBD?

2. Personalization: Does it address the individual needs of each department and/or stakeholder?

3. Collaboration: Can you iterate on the roadmap during the presentation itself?

4. Clarity + Attractiveness: Does it look good? Is the plan visualized in a clear manner? Don’t underestimate the power of good design .

Below, we’ve included some options for structuring your roadmap for your presentation. With a dedicated roadmapping tool like Roadmunk , you can easily create and present multiple pivots of the same data.

1. Flexibility

It’s helpful to communicate which initiatives are actually in the pipeline, and which are still subject to change. One of our favourite ways to structure a roadmap is to organize items by In Progress , Scheduled and Proposed . If your organization works on a timeline, you can simply colour code the items on your roadmap.

If your organization prefers to avoid timelines, you could also create a Swimlane View with the headers In Progress, Scheduled or Proposed.

Like the way this roadmap looks? It's a Roadmunk template. Check our library of 25+ templates .

We’ve found this roadmap structure very effective for reducing backlash during a roadmap presentation. Stakeholders get a clear and immediate visual indication of which features are actually committed, and which are still being decided. Overall, it means you’re less likely to hear knee-jerk peanut gallery protestations.

2. Personalization

As we mentioned above, it can also be effective to visualize ownership during your roadmap presentation. A great way to do this is to organize your roadmap by department or even by the individual responsible for each task.

The roadmap below includes the same data as the roadmaps above, but we’ve included subheaders indicating individual ownership over each project.

If you really want to get granular with ownership, you could create a Swimlane View roadmap that highlights department , resource or individual owner . This puts the focus on who’s doing what for which department — not the timeline.

3. Collaboration

There’s a reason why the sticky-notes-on-a-wall method is such an enduring way to make a roadmap: it’s easy to change things up on the fly. Although you’d ideally have buy-in for your roadmap before the presentation, your meeting will go much smoother if you are also able to update your roadmap during the conversation.

With a tool like Roadmunk, you can easily add comments or adjust your roadmap directly within the app during the meeting. This makes for a much more dynamic and participatory presentation.

4. Clarity + Attractiveness

The core purpose of your roadmap is to visualize your strategy and make it crystal-clear to everyone in your organization. “Make something pretty!” may sound trite, but you’ll undermine your end-goal if your roadmap is unattractive or unclear.

Start building beautiful + collaborative roadmaps with Roadmunk. Signup for a free trial here.

Obviously, the content of your roadmap is more important than the appearance of your roadmap. But it will be a lot easier to highlight key information — no matter how complicated — if your visualization is easy on the eyes. Also recommended: custom branding .

What pushback should you prep for?

No matter how much you prepare, there are some common points of friction that come up again and again in roadmap meetings. A great way to ace your presentation: prepare for the pushback before it starts pushing. Here are some common questions to expect.

Are you actually going to achieve this timeline?

You’ll most frequently hear this from sales or execs. They want to confirm that your roadmap is realistic so they can plan accordingly. If you have a history of late delivery, be prepared to address why this time will be different. (Then make sure you deliver.)

How can we scope this down?

Just because stakeholders are skeptical that you can hit your deadlines doesn’t mean they don’t want things to go faster. One way to ship features quicker: scope them down. Especially at startups, executives might push the “M” in MSP when they see scope creep getting out of hand. Be prepared to answer why you’ve scoped each feature to its current specs — and be flexible when it’s possible to scope things down.

What’s the value of this roadmap?

Don’t just speak to the qualitative value of each new feature. Be prepared with hard numbers. How will this roadmap help achieve your revenue targets? What specific clients or market segment does it address? You should be able to tie items on your roadmap to specific dollar-sign potential, and articulate value vs. effort.

What are the maintenance costs going to be?

The cost of maintenance is one of the things most commonly neglected on the roadmap — even though it’s one of the most important and resource-draining aspects of any organization. Expect more technically inclined team members to pipe up with maintenance questions, or simply visualize maintenance initiatives directly on your roadmap.

Where are the risks or dependencies?

Sure, the roadmap looks great. But what factors could derail its execution? What risks does each stakeholder need to be aware of, and how will that affect their department’s ability to reach their targets? Also, what steps can stakeholders take to pitch in and mitigate those dangers? The more honest you are about the realities facing your roadmap, the more likely you’ll build trust — and get buy-in for your plan.

What happens after the presentation?

Alignment is a continuous process . It doesn’t just end when your meeting is finished. Make sure you follow up your roadmap presentation with thorough meeting notes and the updated roadmap. Create a concrete space — whether it’s within an email, a shared document, or your roadmap itself — where stakeholders can share feedback.

Reminder! The Number 1 way to fail your roadmap presentation is to not talk to anyone beforehand. Your presentation is all about alignment. Set the tone before your presentation by talking to — and, more importantly listening to — each stakeholder.

With Roadmunk, you can centralize customer feedback, prioritize what to build next and build beautiful customer-driven roadmaps. Signup for a free trial here .

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Design tips to create a roadmap that is boardroom-ready, managing executives in the roadmapping process, you might also like these, try roadmunk for free.

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What is a product roadmap?

Why is a product roadmap important, who is responsible for the product roadmap.

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How Your Roadmap Will Evolve as Your Product Matures

How do you plan what goes on a product roadmap, how to plan security and technical debt on your roadmap, how do you prioritize features for the product roadmap.

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How to Add Multiple Products to Your Roadmap

What is a roadmap in agile, what are the different types of product roadmaps, why is product roadmap software important.

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How to Present Your Roadmap in 5 Steps

What is roadmap execution.

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A product roadmap is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product offering over time. A product roadmap communicates the why and what behind what you’re building. A roadmap is a guiding strategic document as well as a plan for executing the product strategy.

For examples and inspiration on building your first roadmap, browse our library of product roadmap templates .

The product roadmap has several ultimate goals:

• Describe the vision and strategy
• Provide a guiding document for executing the strategy
• Get internal stakeholders in alignment
• Facilitate discussion of options and scenario planning
• Help communicate with external stakeholders, including customers

For more on the basics of a product roadmap, check on this short video.

Ideally, your product roadmap should convey the strategic direction for your product. And it should also tie back to the strategy for the company. Within that framework, of course, is the general order of what you’ll be building.

Clearly articulating the product vision and strategy can make it easier to secure executive buy-in. It also ensures that everyone is working toward a common goal.

Product roadmaps encapsulate how the product strategy becomes a reality. They take many competing priorities and boil them down to what’s most important, leaving shiny objects by the wayside in favor of work that moves the needles stakeholders really care about.

They’re also a source of inspiration, motivation, and shared ownership of the product and its successes. All the work individual contributors do often only make sense within the context of the product roadmap and knowing that plan and what the organization hopes it will bring can get naysayers onboard.

Product roadmaps are one of the few things almost everyone in the organization will be exposed to, as sales pitches, marketing plans, and financials are usually held closer to the vest. For many workers, it’s their only glimpse of where the product and organization are heading and why certain decisions were made. They provide a shared, common understanding of the vision, goals, and objectives for everyone in the company.

Product roadmaps also help organizations avoid chaos from reigning, pet projects from sliding into the implementation queue, and wasting resources on less important tasks. They are the beacon, the focal point, and the guideposts for everyone bringing the product to market.

Product roadmap creation should be a group effort, but the product management team should ultimately be responsible for their creation and maintenance. This combination of collaboration and discrete ownership gets stakeholders onboard while maintaining informational integrity and avoiding a free-for-all atmosphere.

Product management should begin with a clear understanding of both the product’s and the overall organization’s strategic objectives, which comes from the executive team. Then, with the desired outcomes in mind, product management can create the key themes for this portion of the product’s lifecycle.

Roadmaps support outcome-driven planning

Next, it’s time to dive into the backlog and see which items match up with those larger themes before engaging in a prioritization exercise with various internal (and potentially external) stakeholders to see what will have the biggest impact or greatest ROI. Once everything is sorted and ranked, the product team can then start slotting things in, checking in frequently with the implementation team to ensure the prioritized goals and themes of the roadmap are feasible and worth the effort.

As products evolve, they inevitably become more complex. They’re expected to do more, to serve additional cohorts, to integrate with other products and services.

Product roadmaps also go through an evolution of their own. A roadmap for a freshly-minted MVP differs significantly from a mature product on many fronts:

• Horizon: Startups have a much harder time predicting future requirements and opportunities for the products. Therefore their roadmaps probably won’t go too far in the future (or if they do it’s with some very large asterisks). Established products can make firmer longer-term plans. They have a better understanding of their customers and the market.
• Frequency: When you’re young and scrappy, you need to “always be shipping.” More mature products can space out their releases with less urgency.
• Dependencies: Startups can move quickly and break stuff. Mature products have a legacy to worry about, third-party integrations to maintain, and regression issues to contend with.
• Goals: A startup’s goals are very different from an enterprise product. The first is just trying to prove its viability, gain some traction, and grow. The latter will have more nuanced strategic objectives and more diverse targets.

A great roadmap has a tough bouncer working the door. To maintain credibility with stakeholders, the riff-raff needs to be kept at bay while only items deserving of a slot can make the cut. So keep the roadmap clear of any undeserving inclusions by applying a few filters : 

• Does it have actual value to users? If not, then save that space for something that does.
• Is there evidence of that value? Gut feelings and hunches are for amateurs. Well-documented facts should support this claim, and metrics should be driving feature decisions.
• Is there an owner? Every request needs a champion who understands the nuances and will continue to fight for it.

Every roadmap should include things that get the audience excited, such as new functionality and integrations. But there must always be a place for the less exciting need-to-do items as well.

Ignoring key topics such as scalability, cybersecurity , and technical debt is pennywise and pounds foolish. The product will eventually have to address those topics. If time isn’t allocated in the roadmap upfront for these things, it will feel more like an unexpected delay, slip, or poor planning than simply acknowledging upfront that you’ve got to eat your vegetables.

Roadmaps are the result of lengthy analysis, consideration, and deliberations. Once you set strategies and goals, it comes down to prioritizing features and enhancements based on a variety of criteria.  

There are multitudes of methods for prioritizing potential roadmap items. There are dozens of frameworks to choose from, from using OKRs , to MoSCow,  to the RICE Scoring Model . Regardless of which approach is ultimately selected, proper prioritization requires product teams to do their homework. Assess each item under consideration for value, level of effort, and opportunity costs.

Teams must also weigh the benefits of short-term wins versus making progress toward long-term goals . Any good roadmap will include a combination of both items. This ensures incremental gains are being seen regularly without pushing out the hard work required to advance the overall product strategy.

Roadmapping levels up its degree of difficulty when it involves multiple products. Now, instead of trying to convey a vision and plan for a single product, the roadmap must do so for lots of them.  

Not only is this a challenge from a pure real estate on-the-page perspective, but getting all the messages aligned isn’t always easy. There are often multiple product managers or teams involved. Each with its own tastes, vernacular, and terminology. Not to mention that the products themselves might be in entirely different stages.  

A note on roadmap alignment

Consistency is the key to pulling this off . Alignment on the roadmap style, legend, color coding, time horizon, and level of granularity are mandatory. And don’t forget about version control issues!

To make this easier, ProductPlan offers the Portfolio View feature . Each team manages its own product’s roadmap, but they’ll automatically roll up into a Portfolio View providing a single, consistent view of every product in the portfolio. Organizations can even include non-product roadmaps such as marketing, IT, and operations in the Portfolio View.

Before the prevalence of agile development methods, a product roadmap underwent much less fluctuation during the product’s lifetime. Depending on the organization, a roadmap’s time frame might be locked in for 18 months or longer.  

