• What are product roadmap tools? 
• Why use product roadmap tools?
• Key features of the best product roadmap tools
• What are the alternatives to product roadmap tools? 
• What are the benefits of purpose-built product roadmap tools?
• Key considerations for choosing from the best product roadmap tools
• The best product roadmap tools 

So, let’s dive into the seven best product roadmap tools you should be considering in 2024 and how they can help you stay outcome-focused.

What are product roadmap tools? 

I’m going to assume you all know what a product roadmap is. Of course you do. You know you need a roadmap, you’re looking for the right tool to help you manage it. For anyone looking for clarity on what a product roadmap is just check out our Ultimate Guide to Product Roadmaps. 

But we’re here to talk about tools.

Product roadmap tools are designed to help Product Teams plan, communicate, and track their product strategy. They give you a clear visual of where your product is heading and how you’ll get there. But the best product roadmap tools go beyond just listing out features or release dates – they help connect your product strategy to your business goals and provide clear evidence to your stakeholders of why you have made the roadmapping decisions you have.

The best product roadmap tools help you communicate a roadmap that effectively answers questions like:

• How does this initiative align with our objectives?
• What customer problems are we solving with this update?
• What outcomes have we driven with each completed initiative?
• What stage of the development process is each initiative at? 
• Why has this initiative been prioritized over others?
• What different ideas have we explored for each problem area?
• How do we know the chosen idea is likely to be the best solution?

In short, the best product roadmap tools help you shift from feature factory mode into a more strategic approach, ensuring your team is working on the right things for the right reasons.

The best product roadmap tools don’t just help you communicate your strategic priorities in such a way that adds transparency to your decision-making process – although they certainly should do that. The best product roadmap tools also provide you with all the features and functionality to help you actually make those decisions, and then act on them. 

The best product roadmap tools will also help you:

• Prioritize your idea backlog to help you find candidates for your roadmap
• Link to your customer feedback so you can be sure you’re solving the right problems
• Speed up your ideation with AI assistance
• Generate supporting documentation 
• Collaborate with your teammates and stakeholders across your organization
• Capture all your product work and decision logs in one centralized place

Why use product roadmap tools?

Do you have to use a specific tool for your product roadmap? Can you not just draw it up on a piece of paper and be done with it? No. No you can’t. 

Because in Product Management, alignment is everything. The best product roadmap tools make sure everyone – from the developers to the executives to your customers – has a live and dynamic view of not just what you’re building, but why you’re building it. These tools give you a clear, shareable view of what’s in the pipeline and how it ties back to your broader business goals. 

A piece of paper on your desk doesn’t give anyone else visibility into your product strategy and progress. If your roadmap is not in an easily accessible and dynamic format, you’re going to spend every waking moment having to answer questions from stakeholders and teammates who have zero visibility of what is happening and why. 

Also, if your product roadmap is sitting there on that bit of paper, isolated and lonely on your desk, how often do you think you’ll be looking at it? 

Without your roadmap in a product roadmap tool – a central product tool in which you do most of your work –  it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind and lose sight of that bigger picture plan. Before you know it, you’re a Project Manager pushing through features and not a strategically focused Product Manager delivering impact. 

Key features of the best product roadmap tools

What should you expect from the best product roadmap tools? If you’re going out shopping for a roadmap tool, what’s on your must-have list? Let’s start with the minimum requirements and then list out the features you can expect from the very best product roadmap tools. 

The best product roadmap tools should have:

• Dynamic, interactive roadmaps
• Customizable roadmap views that let you create different versions with different levels of detail
• The ability to publish versions of your roadmap externally
• Integrations with the tools your wider organization use
• Connection to your customer feedback
• Collaboration tools 
• Integration with your product management workflow
• Connection to your idea backlog

The VERY best product roadmap tools will also have:

• Outcome-based roadmaps
• A hierarchy that enables you to stay flexible, work in an agile way and declare the problem to solve, not specific features
• AI assistance to help you work faster and smarter
• OKR management to keep you laser focused on driving outcomes
• Portfolio management and the ability to scale if your needs increase
• Collaboration tools that do not require stakeholders to log into the product roadmap tool, but add their contribution from the tools they already use

What are the alternatives to product roadmap tools? 

