A product roadmap is a plan for your technology solutions that matches your development initiatives with your short and long-term business goals. A roadmap shows what your priority enhancements to your product are for the next 12-month cycle, usually broken out into a quarterly calendar.  

When developing your product roadmap, you should include input from a diverse group of internal and external stakeholders, collecting requirements and features from customers, partners, sales, support, operations, management, engineering, and product management teams.  

Brainstorming a variety of stakeholder perspectives sharing their priorities, biggest pain points, and the opportunities they see ahead of your product will help you develop a strong roadmap.  

What are your company’s goals? 

Over the next year, what are the highest priority goals for the organization? Are you striving to retain current customers? Is your focus to grow new business within the same target audience you’re currently serving? Or are you looking to increase sales within a complementary, yet different marketplace? Discuss and write down the primary goals for the next year, as well as the longer-term vision (3-5 years) for the company.  

What are the strengths of your current product? 

Discuss what customers like about your product and how your product is currently successfully addressing a market need. What value proposition does your product have? What differentiates it in the marketplace from the products of your competitors? Is there a way to expand on or strengthen those capabilities? As you brainstorm developmental priorities for your product, strive to sustain your product strengths. For example, often times successful technology products are user friendly and intuitive to use. If you expand your features over the next year, consider how you can do so without overcomplicating the user experience. Your list of strengths will help you create your acceptance criteria later on in your development process.  

What are the weaknesses of your current product?  

Have an honest discussion of the product weaknesses you’ve come across. Is there a competitor who your current or prospective customers choose over you? What is it they’re looking for that you aren’t offering? Are there common customer service requests that you can alleviate? Are there administrative complexities you can simplify for company scalability and more efficient internal operations? Deciding how to invest in new feature development vs. backend improvements and bug fixes is a common juggling act for new technology companies, so strive to quantify the impact of your weaknesses. For example, can you count the number of requests you had in relation to a specific issue, or do you have deal size estimates for sales opportunities that ultimately decided to pursue another provider? Aim to inform your decisions with data. 

Now that you’ve discussed your goals, strengths, and weaknesses, you are ready to start identifying your developmental priorities and product roadmap initiatives. Product development is expensive and time consuming, so you can’t do it all. Understanding where you want to go and where you currently stand is a critical starting point to strategically organizing and focusing your investment.