In the age of agile development, however, a roadmap has become much more of a living document. The roadmaps have far shorter timeframes and need more frequent adjustments to accommodate changing priorities and market opportunities. And Agile roadmaps may look a little different from more traditional single or multi-product ones.  

Keeping roadmaps current is one of the biggest secrets to success . An outdated roadmap only leads to confusion and false expectations. This confusion is why it’s essential to use a tool that makes it simple and easy to make frequent updates as soon as possible.

Before setting out to build a roadmap, its audience must be identified — this way, you can tailor the content, focus, and presentation to their needs.  

In an executive-facing roadmap, for example, the product vision is emphasized, along with its alignment with business goals. With a roadmap for engineers, however, there’s a stronger focus on specific features.

Here are four examples of roadmap constituencies, and the primary function the roadmap serves for them.

(Note: for these examples, we’ll assume your product is software, but the fundamentals of product roadmaps could apply equally if the product were physical or any other category of good or service.)

Internal roadmap for executives

For this audience, aim to secure buy-in for the product vision and to maintain support and enthusiasm throughout its development cycle.

These roadmaps should focus, therefore, on high-level strategic concepts — such as driving growth, new market penetration, customer satisfaction, or market position.  

Although similar to executives, investors and board members also require their flavor of roadmap. The emphasis must be on how the planned work will increase the value of the product (and company). It should illustrate how enhancements move vital metrics that matter most to that cohort.

Internal roadmap for engineers

These roadmaps often focus on features, releases, sprints, and milestones. They’re typically more granular in scope and shorter in duration than executive-facing roadmaps. For those using agile development methods, these roadmaps are often at the epic or feature level. However, product goals and themes should still be a component of these roadmaps.

Engineering roadmaps should include as much granularity as possible. Even though developers will focus less on product vision and revenue potential, it’s a smart practice to include relevant milestones and requirements other departments are facing. This way, developers understand specific deadlines and requirements.

Internal roadmap for sales

Sales teams will want to know how the product will help them sell more, so the focus here should be on a combination of features and customer benefits. Focus on how the product will benefit reps directly, as well as the user benefits they can communicate to their customers and prospects. Whenever possible, group similar features/items into themes that sales reps can discuss with prospects.

Use caution when sharing internal roadmaps with Sales. It is not uncommon for sales reps to share internal roadmaps with customers, as a way of closing a deal, generating interest, and keeping leads warm. Avoid having sales teams committing a product to a specific release date, by excluding release or launch dates in these roadmaps.

External roadmap for customers and prospects  

When designing a product roadmap for customers and prospects, the focus should be entirely on the product’s benefits to them. Because these are external documents, customer roadmaps should be visual, attractive, and easy to understand.  

It’s a best practice not to include the release or launch dates in external-facing roadmaps. Just as a sales rep sharing an internal roadmap with prospects can commit the team prematurely to a release date, external roadmaps run the same risk of over-commitment. Unless there’s certainty about the product’s availability date, it’s a good habit to avoid including dates in an external-facing roadmap.

Product roadmaps aren’t new, but they were created using inferior solutions that were created with other tasks in mind for much of their existence. Whether it’s project management tools, Gantt charts, or spreadsheets, this software might have produced product roadmaps with lots of data. Still, legibility was often an issue, and there were few visual cues to the casual reviewer as to what was necessary.

The challenge with some presentation tools

But product managers are no longer limited to these off-label uses of standard productivity software. Instead, solutions are created explicitly for building product roadmaps that boast features and capabilities that don’t exist elsewhere.

These tools unlock the ability to create visual, theme-based roadmaps that elevate the discussion above specific features and shift the focus to strategic goals. In addition, they eliminate out-of-date versions from circulating and being referenced by using a cloud-based viewer.

Product roadmapping software can also easily enable custom versions of the roadmap to be generated based on the particular audience it’s being presented to. They can also sync with other vital parts of the product stack to keep things up-to-the-minute accurate and alert stakeholders when changes are made.

Creating and maintaining roadmaps takes a lot of effort and attention to detail. But all that hard work might go for naught if the final product presentation doesn’t go well. So to make sure a roadmap is well received, product managers must lay the groundwork for success. 

1. Who should you share your roadmap with?

Product roadmaps can be shared with a wide variety of stakeholders, provided that the version being socialized is appropriate for the audience in question. That’s one reason why using tags and filters with a cloud-based, purpose-built product roadmapping tool can be so valuable.

Instead of circulating the same version of the product roadmap with everyone, product managers can quickly craft product roadmaps appropriate for the occasion. Of course, the master version has all the details, but what is specifically shown to each group is tailored just for them.

In general, a few key sets of stakeholders need to get their hands on product roadmaps. Starting at the top, the executive team will certainly need to review and approve the product roadmap at the outset of any major initiatives and receive regular status updates on how things are progressing. The key for them is understanding the major themes, expected outcomes, and how it aligns with the overall product strategy and helps the company improve its KPIs .

Roadmaps for the internal team

But other internal groups should see the product roadmap as well. For example, the implementation team (UX, engineering, QA, operations) should all be privy to the most detailed versions of the product roadmap as they’re tasked with key pieces of its execution. Sales and marketing are also critical stakeholders to share the product roadmap with to plan out their go-to-market activities for key releases and major new functionality.

Beyond the organization itself, the product roadmap has additional roles to fill. Customers and prospects may benefit from seeing a glimpse of what’s on the horizon and from seeing where their specific requests fall (or don’t fall) in the future. 

Press and analysts are another potential audiences for an extremely edited version of the product roadmap to get them excited about where the product is headed. Additionally, key strategic partners from technology providers to distributors and sales agents may also need access to align their activities with the plans for the product.

2. Know your audience.

Beyond tailoring the roadmap to the titles and roles of the crowd, product teams should understand their motivations, concerns, and hot-button issues. If the presenter doesn’t proactively address them (either in the roadmap or in the commentary offered during the presentation), they’re likely to be brought up and put the presenter on the defensive. So it’s best to get out ahead of those things as it speaks to preparation and keeps things from turning negative. 

Even better is previewing the roadmap with crucial decision-makers ahead of time. Getting them onboard and addressing their potential quibbles before the formal presentation can smooth the path for approval and buy-in. 

3. Focus on the narrative.

Storytelling is an essential part of effective product management . There’s no opportunity more apt for tapping into your inner Mark Twain than during a roadmap presentation.

Providing context, anecdotes, sources of inspiration puts the audience at ease. It also demonstrates how much thought and consideration were invested in the process.

And if there’s a compelling narrative for how each new theme, feature, and epic unlocks new potential for users, all the better.

4. Stay high level.

If a roadmap presentation spends most of its time discussing individual features, things have already gone off the rails. The strategy, goals, and themes are the key messages to convey. Specific features are implementation details that shouldn’t matter to stakeholders as long as a result is achieving objectives. 

5. Add some metrics to the message.

Everything in our data-driven world must be measurable, and roadmaps aren’t spared. The items on a roadmap should be improving the metrics the organization values and moving KPIs in a positive direction. When there’s a meaningful, measurable outcome for a particular initiative, it’s far easier to gain support than discussing vague and abstract endpoints.

A product roadmap is a vision, a strategy, and a plan. What it is not is a finished product. To get to that state of things, the product roadmap must be successfully executed.

That process has several key steps. The first is socialization to ensure the product roadmap and its objectives are clearly understood by the teams tasked with making it all happen. This includes UI/UX, engineering, architecture/IT, testing, and operations, as each plays a role in turning great ideas into actual products.

But making sure everyone is on the same page and then “throwing it over the wall” doesn’t guarantee the finished product will reflect those good intentions. So product management must remain involved throughout the design, development, testing, and deployment phases of the process.

Part of this is just being available when people have questions or need clarification or want to settle a quick judgment call. But it also requires proactive engagement from the product team, with frequent check-ins and conversations to ensure the plans are being faithfully executed and introducing new learnings and information as it becomes available.

Roadmaps during testing and deployment

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30 Product Roadmap Examples from Real Products

A product roadmap is a the best place to communicate upcoming product developments to any audience you choose to share with: customers, internal stakeholders, partners, and more.

‍ In this guide, we will explore 30 product roadmap examples from companies that are implementing them well and why each one of them stands out. We’ve also included a template you can use to build your own and offer transparency for your progress.

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Product roadmap template

An effective product roadmap is simple enough for the intended audience to understand. At the same time, it includes crucial details about the project’s status, target release dates, problem areas, and important milestones to show what’s happening and what’s on the agenda. 

Furthermore, it is a living document that contains the following essential components that both business and technical audiences will find useful:

• Product vision: A long-term view of what the organization wants the product to be in the future
• Strategy: A high-level product plan tied to overarching business goals and priorities
• Goals: S.M.A.R.T product goals (or business goals) that show what the company aims to accomplish with the product
• Features and functionalities: It’s essential to articulate the product’s features to inform and guide execution and tracking.
• Timelines: The roadmap often includes specific dates (or at least timeframes) and milestones by which the stated goals and planned features should be achieved.

These are the five core components we’ve looked at in detail to compile the following list of the best public roadmap examples out there.

Product roadmap examples

Buildertrend, structurely, safetychain, shopify api, vectorworks, simple analytics, microsoft 365.

What they do: Courier offers an API for email, SMS, web, and mobile push notifications.

Public product roadmap page: https://updates.courier.com/board  

What we like: Courier's product roadmap does a great job at providing a great level of detail and images to accompany both recently-released and upcoming features. You can also take a look at how they distribute the categories for better clarity and easy roadmap management.

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What they do: CoScreen is a screen-sharing tool that’s aimed at facilitating remote collaboration for technical teams.

Public product roadmap page: https://updates.coscreen.co/board  

What we like: Given their business completely relies on highly visual communication, CoScreen’s public roadmap naturally aligns with this vision. We’re huge fans of the GIFs they’re using for complete releases.

What they do: Eden is a people success and workplace management platform that aims to create delightful employee experiences every day.

What we like: Not only are they helping customers delight their employees, but also, they’re impressing their own users through one of the most complex roadmaps you’ll see on this list. Every single feature or update, no matter how small, makes it onto the public roadmap. To bring some organization into all this, they added a separate Ideas section where users can upvote suggested features.

What they do: ArborXR is a device management solution that lets you remotely manage AR & VR devices, deploy content, and guide what your users see and do in a headset.

Public product roadmap page: https://updates.arborxr.com/board  

What we like: The perfect public product roadmap? Pretty much this one. Here’s an ultra-polished example of impactful screenshots and just the right amount of details on each feature. We also love how they don’t shy away from having multiple categories for the same feature to make sure they are visible to everyone using them.

What they do: Buildertrend is a leading construction management software that aims to connect teams, improve project efficiency, and increase profits for their clients.

Public product roadmap page: https://buildertrend-publicroadmap.launchnotes.io/board  

What we like: While most software product roadmap examples in this list follow a classic Kanban board format, Buildertrend opts for a structure similar to a timeline that gets you to go through the roadmap in a logical order. In fact, they even have an introductory Welcome section to get users up to speed with how the public roadmap and feedback portal works. The categories they use are also super fun, paired with emojis which make news and improvements stand out. And their level of attention to what goes into their product roadmap doesn’t end here. The actual feature descriptions are highly detailed and almost always paired with screenshots and extra contact info.

What they do: SPARK is an innovative solution for business lending in your own community, helping businesses capture leads and keep everyone on the same page.

Public product roadmap page: https://updates.lendwithspark.com/board  

What we like: While they keep their product roadmap simple, SPARK is big on making sure everything is super clear. They have a separate Under Consideration section where users can vote on previously suggested features.

What they do: Structurely is a SaaS company that provides lead qualification as a service. Their promise is to help you convert 17% of all leads to qualified appointments through long-term follow-ups and two-way conversations.