Spreadsheets and slide decks

We’ve already discussed the piece of paper. But surely no one would actually do that with their roadmap?! Some Product Managers, however, do use spreadsheets, slide decks and document files for their roadmaps. 

I know. Why would you ever do that? 

Spreadsheets, slide decks and documents are often static files, saved on a drive somewhere. They’re not dynamic and always up to date. The problems with this are extensive. You’ll be faced with endless versioning headaches and you can’t ever be confident everyone is looking at the most up-to-date version. You’ll have huge admin overheads, having to manually update your roadmap document all the time. You’ll end up having to repeatedly remind people where they can see the roadmap because no one ever remembers different filing systems or where something is saved. 

Even if you keep your spreadsheet or slide deck in the cloud and manage to remove the versioning headaches, how inspiring is a spreadsheet or presentation file ever going to be? There are better ways to visualize your product roadmap so people actually understand what they are looking at.

A product roadmap confined to a spreadsheet or similar document is also completely detached from everything else! Where’s the link to your customer feedback, your backlog, your release planning, your design files? This makes it extremely hard to keep your roadmap at the heart of everything you do. Increasing the risk of ‘everything you do’ becoming detached from the strategic plan. Which is when you start slipping into an output mindset instead of delivering outcomes. 

So, in sum, don’t use general tools like spreadsheets, slide decks or document files. 

Project management tools 

But what about those generalist productivity tools that are designed to help you manage tasks and track projects? Are they an option? 

I mean, sure, maybe if you’re just getting started and have no budget for a proper product tool. If you want to have an initial stab at creating a roadmap in a dynamic tool and you already have a license for something like ClickUp, Asana, Trello, or monday.com  then sure, give it a go. But, be aware of the limitations. 

Remember, a product roadmap isn’t a project plan, it’s a strategic communication tool. Don’t forget the distinction between a product roadmap and a delivery or release plan – don’t get them confused or try to solve both problems with one tool. If you use a tool designed for task management for your product roadmap, you can very easily fall into the trap of presenting your stakeholders with a timeline project plan Gantt chart instead of a high level strategic plan. 

The other option some Product Managers will try is using whiteboard tools or wiki software. Although they can offer better visualization capabilities than project management tools or the dreaded spreadsheet, they lack the connection to your execution workflow. 

You need the best of both worlds – an easy-to-understand visualization of a bigger picture strategic plan, alongside the ability to drill down if needed and follow a thread all the way through to the detailed release plans. 

This is why purpose-built product roadmap tools exist. 

What are the benefits of purpose-built product roadmap tools?

The biggest advantage of using one of the best product roadmap tools, specifically designed for product teams and roadmapping requirements? The help it gives you to work in line with modern Product Management best practice.

Work within best practices

If you use a purpose-built product roadmap tool you should (assuming you’ve picked one of the best ones) find a structure and a bunch of built-in features that guide your process, behaviors and even the wider organization towards proven best ways of working. 

Not least of all will be the connection to objectives and key business goals. Because, as we’ve already said, the very best product roadmap tools will help you stay laser-focused on outcomes. You’ll have far better:

• Strategic alignment: Your roadmap will be clearly tied to your product strategy and business objectives.
• Clarity of communication: Everyone can see what’s coming up and how it fits into the bigger picture.
• Adaptability: As priorities shift, your roadmap will be able to keep up. The right tool will allow you to make updates without losing sight of your overall goals.
• Stakeholder visibility: Get buy-in from execs and other departments by showing how your roadmap connects to business growth.

Move faster

You’ll also be able to move a lot faster. Everything is set up specifically for the requirements of a Product Team, so you won’t need to get your head around how to bend and adapt a generalist tool to fit your use case. 

You’ll have ready-made product roadmap templates right off the bat, you’ll have suggested workflow stages already created, you’ll have default filters and suggested roadmap views ready to share.

Key Considerations for choosing from the best product roadmap tools

So, now you understand what product roadmap tools are and what makes purpose-built tools like this the best option. But you’ll still need to narrow down a fairly long list to find the best product roadmap tool for you. How do you decide? 

There are a number of questions you need to ask yourself. 

Are you outcome-focused?

