Roadmap

Last Updated on February 17, 2023 by admin

Planning a perfect product roadmap does not solely involve random energy outbursts. It needs elaborate planning. You weigh in all your moves and analyze them to ensure that each step takes you closer to your goal. Prioritizing is also essential as it ensures that only the helpful feature proceeds to the final product. Following a perfect product, a roadmap breeds an impressive end product. But how can you create a perfect product roadmap?

Product Roadmaps, what do they entail?

Product roadmaps are simply visual summaries (high level) that map out the overall goal of a business. They also include details on how you wish to achieve this goal as the owner of the business. Product roadmaps bring out:

  • The product that you are building
  • Why you are building this particular product
  • The steps that you must undertake to develop your product

Things that you can achieve via product roadmaps

Following is the list of what you can achieve utilizing product roadmaps:

  1. Define your product’s strategy and vision
  2. Prepare guidelines to help execute your strategies
  3. Get all your stakeholder on board with your plan
  4. Plan and discuss every scenario before you undertake it.

Why should you utilize Product Roadmaps?

For one, product roadmaps make explaining complex issues to stakeholders easy due to their visual factors. What’s more, it helps your stakeholders get to know your strategy and your vision.

Here is a list of more reasons why you should highly consider creating a roadmap for your product:

  1. Product roadmaps help you communicate your production direction visually; this helps your teamwork on the right things
  2. Product roadmaps also bring out the product’s bigger picture, which motivates your team members. The team hence focuses on the tasks that lead to better product output. The results of utilizing product roadmaps for this purpose include:
  3. Avoiding any scope creeps and
  4. The decision-making process becomes easy and fast
  5. Product roadmaps help you communicate your progress with your team leaders in an understandable way. In doing so, you ensure a smooth flow in terms of phase transitions.

Overall, product roadmaps

  1. Avoid chaos,
  2. Wastage of energy,
  3. And saves time.
  4. It also ensures that you launch your product on time, ultimately bringing in profits.

How can you Generate your Product’s Roadmap?

To generate your product’s roadmap, follow the following steps:

Understand your products vision

Individuals who do not know where they are going can never expect to reach their destination. Therefore, it would help if you understand your product’s vision first before moving on to the next stage.

To understand your product’s vision, try to answer the following question as per your product:

  1. Why this particular product?
  2. Why now?
  3. Who will buy your product?
  4. What are your target pain points?
  5. Is the market favorable to your product’s vision?
  6. Do you have a strategic goal that you wish to solve using your product?

These questions help you vet the viability of your product in the market, and they also help you generate a strategy. Your strategy will help you move in a calculated manner and ultimately lead you toward your product.

Define your products strategy

Now that you have your product’s vision on check time, move on to the strategy. Your product’s strategy helps you describe your idea to your stakeholders. Your stakeholders then utilize this strategy to decide whether or not to invest their money in your product’s development. Therefore the strategy has to be strong, and it should clearly show the yield of a good product.

A perfect strategy does the following:

  • Answers the questions that we went through earlier on
  • Generates a pretty solid base from which you can build your product
  • Convinces your stakeholders to invest in your product

Selecting the proper product roadmap for your product

Product roadmaps come in different variations. Be free to go for the one that is okay with your product description. Some common variations include:

  1. Portfolio roadmap – brings out planned product releases across many products in one view
  2. Strategy roadmap – It communicates the amount of effort that your team requires to put in to produce your product in time
  3. Release roadmap – bring out the activities that your team has to complete to produce your product
  4. Feature roadmap – brings out a timeline that displays the time at which your production team will produce a new feature. It is crucial in terms of updating customers on updates.

Deciding on what to feature in your product’s roadmap

Scrutiny is pretty essential when it comes to creating a perfect roadmap for your product. It filters out all unnecessary features leaving only those features that are vital to your product.

Your product’s roadmap should hence only include:

  1. Your products end vision/goal
  2. An overview that describes what you and your team need to carry out
  3. A sufficient timeline that caters to each product phase
  4. Brief details on the assistance that you will require and from who
  5. Markers to help you track the process
  6. Metrics to help you measure your product’s production rate

Define the Products Backlog

A product backlog is a list (ordered) of infrastructure changes, features, and other essential activities that your team must undertake to create your product.

Prioritizing is essential in product backlogs. You can follow the following steps to prioritize your product backlog:

Complexity versus value quadrant

Select the elements in the backlog that have the most complex implementation procedure and the highest business value. These elements should be highly prioritized.

Weighted scoring

Once you have the elements that have the most complex implementation and the highest business value, now weigh in the scoring factor. That means that you should check on the elements that lead to a more objective and concrete result. Therefore, these elements should have an even higher priority.

Kano model

Check on the elements that produce the best customer satisfaction, then check on the amount of effort that they require. Prioritize your elements further using this model.

Opportunity scoring

Measure how crucial new elements are to your customer using opportunity scoring.

Moscow prioritization

Utilize the MOSCOW prioritization, which is an acronym for:

  1. M – stands for elements that are a must-have (crucial elements)
  2. S – are elements that you should have (secondary elements)
  3. C –could have elements (they are optional)
  4. W – won’t have (Non-doable element, which might be undertaken later on)

Read More: 14 Marketing and Promotion Ideas for Retail Stores

Features to User Stories

Fitting product features into sprints can be challenging as most of them are complex. However, if you break it down into smaller chunks, they become simpler to undertake.

Follow the following procedure to subdivide your complex features into smaller chunks:

  1. Go through the workflow steps one by one
  2. Categories the features into unhappy and happy flows
  3. Break down different features using their designated parameters or the “data type” that they return
  4. Break down more features using operations such as delete, update, read or create

Other methods of subdividing your features exist, and they include:

  • Usability requirements
  • Acceptance criteria
  • Platforms
  • Roles
  • Test cases

Present your Products Roadmap to your Stakeholders

Stakeholders that are most likely to review your product roadmap include:

Executives –

focus more on products strategy and profitability

Marketing –

focus more on the product’s features, your product’s uniqueness in the market, and the user stories

Sales –

focus more on the timeline

Customer service –

the customer service team has to be well equipped to handle your product’s requirements

Agile team –

Your agile team includes:

  • Designers
  • Engineers
  • Developers
  • Testers

or Hire remote developers, they all understand your strategy and provide feedback during the development cycle.

Customer –

the customer vets your idea and provides crucial feedback that you can use. They are also crucial for testing the UX.

Tweak the Product Roadmap and Measure your Progress

Your product road map has to be flexible. It should change and adapt to future changes.

Once you complete your sprints, you should ensure that you measure your work’s outcome. Doing so helps you keep tabs on the product’s development to ensure that you are moving towards your goal.

Conclusion

If you are looking to produce a high-quality product in the shortest time possible, creating a product road map is essential with the help of software development company. The product roadmap helps you strategize your production procedure and move in a deliberate manner. In doing so, you get to produce your product on time and in the highest quality possible.

Apart from this if you are interested to know about Why Custom Retail Packaging Boxes are important for retail products? then visit our Business category.

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