What we like: This is a perfect example of a small team that’s dedicated to regularly updating their public product roadmap. Don’t forget to check out how they make their announcements for more detailed posts.

What they do: Zeaeye is a maritime safety company based in Denmark and primarily sells to Danish companies.

Public product roadmap page: https://zeaeye.launchnotes.io/board  

What we like: Need a public roadmap in a different language? Can do. Zeaeye’s posts accurately reflect the current status of feature development while making use of creative emojis like ⚠️ to highlight the important updates everyone should read.

What they do: SafetyChain is an enterprise solution for plant production, quality, and compliance that’s available on all devices.

Public product roadmap page: https://improvements.safetychain.com/board  

What we like: While most companies tend to get creative with how they name their feature cards, SafetyChain opts for short titles that often simply reference the feature’s name. This is a good option if you regularly work on multiple different features at the same time and want to save your users from having to read your entire roadmap to spot one they’re interested in.

What they do: Vowel is a tool that aids video conferencing and meeting transcription without the need to download extra software.

What we like: Loads of small elements make this public product roadmap stand out: categories that are easy to spot thanks to their emojis, short and clear titles, and four different columns on the Kanban board to tell customers exactly where a feature is at right now. While there are no details on the features this time, each new launch comes with a more detailed announcement that ensures the specs get in front of the final user.

What they do: Buffer is essentially a social media toolkit for small businesses but, as a company, they’re also big promoters of remote work as well as work transparency.

Public product roadmap page: https://trello.com/b/PDIV7XW3/buffer-transparent-product-roadmap  

What we like: In line with their transparency policy, this public roadmap gives you a look at all the conversations going on around a feature. This way, you can see which users support a functionality, every step of the way. The Buffer roadmap is also the most extensive example of an About The Roadmap section done right. Not only do they have an intro, but they also talk about what each label and coloring option means.

What they do: Evidos is a SaaS tool that lets businesses provide proof for their digital transactions through digital signatures, online IDs, and login solutions.

Public product roadmap page: https://product.evidos.com/board  

What we like: Evidos opts for only adding details to features In Development or Complete. This is an option you’ll want to consider if you want to make sure you’re not wasting time on developing a feature whose development hasn’t been confirmed. Also worth noting is the functionality of separating the roadmap from the list of feature ideas users can upvote and one day see on the roadmap.

What they do: Nuon is a solution that allows you to view current apps in all of your customers' cloud accounts, without needing to spend a lot of time to refactor them.

Public product roadmap page: https://updates.nuon.co/board  

What we like: Consistent images. That’s what best defines this public roadmap. Every card comes with an image that makes it easier to skim through everything. No need to spend a lot of time and resources on these. A title and icon will be just enough for users to easily recognize what you’re talking about.

What they do: Tappin provides digital solutions for event management and registration, whether you want to host these online or in person.

Public product roadmap page: https://tappin.launchnotes.io/board  

What we like: Tappin is a small team, so they keep their roadmap super simple, making it easier to manage while still providing the transparency their users need.

What they do: Teamwork offers project management software with complex features. 

Public product roadmap page: https://www.teamwork.com/roadmap  

What we like: Teamwork opts for a mix of recent updates and roadmap on a single page. This is usually difficult to do as boards can become cluttered. Teamwork pulls it off with a blend of visual elements and categories.

What they do: GitHub is an Internet hosting platform used for software development and version control through Git.

Public product roadmap page: https://github.com/github/roadmap  

What we like: Talk about using your own product whenever you can. GitHub hosts the roadmap through a repository on their own platform. They also have a highly-welcomed introductory section to clarify the purpose and structure of the roadmap.

What they do: New Relic is a cloud-based software that helps you monitor, debug, and improve the performance of your tech services.

Public product roadmap page: https://newrelic.com/futurestack  

What we like: New Relic takes their public product roadmap to the next level by hosting live events where they present them. This is a community play that helps New Relic connect with their users, offer hands-on workshops, and highlight what’s next on the roadmap.

What they do: Qualtrics is building a single system of record for experience data, helping companies manage products, customers, employees, and brand experiences within a single solution.

Public product roadmap page: https://www.qualtrics.com/product-updates

What we like: The first thing that stands out with this product roadmap is the subtle note on how often the roadmap is updated. This gives visitors a cue of when they should check out the roadmap and make sure they have something new to see. The various calls-to-action that they use are also worth considering for your own roadmap. These prompt the community [aka the people who are likely to be more interested in feature updates] to sign up and receive news and notifications in the future. 

What they do: Separately from the Shopify we know, the organization’s API solution gives developers the tools they need to build on top of the popular e-commerce platform.

Public product roadmap page: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/roadmap/  

What we like: We appreciate the creative approach of presenting the sample product roadmap in an article-like format. This ensures readers will look through the information in a logical order and can fully understand why each change is happening.

What they do: Unit is a banking-as-a-service software that allows developers to embed strong financial functionalities into their products.

Public product roadmap page: https://updates.unit.co/board  

What we like: Unit’s public roadmap impresses through its brand consistency. It stays loyal to the brand's own identity [e.g. colors, fonts, etc.] by ensuring the design of the roadmap page fully aligns with the rest of the website.

What they do: Correlated is a tool that helps revenue teams achieve self-serve conversions, expand their revenue, and find more cross-selling opportunities. 

Public product roadmap page: https://correlated.launchnotes.io/board  

What we like: We love the brand alignment between the website and this public roadmap. But the most noteworthy aspect is the categories which are divided by role [e.g. FOR GROWTH TEAMS, FOR DATA TEAMS, etc.]. This way, users belonging to a certain team will instantly know which features are of interest to them.

What they do: Vectorworks is a design software that supports collaborative design processes for architecture, entertainment, and landscaping professionals.

‍ Public product roadmap page: https://www.vectorworks.net/en-US/public-roadmap  

What we like: The Vectorworks team goes the extra mile to make sure they’re getting feedback from as many people as possible. For each feature or enhancement in this public product roadmap example, they ask customers how important that change is and if they want to share additional comments.

What they do: Simple Analytics is a Google Analytics alternative focused on providing better privacy for a website’s users.

Public product roadmap page: https://simpleanalytics.com/roadmap  

What we like: You actually get to discuss the features as a user. Each feature comes with a GitHub link where customers can see the details of the upcoming release and discuss it with the team or among each other.

What they do: Atlassian is a software organization that develops apps and platforms for various team types including project managers and software development professionals.

Public product roadmap page: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/cloud  

What we like: Atlassian is a complex organization, but they manage to list the roadmap for each of their products. How do they do it? First, they divide their offering into two: Cloud and Data Center. Then, customers have the option to add multiple filters to get to the roadmap they’re interested in. These filters include exact product type, category, and status. Seems like a lot, but this is simply the only option when you’ve got so many products to handle.

What they do: Storyblok is a headless CMS with its own API that supports developers in their goal to build anything, publish everywhere, and integrate with all possible tools out there.

Public product roadmap page: https://www.storyblok.com/roadmap  

What we like: This product roadmap example stays focused on the most recent features. This means you’ll only see the updates from recent months as well as functionalities and fixes that are 100% going to happen. This is a good option if you want to offer more clarity into the process, but feel free to pair it with an archive of past releases and a system for upvoting up-and-coming features.

What they do: Juni provides financial services like multi-currency accounts, virtual cards, and banking, accounting, or advertising integrations.

Public product roadmap page: https://www.juni.co/roadmap  

What we like: Besides the top-notch visuals of this roadmap, take note of how each feature is paired with its benefits. This allows Juni to start promoting early by immediately telling users how a new feature is going to help them.

What they do: Autodesk builds tools and services for industries like architecture, engineering, media, construction, education, manufacturing, and entertainment. 

Public product roadmap page: https://makeanything.autodesk.com/3dsmax  

What we like: Here’s one specific example of how they simplify their roadmap announcement process for their 3ds Max product. Announcements for future releases are made roughly every quarter and always come with a complex separate page that gets into the details of what a feature will do and how it will work.

What they do: Microsoft 365 is a suite of tools that help both individuals at home and professionals at work handle their productivity challenges.

Public product roadmap page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap

What we like: Since this is a tool that attracts a lot of attention from diverse user types, their filters reflect just that. You can directly choose among different device types, platforms, products, and more. On top of this, each feature card comes with extra details like a feature ID to make it easier to identify in case a user might have a question about it.

What they do: Angular is a free, open-source web and mobile app framework built by the Angular Team at Google in collaboration with several other individuals and organizations.

Public product roadmap page: https://angular.io/guide/roadmap  

What we like: This product roadmap presentation example made it onto our list thanks to its simplicity. Angular relies on their documentation to get used by millions of developers. Hence, this is the best place for them to place their roadmap. It’s in the very place where its users spend a lot of their time and it’s in the same exact format as the product.

What they do: Front is a SaaS company building a shared email inbox and calendar tool for teams of all sizes. 

Public product roadmap page: https://portal.productboard.com/gf59pkqrbumehmcn7ueixwbu/tabs/1-under-consideration  

What we like: We love how each feature is categorized under a core functionality. Additionally, looking at features that have been released already, it’s worth noting the level of detail they have added to each feature.

Stand up a product roadmap just like these, with LaunchNotes

Plenty of the product roadmaps you saw on this page are powered by LaunchNotes .

LaunchNotes makes it simple to stand up a fully-featured and dynamic product roadmap. Provide every relevant stakeholder–from end users to enterprise customers to key executives–the ability to see, follow, engage with, and leave feedback on your product roadmaps

Many product teams and managers struggle to share product roadmaps and announce new features to their intended audience. LaunchNotes eliminates this struggle with a centralized, user-friendly platform for all product roadmaps and change communications.

Ideal for both product managers and marketers, LaunchNotes enables these specialists and their teams to sharpen their launch messaging and build buzz around upcoming launches. They can even drive feature adoption and engagement and measure the impact of each message to ensure successful messaging and a successful launch.

Request a demo to see how LaunchNotes can help you reach the right users with the right message at the right time, every time.

• Roadmap vs Project Plan
• Roadmap vs Release Plan
• Ultimate Guide to Roadmap Prioritization
• How to Present Your Roadmap to Execs

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Learn / Guides / Product roadmaps guide

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Product roadmap strategy: how to create and build an effective product roadmap

When done right, your product roadmap seamlessly aligns with your business goals and keeps the product team focused on the highest priority initiatives. 

But how do you build the right product roadmap for your team and business? The answer is a product roadmap strategy—a methodology for building roadmaps that bridges the gap between your product vision and mission.

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This guide gives you six steps to develop a strategy for building a simple and effective roadmap—one that shows what to build, why your team should build it, and how to prioritize your product initiatives. You'll also learn how to present your roadmap to keep your team and stakeholders aligned and deliver better products to your users faster. 

Use Hotjar to create an impactful product roadmap

Hotjar helps you discover and connect with the user needs that form the core of a great product roadmap.

The 6-step process to building a product roadmap everyone is on board with

As a product management tool, roadmaps are not inherently effective—they're only as useful as you make them. It’s up to you to create, share, and iterate on a product roadmap that will help you achieve exceptional results.

Building this type of compelling and effective product roadmap isn’t a one-day, or even a one-week task. It requires focused efforts, along with foolproof, flexible planning—and there are quite a few logistics to be taken care of. Do it right, and, in the end, you’ll be rewarded with valuable insight and direction that you won’t get from tools like your development backlog.

Follow the 6-step process below to build a product roadmap that allows you to:

Solve the right problems

Adapt to changes in the market

Stay focused on the end-user

1. Create the product strategy that defines your product roadmap

Strategic planning is an important first step in building a roadmap. You can't build a product roadmap without a well-defined product strategy —a high-level plan that outlines your product goals and how you'll achieve them. 