This has to be question number one. What does your business value most? Is it more important that you can demonstrate volume of features or improved metrics and results? Hopefully you’ll be answering in favor of outcomes and results. If you’re not, you may need to have a word with your senior stakeholders and help them see the light about the importance of outcome-based roadmapping. We’ve got a ready-made presentation deck you can use for the job! See below

If you can confidently say that outcomes are your key focus, then you need a product roadmap tool that allows you to run an agile-friendly Now-Next-Later product roadmap. If you need to know more about the time-horizon-based roadmap format (the antithesis of the timeline roadmap), we have you covered. 

Do you want to foster a product culture across your organization?

Is part of your objective for revamping your roadmap and how you communicate it, to help promote a ‘product mindset’ across the company? Do you want to get more stakeholders engaged with the product process in the hope that you’ll convince them of the alignment, strategic importance and success of the Product?  Are you hoping to encourage collaboration from other teams and stakeholders so there is more transparency on how you work, how you reach decisions and why you have to balance priorities and sometimes say no?

If so, look for a tool that has the most robust publishing and sharing options, the right collaboration integrations and the clearest visualization of why things are where they are on your roadmap. 

Also look for a tool that will allow you to add everyone in your organization as a collaborator for free. And make sure you understand what they can do as a ‘collaborator’ or ‘reviewer’ or ‘contributor’ or whatever the user type is called. Can they only view? Or have they got the ability to submit feedback, add comments, join in discussions or even submit ideas to your roadmap initiatives? Spoiler alert – free reviewer accounts can do all that and more in ProdPad. 

Do you need your tool to play nicely with other tools in your organization? 

If you answered yes to the previous question then you’ll definitely need to consider this. The whole point of using one of the best product roadmap tools is so you don’t have a roadmap that sits in isolation from everything else. So think about how you need your chosen tool to integrate with your existing systems. 

Think about…

• Where your developers manage their sprint planning
• Which CRM your Sales Team uses
• The Customer Support tools your customer-facing teams use
• The messaging app your wider organization favors

What does the future of your team look like?

You don’t want to be back here in a year’s time looking for a new tool because your chosen one isn’t able to scale with you. So consider if you’ll be likely to add new products or new product lines and will need to manage a portfolio or even multiple portfolios. 

Also consider all the security implications of a growing team. Look out for the right type of Single Sign On capabilities and security compliance. 

The best product roadmap tools

OK, full disclosure, you’re on the ProdPad blog so you can guess which tool is top of the list. Yes we obviously have a degree of bias , but we seriously do stand by all the reasons why ProdPad is the best product roadmap tool for forward-thinking Product Managers. 

Having said that, we’re not about to start bad mouthing our competitors all over town. That’s not our style. We’re all product people building tools for product people, after all. And some of these folks have built some really great software tools, with some solid features that have given us food for thought over the years. 

We’ve included the tools we believe are the absolute best suited for product roadmapping – they are all purpose-built and all have a proven track record as an established player in the market. 

So let’s delve in….

1. ProdPad

Who is it for?

ProdPad is the best product roadmap tool for outcome-focused Product Teams of any size. ProdPad is structured around the industry-prefered Now-Next-Later roadmap format which was actually invented by our very own Co-Founders and allows Product Managers to present a roadmap that follows an Initiative > Idea structure.  

This two level structure to roadmap items is the key to staying flexible and working in an agile way. Instead of pinning exact features to your roadmap from the start, with ProdPad you create roadmap Initiatives that are focused on a problem to solve. You then attach various different Ideas to each Initiative as your thinking develops, working each through discovery until you find the best solution to the problem you have prioritized. 

This also makes ProdPad the best product roadmap tool for PMs looking to communicate their roadmap in a way that does not create stakeholder expectations tied to arbitrary dates. ProdPad’s roadmap flexibility provides stakeholders with a clear picture of the product priorities, with broad time horizons for the stuff that is further out, moving to more exact time periods as Initiatives move further down the line. 

In this way, Product Teams spend less time reworking their roadmap when discovery work invalidates one Idea and means changing to a different feature Idea. They can stay true to a roadmap that is agile, flexible and focused on the outcomes they want to drive, not exact feature outputs. 