You need to clearly articulate the business case of a given initiative or feature, so your team understands why you’re building it—which means you have to invest time in developing your strategy first. 

A brilliant product strategy helps you make confident decisions to turn your product vision into reality. According to Alan Carr , Executive Product Manager at Webpop Design , "the first step is understanding the product, what direction you wish to go, and how you will get there. Creating a product strategy helps you answer those questions, and only then can you move to the next step, execution."

Product strategy is a bridge between vision and execution. It involves laying out major areas of investment, so you can prioritize what matters most and achieve your product goals. 

A specific, user-centric strategy leaves no room for ambiguity or confusion among your product team. Working on a product without a well-defined sense of direction and purpose leads to product goals that never get realized, a lowered sense of morale within a team who feels like they lack direction, and a waste of resources.

As you work on your strategy, keep product team members and exec-level stakeholders involved throughout, and especially in the inception and development stages. This will help you:

Understand your organization's broader landscape of needs and concerns, which contributes to a more robust product strategy

Engage different organizational stakeholders to get them behind your product development process and business strategy from the start

Your product roadmap should then portray your plan for accomplishing your organization’s strategic goals and initiatives. It should communicate the ‘why', ‘when', and ‘what’ of your product plans—and explain how your efforts will support the overall business.

To develop a product strategy that will guide your roadmap, you need to:

Define your product vision. What would you like your product to do, and why? 

Identify your user needs. What problems are your users facing, and how can you solve them?

Perform competitor analysis. What are your competitors doing, and how can you differentiate your product from theirs?

Analyze market trends. How are customers using your existing products? What market changes should you expect?

Set goals. What does success look like? How would you measure it?

Evaluate your company's resources. What can you develop and build with the available time, money, and people resources?

Develop a timeline . How will product releases occur over time? What’s the amount of work and detail involved in a particular milestone?

Together, these elements of your product strategy will inform everything that goes on your roadmap.

💡 Pro tip: user empathy is the key to a brilliant product strategy.

The success of your product strategy depends on your ability to deeply understand and describe your customers.

As a product manager, it’s your responsibility to identify the most important problems to solve and make informed decisions on how to solve them. The quantitative and qualitative feedback you receive from your users will inform your prioritization.

Hotjar (hi there 👋) keeps you connected with your product experience and lets you dig deeper to discover real user needs:

Heatmaps give you a visual overview of how people interact with an individual element, helping you spot trends and optimization opportunities

Session recordings reconstruct individual users’ journeys so you can observe how they navigate, what they click on or ignore as they browse, and whether they encounter any issues along the way

A Hotjar Session Recording in action

2. Identify growth opportunities for your product

With your high-level strategic planning done, the groundwork is laid for what you want to deliver and when. This is an important moment—you're at the start of a thrilling journey to deliver new value to your customers. Now it's time to identify the best product initiatives to chart your path forward.

Your next step to develop a strategic product roadmap is to use the product strategy to inform the product initiatives you'll focus on—and how they'll support your product growth. 

Start by understanding users' needs and expectations: what product or feature can you create or improve to make your customers' lives easier? 

Identify your customers' unmet needs through user and market research —your goal should be to understand and empathize with your customers, which will help you determine the viability of a new product, feature, or initiative.

There are many ways to conduct market research; here are the three common ones:

Once you identify your customers' unmet needs and the growth opportunities to address, you can begin brainstorming ideas and initiatives to add to your roadmap.

💡 Pro tip : host regular Hotjar Watch parties to brainstorm and define ideas and initiatives for your product roadmap.

Come together with your entire team for a Hotjar Watch party to see what your users are seeing and empathize with the people that matter most. Watching a series of session recordings related to a goal or topic of your choice helps you align with your team, empathize with your customers, and make impactful changes, fast . 

This brings new perspectives, so you’ll get a complete analysis of your user, customer, or product experience—dig into the why behind user problems and define product initiatives to address them.

A Hotjar Highlights dashboard

3. Prioritize the right roadmap initiatives to achieve your product goals

A lot goes into a product roadmap—like customer ideas, feature requests, internal input, and backlogs. What gets included in your roadmap—and in what order—should be closely aligned with the strategy you’ve already defined. 

Deciding what to work on first is one of your major challenges as a product manager . There are so many features and initiatives you can add to your roadmap, but there's limited time and resources—so you need to prioritize. 

Product roadmap prioritization is about choosing what to build, when, and why you're building it. You’re looking for what’s most important, realistic, and urgent. The goal is to make data-backed decisions that will benefit your product and business objectives in the long-term.

This is also a good time to identify dependencies between initiatives. Anything valuable that doesn't fit on the first iteration of your product roadmap can be saved for later in your product backlog .

An effective product roadmap prioritization process garners support from stakeholders, inspires a vision in your team, and minimizes the risk of working on something that nobody—including customers—wants.

To prioritize your roadmap, you need to develop a process for generating ideas, prioritizing which ones to focus on, and getting buy-in from key stakeholders. It can look something like this: 

Understand how customers use your product and its features

Collectinput and feature requests from your customers

Scoreand prioritize new features and fixes objectively to validate what to work on next

Manageand share the prioritized product roadmap with internal teams, stakeholders, and customers

Note: we’ve detailed this 4-step process and more in our full guide on product roadmap prioritization . It’s a great place to start in your journey of designing a winning product roadmap.

💡 Pro tip : prioritize effectively by listening to your customers.

Customer feedback surveys are the most effective way to prioritize product features. 

Certain product features may feel innovative, and like they will yield the best results. But your customers can have different ideas about what would improve their lives—that’s why you need to listen to them. 

Customer feedback surveys help you prioritize roadmap initiatives by:

Analyzing survey data to create a list of specific features your customers are asking for, then using product prioritization frameworks to rank the features based on customer needs

Using customer feedback to identify areas where your product is falling short, then prioritizing features that will address those specific problems

A Hotjar Feedback widget in action

4. Set a realistic product roadmap timeline

Now that you’ve defined the ‘why’ and ’what’ for your product roadmap, it’s time to think about the ‘when'. Once your features are prioritized and sorted, you can decide which releases and features are best aligned with your strategy, and then visualize it all on a timeline.

Product roadmap timelines typically include dates to show when new products—and updates to existing ones—will launch, and where they fit on the release plan. Some product teams choose to organize release dates by product launch; others prefer to arrange them based on development capacity. 

What works for you depends on factors like market trajectories, value propositions, and engineering constraints . Once you analyze and understand these factors, you can express them in your roadmap as initiatives and timelines. 

Setting a timeline with specific dates helps your product development team know exactly what their responsibilities are and what the dedicated time for each project is. However, it can also lead to unrealistic expectations, adding unnecessary pressure to your work.

Joshua Chin, the Co-founder & CEO of Chronos Agency, says "hard time frames produce an unhealthy work culture, compromising product quality”. His advice is to focus instead on setting a realistic goal that can be achieved within a soft time frame , allowing for date adjustment when necessary.

Keeping your roadmaps at a high level—months or even quarters—will help you manage stakeholder expectations and help your team focus more on delivering excellent work, rather than meeting specific deadlines.

5. Set metrics to measure the success of your initiatives

A compelling product roadmap should give a clear overview of how the strategy will be translated into action, provide a timeline for product development, and put keymetrics in place to measure success.

When you connect your product strategy to the success of your implementation, you can clearly trace the impact of your work.

Setting metrics for your product roadmap offers a clear, measurable benchmark to see whether the product meets key goals. These metrics are included in a product roadmap to show the critical accomplishments required to make the product vision a reality.

Not all metrics are valuable—beware of vanity metrics, which are stats that look great and make you feel good, but don't translate meaningfully to business results. An example is the number of followers you have on social media. 

If you want to make sure you're not following vanity metrics, use Eric Ries ' criteria for good product metrics. If your product metrics fulfill all three criteria, you're looking at the right data:

The product metrics and KPIs you define in your product roadmap help you see an even broader picture and measure your progress. Depending on the purpose of your roadmap, you may choose metrics oriented to customer needs or business needs: 

Daily, weekly, or monthly active users (AU): are the initiatives you’ve prioritized addressing real customer needs?

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) : is your revenue increasing as a result of that?

Churn rate : has your product roadmap planning improved your retention rate?

Product adoption : is your public roadmap getting potential customers excited about your product’s future?

💡 Pro tip : get rich, in-depth insights with qualitative data analysis.

Qualitative data analysis helps you make sense of customer behavior—beyond the numbers and quantitative metrics—and helps teams uncover valuable insights to better understand user behavior and build better products.

Use qualitative tools and methods—like Hotjar Surveys and Feedback —to understand why some visitors converted and some didn't, to learn about their common pain points, and which product features they find most useful.

Hear from users as they experience your site with the Hotjar Feedback widget

6. Share your product roadmap with stakeholders and request feedback

When your roadmap is ready, it’s time to show it off. Create a product roadmap presentation to keep your stakeholders in the loop on progress and timing.

The product roadmap presentation aligns internal stakeholders, communicates short- and long-term development progress, and seamlessly shares the product strategy with external stakeholders. It also helps stakeholders understand why you’re developing the product and how you’ll develop it to maximize customer delight, market share, and profitability.

Product managers often need to build multiple types of product roadmaps to tell the whole story. Having multiple product roadmaps—and a variety of presentations—also allows you to be flexible so you can easily pivot and adjust views when necessary.

If you want to gain alignment from stakeholders, your product roadmap presentation should be clear and concise, so everyone understands what each element of the roadmap represents. Here are a few things to keep in mind when presenting your product roadmap strategy:

Audience. Like a product, a roadmap has target audiences, so you need to communicate different information to those groups. The audience factor will tell you the type of content to include, the content form, and how detailed it should be.

Context . This is one of the most important things to remember when sharing and presenting your roadmap. Consider the following questions to help you decide what to include:

Who needs to see this product roadmap?

What is the most important information I want to convey?

Why is this information relevant to my audience?

Does my audience care more about the big picture or details?

Does my audience need to know general timing or exact dates?

Review . Chances are your product roadmap isn't perfect. And, that's okay—it’s all part of the roadmapping process. You can safeguard your roadmap by reviewing it every time you experience a problem, and fine-tuning it to ensure your product comes out exactly as you envisioned it.

Update . Your product progress will bring new features and goals, and your team will continuously learn about your users and product as they evolve. To keep track of changes and keep stakeholders in the loop, a product roadmap should be constantly updated.

Feedback . Always leave room for questions and feedback on your product roadmap presentation. Your stakeholders’ insights will help you improve and have better ongoing communication around your roadmap.

As you prepare to present your product strategy and the specific iterations it involves, check out our full guide on product roadmap presentations to see what to do before, during, and after the presentation to build alignment. 

💡 Pro tip: use technology to build the right product roadmap for your needs.

If you’re ready to start creating and sharing your product roadmap, consider investing in purpose-built product roadmap tools and software .

Tools like Aha! Roadmaps , Productboard , Roadmunk , or even Excel help you create, customize, and share professional product roadmaps. You can choose from a variety of templates and tailor the visual details to your needs—so you can take pride in every product roadmap you build.

Next steps for an effective product roadmap strategy

Most product roadmaps include the same components, but product managers need to consider many factors to build the right kind of roadmap—like your audience, the purpose of the roadmap, level of detail, and timeline.

Developing a strategic product roadmap is only the first step in implementing your product vision. As part of the promise your roadmap makes to your team and your customers to be accountable to themost meaningful work, dive deeper into product roadmap best practices and incorporate some of the best product roadmap templates into your presentation.