Whether you’re in a startup or an enterprise, ProdPad’s flexibility and emphasis on strategic alignment make it the go-to tool for teams that refuse to compromise on quality or clarity.

Best features – ‘The Pros’

• Outcome-driven roadmapping: Unlike most tools that focus on features and timelines, ProdPad helps you build roadmaps based on business outcomes and customer needs. All Initiatives are linked to Objectives and the whole roadmap can be viewed by Objectives. Each roadmap item includes a space for you to capture target outcomes and record release outcomes. You even get a unique Completed view of your roadmap so you can easily demonstrate your outcomes to stakeholders.  
• OKR management: ProdPad’s product roadmapping tool comes complete with a full OKR management system that allows you to set, manage and track general objectives and specific goals. Importantly you can then link each Initiative on your roadmap with the particular Objective and Key Result it seeks to achieve. 
• Strategy canvas: Another unique feature of ProdPad. For each portfolio, product line and individual product there is a CAnvas to record and develop the product vision, value, positioning and more. This gives PMs a flexible space in which to document the broad strategy, stored next to the roadmap so no one loses sight of the bigger picture. 
• Integrated customer feedback: Part of a complete product management platform, ProdPad also collects, organizes, and prioritizes your customer feedback, meaning you can link your evidence directly to your roadmap to support your decision-making.
• AI Assistance: ProdPad also has the best and most mature AI capabilities of any other tool on this list. ProdPad has been able to automatically de-dupe your backlog for many years, but with new AI features being released every week the tool is even further ahead of competitors. Honestly, the AI is game-changing.
• Collaboration-ready: ProdPad’s product roadmap tool is specifically designed to foster communication and alignment across teams. It comes complete with, for example, the most robust Slack and Teams integrations of all the tools on this list. This means anyone in your organization can contribute and comment on your roadmap and its Initiatives from the safety of the tools they already use day-in, day-out. 
• Prioritization tools: ProdPad has built-in prioritization tools like our Prioritization chart which makes it quick and easy to spot the Ideas and Initiatives that will deliver the most impact relative to the effort and feasibility.
• Portfolio management: As standard with ProdPad, you can create an unlimited number of roadmaps so you can easily use the tool across your whole organization. Full portfolio management is also available meaning you can have specific roadmaps, OKRs and strategy canvases at each level. 

Restrictions

• No timelines here: If you are fighting against stakeholders who don’t understand how agile roadmapping works, we feel for you. We would be more than happy to help you convince your stakeholders that timelines are bad for business – so please reach out if that’s of interest. Because ProdPad doesn’t have Gantt chart style timeline options. We do enable target dates to be added to all Initiatives – so your stakeholders can understand when something is coming, but that doesn’t dictate the whole layout of your roadmap. We also have two-way syncs with development tools like Jira or Azure DevOps so you can happily link to your release planning for that complete view. But if you want a product roadmap in a timeline format this ain’t the tool for you. 

Pricing

Starts at $24 per month, with custom plans available for enterprise organizations. You can also purchase just the product Roadmap tool from ProdPad’s full suite and later add the Customer Feedback and Idea Management modules as you need. 

G2 Rating

4.5/5

2. Aha!

Who is it for?

Aha! is a well-known option for Product Managers working in large organizations. Aha! Is underpinned by a more traditional approach to Product Management so may be better suited to those that approach Product from more of an operational perspective. 

Best features – Pros

• Strategy tools: In a similar way to ProdPad, Aha! provides an area for PMs to capture their Personas, Strategy and Vision (although it’s at the overall account level and not sitting next to individual roadmaps). There are also a number of strategic framework tools available as templates to help you do, for example, SWOT analysis. 
• Customizable reports: Aha! provides a very customizable suite of reports that enable you to drill down into the data and create analysis into your product process. The customization takes a bit of time to get your head around, but this capability is interesting if you find yourself spending a lot of time crunching numbers in spreadsheets.

Limitations – Cons

• Single item roadmap hierarchy: Even with Aha!’s Now-Next-Later roadmap, there is only a single level hierarchy. This prevents you from capturing the problem area as the Initiative and nesting different ideas within that. That, unfortunately, means you will end up just pushing features around a board view rather than managing a truly agile, lean roadmap. 
• No goal management: With Aha! you cannot set and manage specific goals, relevant to each Objective. This means you will be without the SMART goals that will help you understand if you have achieved your Objective. 
• Next to no AI: Aha! is yet to release any AI capabilities in their roadmap tool

Pricing

Starts at $74 per user, per month on their monthly plan, however, they do have annual plans available too. 

G2 Rating

4.3/5

3. Productboard

Who is it for?

Productboard is worth considering if you’re looking for a complete platform that will help you manage your roadmap, ideas and customer feedback. The setup is rather complicated but if you think you might need deep customization and configuration Productboard should be on your list. In fact, Productboard can be so complex that the team there offer a professional services level of support that you can purchase to help you grapple with the setup.

Best features – Pros

• Integrations: Productboard have a robust offering of integrations from whiteboarding tools like Miro right through to AI analysis tools like Cobbaï
• User access levels: Productboard, like ProdPad, is another tool that provides you with a lot of control over the access levels and permissions that each of your users has. This can be very important in larger organizations or where sensitive projects may be in play.

Limitations – Cons

• No strategy capture: Productboard does not have an area for you to document product vision, values or add narrative to your product strategy. 
• No OKR or goal management tool: Productboard does not offer an in-bulit tool to help you set and track your product objectives making it harder to align your roadmap with priority outcomes. 
• Single item roadmap hierarchy: Like Aha!, Productboard only provides a ‘feature board’ by way of a time-horizon based roadmap, preventing you from communicating larger initiatives with multiple features ideas within them. 
• Basic reporting: Productboard’s reporting features are minimal, which can limit how well you track progress or demonstrate strategic alignment.
• Complexity: The user interface can feel cluttered and difficult to navigate, and many users complain about the level of decision that have to be made before you can get started.
• AI only available on the highest price plan: The AI assistance that comes with Productboard is only available with the top tier plans, making the tools less integrated or integral to the overall experience. 

Pricing

Starts at $19 per user, per month for their Essentials Plan.

G2 Rating

4.4/5

4. ProductPlan

Who is it for?

ProductPlan is a good option for teams that want a super simple, visual tool to present their roadmap. 

Best features – Pros

• User-friendly: ProductPlan’s drag-and-drop interface is simple to use and great for teams looking for a quick visual solution.
• Launch project management: ProductPlan also has an adjacent tool for managing launch plans and collaborating with GTM teams. It helps you create and track tasks and assign due dates for the launch phase of a feature release. 
• Sharing: Decent for sharing roadmaps with non-technical stakeholders, they allow for easy external link sharing. 
• Great resources: ProductPlan has a great resource center to help you navigate your way around the app and tackle general product management problems. 

Limitations – Cons

• No customer feedback management: ProductPlan doesn’t have tools to help you collect or prioritize customer feedback.
• No idea management: ProductPlan is a roadmap only tool, so you won’t be able to manage your backlog and easily link ideas and their related documentation to your roadmap items. 
• No AI assistance: ProductPlan doesn’t have any AI-powered tools to lighten the load.

Pricing

ProductPlan no longer advert their pricing on their website and seem to be offering custom enterprise packages only that necessitate a call with the Sales Team. 

G2 Ratings

4.5/5

5. Roadmunk

Who is it for?

Roadmunk is a decent option for teams that need flexible roadmap views. If you are forced to balance unwavering stakeholder demands for timelines with a desire to work more flexibly then Roadmunk may be the solution that gives you both avenues. 

Best features – Pros

• Multiple views: Offers flexibility in how you display roadmaps, which can be useful if you’re battling with different stakeholder preferences.
• Portfolio level roadmaps: Allowing you to have different levels and roadmap effectively across your organization.
• Prioritization: Provides some fairly robust prioritization features, so you’re able to assess your product ideas against a range of different criteria.

Limitations – Cons

• Limited integrations: There are only two integration options with Roadmunk – one for Jira and the other ADO, meaning you’re going to hit roadblocks when trying to sync data from other platforms like CRMs or Support tools.  
• Weaker strategic focus: Roadmunk focuses more on visuals than on providing the tools needed to build a strategy that drives outcomes.
• No Now-Next-Later roadmap: Although you can do a swimlane roadmap, Roadmunk don’t offer a proper Now-Next-Later roadmap format. 
• Limited customer feedback management: Roadmunk is primarily a roadmap-only solution but in recent years they have added some basic ways to add feedback into the tool, however they aren’t as robust as other product roadmap tools.  