Hotjar helps you discover and connect with the user needs that form the core of an excellent product roadmap.

FAQs about product roadmap strategy

What is a product roadmap strategy.

A product roadmap strategy is a methodology for building roadmaps that explain your vision behind the product, guide the direction you take throughout development, and align the organization around short- and long-term goals for the product—and how they will be achieved.

How do you build a product roadmap?

Here are six steps to building a product roadmap:

Create your product strategy

Identify growth opportunities

Prioritize roadmap initiatives

Set a realistic timeline

Set metrics to measure success 

Share with stakeholders

Who is responsible for a product roadmap?

The product manager and the product team are responsible for building, maintaining, facilitating, and sharing the roadmap. That said, the best product roadmaps involve cross-functional collaboration . 

Incorporate insights from as many voices as possible : a range of product team members, different organizational stakeholders, and, of course, your customers. It will help you gather diverse perspectives and get stakeholder buy-in on your product strategy from the start.

Roadmaps best practices

Previous chapter

Product roadmaps prioritization

Next chapter

7 examples of excellent product roadmaps

“What are we doing next?”

“What’s the actual plan?”

“Why are we doing this now?”

It can be easy to get lost in the backwoods of roadmaps, and these are all questions that, as a product manager , you might hear from anyone in your organization, from sales and engineering to customer success and marketing. And yes, it can be frustrating. As Braden Kowitz points out, these questions can cause a great deal of anxiety .

One tried, and true way to get ahead is to create a product roadmap that communicates the product plan and aligns your whole organization around it. Useful product roadmaps can take time to create, but they also give stakeholders on different teams the insights they need and ultimately boosts confidence in your product leadership.

But the challenge is often building a roadmap that will align your company around your product vision , providing both the level of detail each function needs while also staying connected to higher-level objectives.

Often, companies will go about building a product roadmap the wrong way. They’ll focus on hitting deadlines above all else, which can cause a lot of anxiety for the team.  Other times you’ll see companies build a roadmap once and then never look at it again or rarely update it. 

A vast majority of roadmaps miss the why behind what they are building and just focus on features — they are disconnected from the product strategy and have no clear goals or themes.

Instead, excellent roadmaps should be a product of collaboration and include the input of many stakeholders and cross-functional teams. They should always be-up-to-date, not one-time documents that are outdated once you hit the save button. And, they should reflect the outcomes your organization wants to achieve, not simply outputs. 

Essential pieces of a product roadmap

The importance of tailoring your roadmap to the right audience, 7 examples of effective product roadmaps, timeline roadmaps , getting to where you’re going.

Your product roadmap should articulate your product strategy so everyone, including different audiences with unique needs, understands it. Before diving into specifics, remember that what works for you may be unique to you and your organization. That’s why it’s critical to talk to everyone across your teams and ensure alignment on the best way to present this information .

We know rethinking how you approach the product roadmaps can be daunting. That’s why we’ve consolidated the best roadmap types that can help you communicate the why of your plan and the what and provide the right level of detail for your stakeholders.

““I think of roadmaps as communication vehicles rather than decision vehicles. A lot of folks say their goal is to have a roadmap. And I say no, our goal is to have a good product strategy where we make hard choices and prioritize the right things. The roadmap is simply a reflection of this.” ” Rich Mironov Product consultant & thought leader

You don’t need to list specific dates on your roadmap. But you do need a way to clearly outline and prioritize short-term features, medium-term features, and features you’re planning for in the long term.

Example timelines:

• March, April, May
• Now, Next, Later

What features are you releasing along the timeline above? You can categorize these based on what you’re looking to communicate and what tools you use for project management. These can be simply stated as the feature you’re building, or you can create a hierarchy of broad feature themes down to more specific subfeatures.

Examples (from high-level to detailed):

• New user onboarding, Team collaboration, Video messaging
• Create user signup flow, Share files between teammates, Record video calls
• Implement SSO, Integrate Dropbox, Share saved video files

What are you looking to accomplish with your products and features? You’re not doing work for the sake of doing work. You’re moving the needle on your business. Goals (or objectives) lets your organization know where the product is headed. These may be product-specific goals or business goals.

• Improve team communication platform
• Launch dashboard analytics
• Increase monthly active users by 5%

Different types of roadmaps work best with different stakeholders. You can choose which views best support how you want to communicate and rally your organization around your product vision.

• Use leadership roadmaps , such as a r elease plan roadmap or an objectives timeline roadmap, to give senior executives and stakeholders a 1000-foot view of the product team’s work. These high-level roadmaps provide quick summaries of your product direction. They can include information such as the market opportunity and profit and loss details with the ability to dive in deeper if needed.
• Use company roadmaps, such as release plan or release timeline roadmaps, to share more details with cross-functional teams like sales and customer success. These roadmaps allow other teams to set appropriate expectations with prospects and customers and contribute comments and relevant customer feedback.
• Use delivery-focused roadmaps, such as Kanban, sprint plan, or features timeline roadmap with granular timelines for development teams that want to know the details. Communicate objectives, status/stage of development, areas of your product, and account for other work they need to support. Leverage dependencies and capture risks.
• Use customer-focused roadmaps, such as a release plan or a now-next-later roadmap, to customize a roadmap that zeroes in on features customers care about most. These roadmaps also communicate what’s coming up next for your product to internal customer-facing audiences such as sales, customer success, and marketing . 

Let’s look at some common types of product roadmaps to help you figure out which one will work best for you. At a high-level, you can differentiate between two overall types: column and timeline roadmaps with relevant examples described. 

Example 1. Release plan

Release plans are the execution-level plan of how you’ll deliver the work that you’ve decided to do and the timeframe when you’ll complete that work. A release plan communicates a high-level overview of upcoming product releases to senior executives, stakeholders, cross-functional teams, and even customers. It’s ideal for planning milestones not time-bound, but with a fixed scope or new versions of your product on a regular release schedule (e.g., mobile app). It lets other teams know features are coming soon without committing your team to a specific launch date.

Example 2. Sprint plan roadmap

Sprint plan roadmaps are delivery-focused and, of course, useful for sprint planning. Products teams use sprint plans to align their development teams with upcoming work so they’re always up-to-date and in sync. You can plan your delivery over multiple sprints and show each feature’s effort and owners to monitor your team’s workload. You can even use swimlanes for additional context or grouping. You can make your sprint plan as granular as you need. This roadmap is only for your product and development team’s eyes.

Example 3. Now-next-later roadmap

Now-next-later roadmaps communicate your priorities over broad time frames with an emphasis on the near-term. Features in the ‘Now’ slot have more detail as you work on them, while features in the “later” bucket will be more high-level and reflect your long-term strategy. They are perfect for teams operating in fast-changing environments where release dates may change and allow you to communicate comprehensive plans to customers without committing to specific deadlines. Now-next later roadmaps are great for sharing your product strategy and priorities with large audiences (e.g., at an All-Hands or Town Hall meeting)

While this view is great for organizations that move quickly, you’ll want to keep things on track with a rigorous prioritization process. Otherwise, you risk having things in “later” stay there indefinitely, and ideas not aligned with your long-term strategy may make their way into the “now” or “next” buckets.

Example 4. Kanban roadmap

A Kanban roadmap is another delivery-focused roadmap for development teams. It helps product teams clearly group initiatives into buckets such as what is in the backlog , what you’re planning, what is in progress, and what you’ve completed.

One of the most significant advantages of a Kanban roadmap is that it allows product teams to communicate their near-term plans without committing to exact dates. You can showcase when you’re working on specific features and keep your delivery team motivated by reminding them what they’re building towards.

Product managers most commonly use timeline roadmaps to ensure alignment with stakeholders and cross-functional teams. Stakeholders can visually see key initiatives’ goals and duration, while cross-functional teams easily organize launch activities with clear timelines. Be wary about using tight timeframes as this can set burdensome expectations. Consider using a timeframe that works best to communicate your plans broadly. This may be monthly, quarterly, or any bucket of time you think works best for your needs or stakeholders’ needs.

Example 5. Features timeline roadmap

A Features timeline roadmap is an output-driven roadmap that allows you to set the time frame for an individual feature. Planning features and tracking progress with a timeline roadmap is ideal if you want to get a 1000-foot view of how work is progressing toward a deadline or time-bound milestone. You can track feature progress against specific deadlines and milestones and align internally with development teams on concrete dates. You can also allocate resources when and where they’re needed.

Example 6. Objectives timeline roadmap

For larger organizations and those working in more complex environments, there comes a time when senior executives and stakeholders want a more zoomed-out approach. An objectives timeline roadmap is an example of an outcome, not output-driven roadmap. This roadmap provides broad organization alignment on product direction. It’s easy for anyone to understand when you’ll work towards each of our business goals and where that sits relative to your most significant milestones.

Objectives timeline roadmaps are great to communicate your product strategy and goals across teams for the next 2-3 quarters. When using business-level objectives, this offers a clear connection between your product and business strategies and end deliverables, such as features.

When we decide which objectives to tackle next, we backward-plan from milestones in time (Gartner analyst briefings, industry conferences, marketing launches, commitments to strategic partners or major customers, etc.) and consider what would be most important to accomplish by then.

Example 7. Release timeline roadmap

When you’re planning objectives in time, you can remain high-level. But as you prepare for sprints and launch activities, you’ll want to decide which features to release together and when. Using a release timeline roadmap allows you to plan and communicate when you’ll work on releases in the near future with clear timeframes to cross-functional teams, like sales and customer success. Stakeholders can see what’s slated for the next app version, quarterly release, monthly bug fix, etc. With product management software, like Productboard, larger product organizations with multiple teams releasing features on different cadences can create multiple release groups to organize these and keep cross-functional teams in the know.

Plus, release timeline roadmaps are useful for creating a low-maintenance tactical roadmap to track progress against essential deadlines. If you’re working in an Agile environment, you may resist planning releases much more than 4-6 weeks in advance for the reasons cited earlier. A release timeline roadmap allows you to keep using your specific release objects, while also conveying a time horizon with any essential milestones or company deadlines.

Product roadmaps are critical for your success. Creating a great product without a roadmap is like going on a road trip without a map: if you’re lucky, you might eventually get to your destination, but you’ll likely end up in some run-down motel. You’ll also probably have to stop a bunch of times to ask for directions from people who had no idea what kind of trip you initially planned. Unlike road trips, product roadmaps are all about the destination, not the journey.

You might also like

Why date-based timeline roadmaps are valuable for Agile product teams

How to build an outcome-driven product roadmap — a step-by-step guide

The building blocks of excellent product roadmaps

30+ Best PowerPoint Roadmap Templates 2024

If you’re working on a product or business roadmap presentation, we have handpicked some of the best PowerPoint roadmap templates you can use to design a killer slideshow for your presentation.

A roadmap presentation is one of the most effective methods of detailing the past, present, and future for product and business development.

Using a PowerPoint roadmap template will make the process of designing the slideshow much easier as they come packed with timelines, tables, infographics, icons, and much more to make your presentation look more professional.

Our collection of PowerPoint roadmap templates should have the perfect design for your presentation, along with a few helpful tips for creating a roadmap in PowerPoint .

How Does Unlimited PowerPoint Templates Sound?

Download thousands of PowerPoint templates, and many other design elements, with a monthly Envato Elements membership. It starts at $16 per month, and gives you unlimited access to a growing library of over 2,000,000 presentation templates, fonts, photos, graphics, and more.

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Explore PowerPoint Templates

Roadmapping – PowerPoint Roadmap Template

This professional PowerPoint template comes with multiple slides designed for presenting all kinds of roadmap presentations.

The template includes 21 unique slide designs filled with vector graphics, infographics, icons, and much more. It also comes in 5 different color schemes.

Why This Is A Top Pick

All of the shapes and tables used in this template are fully customizable. This will allow you to create more personalized roadmaps for your business presentations.

Minimal Roadmap PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint roadmap template features a set of clean and minimal slide designs. It comes with 20 unique slide templates you can easily customize to change colors, text, shapes, and more.

Project Status Report – PowerPoint Template

This template is a must-have for agencies and designers for showcasing project and product development to clients. The template comes with multiple slide layouts in 5 different color schemes you can easily customize to your preference.

Facebook Analytics PowerPoint Template

If you’re looking to create a Facebook marketing presentation, and need a roadmap template for the same, this PowerPoint product is the best contender for your cash. It features 50 unique slides, fully customizable in PowerPoint.

Eargo – Infographics PowerPoint Template

Eargo is a painstakingly designed roadmap PowerPoint template with more than 250 unique slides to choose from. It offers 12 infographic sections, ensuring you have everything you need to visualize your data in the best way possible.

Infographia PowerPoint Template

Infographia is a professional PowerPoint template with a layout that’s sure to make a statement. It features 60 custom slides (light and dark), free fonts, and a widescreen 16:9 ratio. We recommend you give Infographia a try and see for yourself the world of a difference it can make in taking your business to a new level.

Free Roadmap PowerPoint Template

Here we have an easy-to-use roadmap template for you to track your project’s progress, and communicate the same with your employees, clients, investors, and other stakeholders. It’s a ready-to-use template available for free download.

Roadie – PowerPoint Roadmap Template

Present your business plans, and sales roadmap in a sophisticated way with Roadie, a clean, and professional PowerPoint template that comes with 30 gorgeously crafted slides, free fonts, picture placeholder, and resizable and editable graphics.

Project Timeline – PowerPoint Infographics Template

If you are wanting a clean and professional template for your next roadmap presentation, you can’t go wrong with this project timeline ppt providing you with 40 unique, pixel-perfect infographic slides, KIKO icon shapes, and much more.

Von – PowerPoint Roadmap Template

Check out Von, a multipurpose PowerPoint template that consists of slides crafted with a lot of care and attention to detail. Whether you need a template for an advertising presentation or sales pitch, Von comes in very handy.

Project Roadmap PowerPoint Template

This presentation template has a modern and sleek design that instantly catches the eye and gets potential investors interested in your proposal. It contains 30 professional slides, picture placeholders, free fonts, and much more.

Monthly & Annual PowerPoint Template

Next up we have a clean and elegant roadmap PowerPoint template that you’ll be hard-pressed to not consider. It consists of 57 slide designs that can be completely customized to suit your brand needs and your personal preferences.

Leo – PowerPoint Roadmap Template

Leo is a beautiful, sophisticated PowerPoint template featuring 65 total slides out of which 10 are timeline and roadmap slides that can be edited to your liking. A great option for a wide range of creative and professional applications!

Business plan PowerPoint Roadmap Template

Next up we have a modern presentation template for showcasing your business plan to potential clients and get their approval in just a couple of minutes. It features a massive collection of 100 slides, a range of infographics, and color themes.

Web Design PowerPoint Roadmap Template

If you are a web designer, this Powerpoint template can go a long way in helping you win potential clients. It consists of timeline and roadmap slides, 5 pre-made color themes, free fonts, and a range of customizable elements.

Free Project Timeline PowerPoint Template

Our next option is a free template for PowerPoint that can help you manage and keep track of project timelines. The slides are available in light and dark backgrounds and can be completely edited to suit your needs. Grab it right now.

Free PowerPoint Roadmap Template

If you are wanting to get your hands on a great PowerPoint roadmap template without spending a penny, consider this option containing virtually everything you need to create a linear visualization of your data.

A useful PowerPoint template that comes filled with lots of infographics and tables for making impactful roadmap presentations. This template includes 30 unique slide designs in 10 different color schemes and in both light and dark color themes.

Agile Development – PowerPoint Template

Agile development is quite popular among modern businesses, especially among startups. This PowerPoint template will allow you to create roadmap presentations to showcase your agile development strategies. The template includes 20 master slide layouts.

Product Roadmap – PowerPoint Template

This premium PowerPoint template is made specifically for crafting roadmap presentations for product development. The template includes 20 unique slide designs that are also available in 5 different color schemes.

Free Roadmap Diagrams for PowerPoint

This free roadmap PowerPoint template features 8 unique slides with modern diagram designs you can use to create a simple roadmap presentation for your project. It includes infographics and icon packs as well.

Free Creative Timeline PowerPoint Template

Another simple free PowerPoint template featuring 6 unique slides. This template comes with multiple timeline slides for crafting project and product roadmaps. It also includes master slide layouts and image placeholders.

Cytrex Business Plan – PowerPoint Template

Crytex is a modern PowerPoint template that features a set of slides designed for crafting business plans. You can also easily edit the slides to create roadmap presentations as well. The template includes more than 200 unique slides in 30 color schemes.

Modern Timeline PowerPoint Template

This creative PowerPoint template comes filled with timeline slides that are perfect for crafting effective product roadmaps. The template lets you choose from 30 unique slide designs that are available in 7 pre-made color themes.

Timeline 2.0 – Multipurpose PowerPoint Template

Timeline 2.0 is a professional PowerPoint template that comes with 50 unique timeline slide designs. You can use these slides to design various roadmap presentations and slideshows. It comes in both static and animated versions as well.

Business Plan 3.0 – PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is most suitable for designing a presentation to showcase your business plan and roadmaps. It includes 40 unique slide designs that can be easily customized to your preference.

Monthly Planner – Business PowerPoint Template

Despite its name this PowerPoint template can be used to design much more than monthly plans. It includes 50 unique slide designs in 10 color schemes you can edit to create roadmaps and business plan presentations.

Business Roadmap – Free PowerPoint Template

This is a free PowerPoint template you can use to design professional roadmap presentations for all kinds of businesses, agencies, and companies. It includes 10 unique slide layouts with editable designs.

This free PowerPoint template features a set of unique slide designs that are ideal for making creative roadmap presentations. It includes 5 slide layouts you can edit with PowerPoint and Keynote.

Leave a lasting impression on your stakeholders with this beautifully designed PowerPoint roadmap template that is not just easy to edit but also fun to play around with all the amazing features it offers.

Tips for Creating a Roadmap in PowerPoint

Roadmap presentations are a type of presentation that needs to be made differently than other PowerPoint presentations. Follow these tips to create more effective roadmap slideshows.

1. Showcase a Timeline

A roadmap presentation is comprised of many things, including a story, strategy, reports, and more. Another important part that should be included is a timeline.

Whether it’s for product development or business projections, adding a timeline to your roadmap can make the entire presentation easier to understand and more entertaining as well.

2. Add Object and Transition Animations

Animations can be your best friend when designing roadmap presentations. Especially when showcasing timelines and product roadmaps, you can use object and transition animations to reveal features one at a time and make each slide transition smoothly throughout the presentation.

3. Use Infographics

Just as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can use pictures, specifically infographics to your advantage to showcase your strategies and roadmap while visualizing different parts in more detail. So make sure to pick a PowerPoint template that comes with editable infographics.

4. Use Only the Appropriate Colors

Be mindful when using colors in roadmap presentations. Especially describing different aspects of a roadmap, try not to use too many colors as some colors tend to show up brighter than others. Instead, use a subtle color palette throughout the presentation.

For more great templates, check out our best business PowerPoint templates collection.

Product Roadmap Template

Make your next product roadmap presentation your most impressive one yet with our customizable template. Perfect for bringing your vision to life, this product roadmap template has all the essential elements for a successful pitch: vision and strategy, goals and objectives, launch timelines, and more. 

Even better? This Beautiful.ai template is already professionally designed and will come together in just minutes – helping you get your product roadmap off the ground. Whether you’re pitching to investors or training an in-house development team, you can easily tailor our product roadmap template to any audience. 

Our product roadmap template can also help you:

• Pitch new products to investors and customers
• Visualize the trajectory of research and development work
• Inform and educate your sales team of up-and-coming products

Master your next development presentation with our project roadmap template

As you bring your product roadmap to life, don’t forget that you can tap into Beautiful.ai’s additional templates and designs to create additional elements like Gantt charts, flowcharts, infographics, and more – all with a few clicks. With our project roadmap template, you’ll get access to 10 customizable slides that outline all the details necessary for your presentation. Those slides include:

Pro tips to create an impactful project roadmap template

Ready to use this template to create your roadmap presentation? Here are some tips to keep in mind:

Let audiences know what to expect upfront and throughout your presentation with an agenda slide and section break slides.

Use our library of templates to easily add new slides and create different versions of your presentation. That way, you can tailor each to your various audiences, like upper management, the marketing department, sales teams, and product developers.

Don’t bog down your presentation with text-heavy slides. Diversify your content by using elements like photos, videos, icons, summary slides, diagrams, and more.

Successful product roadmaps are tactful and detailed, but that shouldn’t dim the excitement. Don’t be afraid to add some energy and flair to your presentation.

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Keep all stakeholder up to speed with our pre-built templates optmized for team meetings and collaboration. From setting the agenda to collaborating on the presentation, you'll be prepared to present with this team stand-up template.

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A mood board presentation is a compilation of images and words to represent ideas for a project or business. Put your inspiration in one place with our mood board presentation template.

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What Is A Product Roadmap? Guide To Creating A Product Roadmap

This blog aims to clarify the significance of roadmaps in Product development. It provides a comprehensive insight into different roadmap types, their objectives, key components to incorporate, and the step-by-step process of creating roadmaps. You will coordinate your resources and product vision better to drive successful results.

It’s important to bring innovative features and products to market, focusing on the product and flawless execution. It can be challenging to decide what features to build next for a product when customers’ desires constantly change. Therefore, having a unique and different product strategy that convinces the internal stakeholders is vital for your success. A product roadmap is crucial in coordinating your resources and vision for the product to ensure that your development and product teams stay focused throughout the product life cycle and deliver results. 

This article will give you a complete guide about what is a product roadmap, how to build a product roadmap, and how to manage and present it effectively. It will also cover some product roadmap examples and templates at the end.

What is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap is a long-term visual depiction of your goals, priorities, and product development. It helps organize, encourages agreement, and informs all organization members about important short and long-term goals and decisions.

Product managers can effectively outline a project’s development using roadmaps. It assists with project control, time, money, and resource allocation.

Even if you have a fantastic product design, it needs a proper roadmap and plan. Following a thorough roadmap, transform your product vision and strategy into concrete projects and activities your team can work on daily. It is also called your strategic vision, which clearly outlines the products you are creating and the reasons behind their development.

Product roadmaps are relatively high-level compared to strategy plans, which concentrate on the specific activities needed during product development. A helpful roadmap covers every possible query that could come up while developing a new product. To guarantee the product’s success, it must be adaptable enough to any changes that may arise during the process.

Why is a Product Roadmap important?

Let us discuss its importance. Roadmaps are practical tools for communication. But there are a few more significant reasons why adopting one is essential: 

• It supports your plan and vision: First and foremost, roadmaps are communication tools. They are the only reliable source of information for anyone who needs clarification about your product vision and priorities.
• It plans actions to implement your strategy: Roadmaps are thorough yet maintain enough abstraction for general understanding. They assist in concentrating on crucial tasks without getting entangled in minor details.
• Builds trust: A roadmap helps foster trust and confidence in your organization from top to bottom.
• Enhances planning & discussions: A roadmap is more of a conversation than a set of rules. It enables everyone to share input, raise concerns, and ask questions upfront, saving time and resources.
• It unites your team: Teams united by a common goal and aligning with their business’s vision operate more profitably and productively. A roadmap is one of the most crucial tools for inspiring everyone for the future and having all of them on the same page.

Who uses a Product Roadmap?

Before jumping into how to build a product roadmap, it is vital to understand who uses it. This will help you and your team to comprehend it better: 

Business owners and managers create roadmaps to explain product strategies, tools, and efforts to external stakeholders and product developers. They are essentially the only document that will keep a product’s development on course and, for the most part, guarantee that all parties involved are in agreement. You can use it with other business plans, such as business and marketing strategies. They can guide you in expanding your marketing plan .

What makes a good Product Roadmap?

A well-designed roadmap provides a high-level, visual summary of your project’s objectives, timeframe, long-term course, and future iteration plans. Using roadmaps, teams overseeing product management assign team members to each project stage. In addition to successfully prioritizing project activities, you can achieve it by doing the following things:

• Monitor the overall development toward the final product objective.
• It must facilitate open communication and transparency amongst internal and external stakeholders.
• It must foster substantial team agreement and knowledge on the path of the product.
• Organize assignments and endeavors among groups.  

What to include in a Product Roadmap?

Roadmaps can be complicated to make; therefore, before knowing how to build a product roadmap , you must understand what to include in it. They vary based on the kind of product, the industry it belongs to, the size and composition of the product team, and the specific requirements of the business. Although roadmaps may vary, they typically share some common elements:

Product features: It refers to the tasks a product must complete and the issues it must resolve. Usually, the development team selects which features to add after reviewing customer feedback.

Storylines: User stories are the fundamental building blocks of a roadmap. Their purpose is to describe the ultimate purpose of a product feature from the point of view of the end users.

Product releases: As stated in the roadmap, users have access to new features during scheduled product releases. Postponing the implementation of one item until the completion of other items can enable the incorporation of multiple features in a single release.

Product initiatives: These exemplify how groups of tasks, projects, features, and stories work together to achieve specific product objectives. Initiatives help focus on the goal-centric efforts of the teams.

Product goals: They describe the objectives a company or development team aims to accomplish with a specific product. It is helpful to have these goals in mind to develop products.

Product timelines: A product roadmap timeline lists the teams and individuals responsible for each process. It also mentions the stakeholders influenced by various updates during the product development. It will also typically include the dates connected with each milestone.

Cost: It is essential to include the estimated development costs while making your roadmap. You can adjust if expenses are high or resources are scarce for successful execution.

What you shouldn’t add to a Product Roadmap?

Here are six of the most frequent mistakes that larger product teams and product managers make with their roadmaps: 

1. Adding a schedule for the product roadmap

It is not a good idea to center your roadmap around dates. This approach, sometimes called a “timeline roadmap,” frequently leads to planning done well in advance. When your team commits to timelines, it loses its ability to adjust, modify, and evolve. Of course, you must be flexible enough to adapt to anything—changes in the market, events in the world, etc. But, making too many plans too far in advance wastes energy and forces you to construct things that may not be your top priorities.

2. Overly focused on the client

The customer feedback characterizes effective product management, but there is a limit. Suppose a customer needs to influence you. In that case, your roadmap will become a list of feature requests rather than a list of solutions you will develop. As a product team, you need to respond more quickly. Creating minor revisions or adjusting features according to user preferences will consume your time.

3. An excessive reliance on data

While being excessively reliant on data is possible, more often than not, there isn’t a statistically significant result to support that Option A is superior to Option B or vice versa. A large number of users or extensive testing is required to get a dependable result, which takes a lot of time. So, avoid relying heavily on data when you’re a small startup trying to gain momentum or move quickly. Large multinational firms, on the other hand, have the financial resources to advance slowly. So, it is essential to make this choice wisely.

4. Establishing idea-level priorities

All product teams need better prioritization, regardless of how good their ideas, research, or backlog grooming are. The bottom line is to concentrate on the problems that require solving rather than your ideas. Moving the boulders before the pebbles is what happens when you prioritize at the problem level. The tiny details can fall into place and be taken care of when the more significant details are correctly positioned and fit together. 

5. A list of features makes up the roadmap

Many product managers view their job as keeping the development team occupied. The product team appears to fill the pipeline while the development team waits for the work. In reality, PMs must collaborate with the whole team, consider all possible options from an integrated perspective, and design experiments to address more significant issues.

You can approach product planning from various perspectives by stepping back from features and functionalities. Does the product need a fresh positioning, or must we develop a new feature? Could we utilize other marketing materials on the site to change how the service is packaged or priced? Ask these questions before going ahead!

6. Don’t reveal the product roadmap

Product teams often create roadmaps too frequently and restrict their use to internal purposes. You can use them for external purposes also. You can also make different versions and distribute them separately! Include Every little detail in the internal version. It ensures that internal stakeholders know the issues, the reasons behind them, the methods you use to solve them, and the results you achieve.

How to build a Product Roadmap?

You can achieve a roadmap that is effective and in line with your company’s overall business plan by following a few crucial stages. It would help to clearly understand your desired end product before creating your final roadmap. It includes determining the essential demands of your target market, pinpointing the value proposition of your product, and identifying what your client wants.

Additionally, a product strategy connected to your organization’s overarching business strategy and strategic goals is necessary to develop a roadmap successfully. Now let us see how to build a product roadmap and the steps involved in it: 

1. Incorporate User Stories to Determine Your Target Audience

Comprehending your target consumer base is crucial for creating a compelling product plan. It entails gathering input to determine their requirements, preferences, and pain points. Remember this knowledge as you build new products. Subsequently, create user stories to understand how users perceive the value of your product. Through a comprehensive understanding of target consumers’ wants and preferences, user stories can assist in the formulation of roadmaps. 

2. Set Features in Order of Priority According to Client Needs

Once you have a solid understanding of the needs of your target market, prioritizing your product features by those needs can be time-consuming. To avoid this, you must prioritize your development efforts by determining the most crucial features to benefit your target clients.

For example, when developing a B2B sales tool and focusing on small firms as your market, consider prioritizing lead management capabilities in your product. These features would streamline the process for small sales teams to collect contact details and track previous interactions with potential customers.

3. Choose Which Performance Measures Are Most Important for Your Product

Determining the critical indicators to gauge impact is essential to ensuring your product roadmap is doing well. Imagine that you are creating a plan for an app that facilitates teamwork. Key performance indicators that could be most important for the product are: 

Tracking active users, daily logins, and the amount of time spent on the app by each user. All these help to gauge user engagement. Use the amount of paid memberships or in-app purchases to track revenue growth. Use Surveys or app review analysis to measure customer attitude and feedback. By selecting and monitoring critical metrics, the product team may better understand how their roadmap affects the app’s success and make informed decisions to enhance it.

4. Establish Tasks and Deadlines in a Realistic Timeline

It’s time to create a workable schedule for your product development process based on your established product strategy and feature prioritization. To build a timetable, list all the tasks to complete, rank them in order of importance, and calculate the approximate time needed to finish each activity. Using this data, list the precise dates for every task.

It offers checkpoints for assessing progress and making updates to ensure the timeline can easily accommodate modifications and adjustments. Designating particular team members for each task can foster a sense of accountability and ownership. Finally, share the timeline with all parties involved to ensure clarity on tasks and deadlines.

5. Seek Input From Interested Parties

Feedback from essential stakeholders, such as your product team, investors, and the C-suite, should be solicited throughout the product development process. You may use this input to understand your product’s alignment with your company’s overarching business plan and pinpoint areas on your roadmap that require work.

6. Edit as per User Input

Ultimately, you will change your roadmap according to stakeholder input. To keep your product on track, you may need to adjust your timeframe, rearrange features, or take other necessary actions. For instance, stakeholders may complain that the budget for your roadmap is excessively high. Consequently, you can remove some elements from the feature list and update it with the most crucial features.

Product Roadmap Examples

Let’s see 3 product roadmap examples below:

Now-next-later product roadmap

The main feature of the now-next-later roadmap is its simplicity. It facilitates task prioritization. These roadmaps show the relative importance of phases, features, and tasks. Understanding how the work moves forward through the now-next-later roadmap benefits each team member. Moreover, it is simple to comprehend and develop this blueprint. You can use it in meetings with a big group of people or when presenting to clients.

Feature-oriented product roadmap

A product’s feature roadmap lets you keep track of its development and delivery while outlining its main features. It can help team members and clients understand the next course of action.

As a result, customers will recognize the worth of the product, and the team will also be able to understand the development process. You can allocate resources within the organization and prioritize feature releases by implementing a feature-based roadmap. However, the future maintenance of this kind of roadmap will take time as it requires regular updates from user preferences and technical advancements.

Goal-oriented product roadmap example

A goal-oriented roadmap makes your approach easier to understand and explains it clearly. The objectives help logically organize information and provide an explanation for each feature. Executives would find great value in viewing this type of map. It arises from a heightened focus on the broader picture and less attention to the specific qualities of the product. A map with specific goals will show whether the product can live up to the hype.

By understanding the above roadmap examples ,  you can learn which roadmap suits each situation and how to improve it. 

Product Roadmap Templates by SlideUpLift

SlideUpLift provides a wide selection of expertly designed PowerPoint templates . With a dedication to streamlining the presentation design process, SlideUpLift enables users to construct robust, eye-catching presentations quickly and easily. SlideUpLift offers an extensive library of templates for various presenting requirements, catering to a vast clientele, including educators and business people.

Product Roadmap PowerPoint template

This PowerPoint template provides an elegant and adaptable layout to highlight the product journey of your business. You can use five boxes to list your product strategy’s components, checkpoints, or stages. You can briefly emphasize critical points in your product development plan. Underneath the feature boxes is a strategy that covers the entire year. This timeline provides a concise and organized summary of the following year’s milestones and objectives by visually representing the historical flow of your product plan. 

Product Roadmap Journey PowerPoint template 

The Roadmap Journey PowerPoint template provides a visually appealing and dynamic style to demonstrate the strategic progression of your business. This template has five editable boxes with the default labels – People, Operations, Innovation, Technology, and Community. There is space beside each box to explain them. You can customize these components to your company’s specific requirements and goals. 

Animated Product Roadmap PowerPoint template

The Animated Product Roadmap PowerPoint template provides a dynamic representation of the development of your project in multiple dimensions. The template has four rows (Front End, Back End, Analytics, and Marketing) and four columns (Backlog, In Design, In Progress, and Completed).

This grid format gives you a thorough picture of the development lifecycle, enabling you to monitor and organize tasks or features at each project stage. With the help of animated elements, this template gives your presentation a lively touch. In addition to improving the aesthetic appeal, the animation transition between columns can assist in illustrating how work moves from the backlog to completion.

Product Roadmap PowerPoint template (Option 2)

This PowerPoint template offers an easy-to-use and efficient framework for tracking progress across four quarters. With its well-organized sections, each symbolizing a quarter of the year, this template lets you quickly describe and illustrate the project or development milestones for each time frame. This simple yet adaptable template makes it simple to showcase your roadmap, emphasizing quarterly development so your audience can quickly understand the timeframe and accomplishments.

Product Roadmap Yearly PowerPoint template

This template offers a comprehensive view of a 9-year timeline, with each year associated with a specific theme. The default themes for each year are structured as follows: Innovate, People, Process, Launch, Quality, Process, Features, UI/UX, and Channels. The dedicated space for each year allows you to enter additional information, milestones, or details specific to that particular year and its corresponding theme. This template provides: 

• A strategic overview of the product development journey.
• Aligning yearly objectives with key focus areas.
• Making it an effective tool for presenting long-term plans and goals for your product or project.

How to create a Product Roadmap using MS PowerPoint/Google Slides?

Above, we have already discussed some product roadmap examples; now, let’s see how to create one. When making a roadmap in PowerPoint , you can experiment with various design components. You can include a variety of icons, shapes, and other elements in your roadmap presentation, depending on the presentation’s theme.

How to create a product roadmap in PowerPoint:

• Click the “New” tab and select “Blank Presentation” to open the blank PowerPoint presentation slide.
• Once you open the blank slide, two text fields will appear where you can provide the presentation’s title and subtitle. Remove both text areas to create a clear, blank, white presentation slide.
• Click the Insert tab to access the “Shapes” menu. In your slide, insert the “line” shape. Position it so that it is horizontal.
• After making your selection, choose the “Shape Format” option. To change the line’s color, use the Shape Outline option. You can thicken and increase the line’s weight by choosing the Weight option from the same drop-down menu.
• Select the oval shape by clicking the “Insert” menu again. Draw a little circle and position it at one end of the line while holding the shift and control buttons together.
• After selecting the circle, select “Shape Format.” Select the “Shape Fill” tab to alter the circle’s color to your preference.
• Select the hollow circle from the “Shape” menu. Draw a thinner line around the hollow circle and center it around the newly drawn circle. You can modify the hollow circle’s color using the Shape Fill tab. Click the “Ctrl+D” keyboard shortcut to select the hollow circle and copy it. Apply a different color and cover the hollow circle pattern you previously made. Press and hold the Ctrl and Shift buttons simultaneously to enlarge the second hollow circle.
• Make a copy of the straight line by selecting it. Select “Rotate” from the “Shape Format” tab. Choose “90° Rotate Right”. Place the vertical line precisely in the center of the hollow circle. You can resize the line by holding down the shift key.
• Select the arc shape from the Insert tab’s Shapes menu. After moving the yellow dot to form a circle, surround the hollow circle design we have created thus far. Drag the yellow dot to adjust the arc’s direction to match the blueprint design. The Shape Format option lets you modify the arc shape’s outline color and weight.
• Choose a circle that is oval-shaped. Drag it to the opposite end of the vertical line while holding down the Ctrl and Shift keys. Click on the Text Box tab from the Insert menu to add a text box. You can include as many text boxes as the design of your roadmap template requires.
• Choose the entire design. Drag it to the right to duplicate something while holding down the Ctrl and Shift keys. Adapt the horizontal line and text boxes to the needs of the design.
• Once all the elements have been duplicated and adjusted, alter the color of the shapes and lines. Select the Shape Format option. Please select the desired color from Shape Fill and use it to fill the shapes. Using the Shape Outline tab, alter the color of the lines.
• When you prepare the roadmap, save it and give it a file name for later usage. 

To simplify editing of the file in the future, save it in the “.pptm” format. Please save the file in.jpg.webp or.pdf format to print it if needed.

How to create a Product Roadmap using SlideUpLift?

Go through the steps below to create a roadmap using SlideUpLift:

• Go to the SlideUpLift website.
• Explore the collection of templates available on SlideUpLift.
• Choose a roadmap template that suits your presentation needs and goals.
• Download the selected template from SlideUpLift.
• Open the downloaded template in Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides.
• You can modify the template by altering it to your needs and filling in all the required details.
• You can also change the font and colors of the template according to your wish.
• Enhance the presentation by incorporating visuals such as charts, icons, or images to make the roadmap more engaging.
• Review the entire presentation and make any necessary edits to ensure clarity.
• Save your customized roadmap presentation.

How to prioritize features for the Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap gives your team direction by synthesizing a wide range of inputs, including internal limitations, market research, customer feedback, and resources, into a prioritized list of what needs to be built next. Prioritize efforts based on various criteria to benefit your users directly, build customer value and loyalty, and promote long-term growth.

1. Take Client opinions

Listening to present and potential customers is one of the most important aspects of developing customer-centric solutions that appeal to your target user. Actively seek and analyze input from existing and churned consumers to prioritize products and enhancements that address the most crucial pain points and unmet needs. By taking this stage in the product development process, you can prevent the release of a product that your clients will find unappealing or, worse, unlikable.

2. Consider User behavior data

It’s a mistake to consider just what your customers say; you also need to consider what they do. Data on user behavior provides insightful information on how users interact with your product and what features encourage the most engagement. Understanding user behavior helps you prioritize features and enhancements by pointing out actionable facts, trends, patterns, and bottlenecks that could affect the overall user experience.

3. Research on consumers and markets

To make your product stand out in the market, you must first understand it. By conducting market research, your product team will better grasp customer expectations and what products to build. As a product manager, by integrating the results of market research into your prioritization process, you can make well-informed decisions that meet the needs of the present and future. It ensures your product stays competitive and relevant for the longer run.

4. Consider technical viability

When prioritizing a product roadmap, product managers must consider the accumulation of greater technical debt and technical feasibility. By taking this into account, you can be sure that your development efforts are practical and won’t adversely affect your current technology while being produced within an acceptable time frame and using available resources. Examine any technological constraints and evaluate the enhancements scale. For example, you may discover that adding a new feature necessitates significantly reworking your current IT infrastructure because of technical debt. Depending on your startup’s circumstances, this may or may not be worth it.

5. Know your Resources and Limitations

The roadmap prioritization method would matter less if you had limitless funds and time to produce anything you wanted all at once. However, as a startup, this is most certainly not the case. Consider every possible restriction that can make it more difficult for you to develop essential features and scale product development.

6. Estimate impact and value to business

Pay attention to the elements that will yield the highest return on investment. The ultimate objective of roadmap prioritization should be to maximize business impact while utilizing the least amount of resources and effort possible for your product organization. Your company strategy, key performance indicators (KPIs), and high-level business objectives will determine how your product organization evaluates and affects business value.

7. Assess the possible dangers

Product managers should consider risks and potential benefits when evaluating new features. To reduce potential hazards, assess the drawbacks of creating a new feature. Every element of your product presents certain risks, such as the possibility that users won’t like it, it will consume more team resources, or it will make your product more complicated. While a certain level of risk shouldn’t hinder you from including a feature in your product roadmap, it’s essential to assess the associated risks beforehand.

8. Consider Input from stakeholders

It’s normal for non-members of your product organization to disagree with you on the priorities for the product plan. An investor may insist on developing a feature your significant rival already possesses. Instead of creating a visually appealing new release, your support and sales staff may prioritize addressing critical issues that negatively impact the customer experience. In addition, your real clients may ask you to change an existing feature to suit their requirements better. Hence, it would help if you considered your stakeholder’s input.

How to present a Product Roadmap?

To make the most of your presentation, consider in advance how you will convey your roadmap:

1. Ensure your roadmap aligns with the organization’s overarching strategy and objectives:

Your roadmap needs to align with your company’s objectives and strategy. Ensure that you have completed all the work required to align your roadmap and product vision with the plan and objectives of the company. Make it apparent how your future goals align with those of the company. You will get major stakeholders on board with your strategy if it aligns with the organization’s direction.

2. Determine the impact and areas of interest of your stakeholders

Gain a thorough understanding of stakeholders’ interests in your product. Determine who your stakeholders are and take some time to know. It will help you to speak with them more confidently. The interest and influence matrix is a straightforward and effective method for handling this. Using stakeholder mapping, you can decide who to communicate your roadmap to. Consider who you want in the room (or on the call) and whether you have everyone you need for support. Examine your stakeholder map to help you make informed decisions regarding the guest list.

3. Show compassion for your stakeholders.

Diverse stakeholders possess distinct objectives, incentives, and obstacles. Before your session, take the time to get acquainted with the stakeholders. This effort will help build trust and enhance your understanding of them. Keep in mind that formalized leadership presentations are more appropriate for this purpose. Suppose you already know the close team members you’re presenting to. In that case, you might not need to conduct additional interviews. However, consider arranging some stakeholder interviews if you still need to identify your stakeholders. By doing so, you’ll be able to understand them better. Interviews with stakeholders may be informal. 

These are just talks to learn about the difficulties and motives of stakeholders. Stakeholder interviews will assist you in comprehending the organization’s basic structure, how your work fits into the larger picture, and the procedures involved in getting different project components approved.

4. Obtain support from your stakeholders

You may already be familiar with the objectives of the stakeholders. Even so, one-on-one sessions are crucial for planning before presenting your Plan. To avoid surprises, proactively share your roadmap in advance, even through an informal team sync. By engaging in these early discussions, you can more effectively anticipate feedback and identify potential obstacles before your formal presentation. It will be beneficial to consider the effects of your strategy on stakeholders and other departments within your company. Before presenting your roadmap, try to gain support from stakeholders. Recall that the purpose of your presentation is to foster alignment. If you’ve already established buy-in 1:1, you’ll have a far higher chance of being supported by many stakeholders.

How to Manage a Product Roadmap?

Strategic planning and cooperation are necessary for managing a product roadmap effectively. Establishing precise goals and feature prioritization according to value and strategic alignment should come first. Make a visual roadmap with important releases and milestones indicated. Involve stakeholders and cross-functional teams to get feedback and ensure it aligns with business objectives. 

Use agile approaches to promote adaptability and responsiveness, and update the plan frequently to consider modifications to the market, consumer input, or priorities. Make sure to explain the roadmap in detail, emphasizing how each item fits into the larger plan for the product. Organize feature dependencies, monitor critical performance metrics, and modify the roadmap as necessary. Gather user input regularly to help with decision-making and have review sessions with the product team to evaluate development and discuss issues. 

These guidelines will help you manage product development challenges and keep your roadmap a flexible and helpful tool for accomplishing company goals.

What are the best practices for a Product Roadmap?

Creating a roadmap is a process that requires constant attention and should be rooted in the culture of your product team. Here are a few easy strategies to position yourself for success:

• Provide your viewers with as much information as is necessary.
• Maintain a balanced focus on short-term strategies and how they relate to long-term objectives in the roadmap.
• Regularly review roadmaps and make essential revisions if there are any changes in plans.
• Ensure that the roadmap is accessible to all parties and that they check it frequently.
• Maintain communication with all stakeholders to guarantee alignment.

This article provides valuable insights to enhance team coordination by outlining essential elements for your roadmap. You have to make sure your roadmaps are adaptable. A well-structured roadmap is instrumental in fostering the growth of sales and profitability for your small business or startup, facilitating successful product development.

With the best roadmap templates available, SlideUpLift can help you improve your product presentations. SlideUpLift provides templates that blend style and functionality, making them ideal for managing agile processes, planning product development, or exhibiting technological advancements.

It is a visual tool that outlines a product’s strategic vision and direction over time, highlighting key milestones and features.

How to Create a Product Roadmap?

Simply define objectives, prioritize features, and use tools like Gantt charts or specialized software to visualize the plan.

What Does a Product Roadmap Look Like?

It resembles a timeline with phases, milestones, and features, visually representing a product’s development journey.

What are Some Common Pitfalls Of Product Roadmap?

Common pitfalls include overcommitting to features, neglecting user feedback, unclear prioritization, and failing to adapt to changing circumstances.

Where to Find the Best Product Roadmap Templates?

SlideUpLift offers a diverse and professionally curated collection for creating visually impactful and customizable presentations tailored to specific product development goals.

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Strategic Product Roadmap

Strategic product roadmap presentation, premium google slides theme and powerpoint template.

Sometimes, one of our designers thinks of something in a more literal way and then reflects it in a template... But we say that's a good chance of impressing the audience with an unexpected creation! Product roadmaps are like the strategic direction chosen for your product—the path your company will follow when it comes to creating and launching a product. Where's the catch? This template has lots of slides depicting actual colorful roads! Give a new twist to these corporate presentations and put your trust in the surprise factor!

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