Pricing

Starts at $19 per user, per month. However, this is only for the single user, you’ll need to upgrade to the Business Plan at $49 per month for your team to get access.

G2 Rating

4.3/5

6. Jira Product Discovery

Who is it for?

Jira Product Discovery is best for teams that are already deeply integrated into the Jira ecosystem and are struggling to find budget for a more robust roadmapping solution. Like ProdPad, Jira Product Discovery only facilitates the Now-Next-Later roadmap format so it’s a solid choice if one of your priorities is keeping your team working consistently and in line with best practice. 

Best features – Pros

• Easy Jira integration setup: If your team is already using Jira Software for development, the integration here is obviously set as standard. You won’t need to set it up and confirm authorization between the two tools. 
• Now-Next-Later customization: Offers flexibility to play with the Now-Next-Later structure and adapt it (although…beware you don’t end up with something that doesn’t fulfill the outcome-focus of a true Now-Next-Later)

Limitations – Cons

• Single level roadmap hierarchy: Like a couple of other contenders on this list, Jira Product Discovery does not allow you to nest Ideas within Initiatives on your roadmap, therefore limiting the flexibility you have to remain agile and adapt to your discovery findings.
• Fewer ways to gather feedback: Although Jira Product Discovery does allow you to capture feedback to inform your roadmap, the tool is missing the integrations that would make this feedback flow consistent and effortless.
• No feedback analysis tools: There are no tools to help you uncover insights from your feedback to inform your product thinking.
• No AI assistance: Jira Product Discovery is yet to offer an AI assistance. 
• No roadmap publishing: You cannot publish your roadmap externally meaning all viewers will need to have their own login. 
• Lack of collaboration tools: You won’t be able to integrate other communication tools and have your stakeholders contribute to your roadmap planning without actively logging into Jira Product Discovery and using the tool directly. 
• Limited standalone value: It’s a good add-on for Jira users but doesn’t stand alone well as a comprehensive product roadmap tool.

Pricing

Starts at $10 per user for teams of  1 – 25

G2 Rating

Oh sorry, Jira Product Discovery isn’t actually represented on G2.

7. Dragonboat

Who is it for?

Dragonboat is a solid choice for large teams managing multiple products or portfolios. It positions itself as a Product Operations platform and has a focus on portfolio decision making and business leadership considerations. 

Best features – Pros

• Portfolio management: Great for multi product organizations and portfolio managers looking to make strategic decisions across multiple product lines. 
• Outcome-focused planning: It offers good tools for linking initiatives to business objectives.

Limitations – Cons

• Complex interface: Dragonboat’s UI can be difficult to navigate, especially for new users. Users have been known to crumble about the outdated UI.
• Overly robust: The feature set may be too much for teams that aren’t managing portfolios or large-scale product organizations.

Pricing

Dragonboat no longer advertises their pricing publically, you can contact their Sales team directly to discuss options. They have a Standard Plan and a Business Plan available. 

G2 Rating

4.5/5

What now?

Think there’s a couple there that could work well for you? The next steps are to book yourself a demo and let the expert teams behind these tools show you how they work in detail. Then you’ll have all the info you need to make the right decision.

Why not start with ProdPad?

The post 7 Best Product Roadmap Tools in 2024 appeared first on ProdPad.

There are many different product roadmap formats, and everyone’s got their favorites. You probably already have a certain product roadmap format that you live and die by, but we urge you not to be stubborn. Many alternative product roadmaps might be a great match for you, you may find one that’s better suited to how you work. Just because you’ve been doing things a certain way for years doesn’t always mean it’s the best. That’s how you get stuck in bad habits. 

All we’re saying is: maybe it’s time to break up with your current product roadmap format? Maybe, like a bad relationship, it’s holding you back. 

To help you explore your options, here’s a complete list of product roadmap formats. Have an open mind, you may find your perfect fit.

Why is it important to choose the right product roadmap format?

We get it, change is hard. But if you’re using the wrong product roadmap format, then we also think change is necessary. The product roadmap you use will massively affect how well you and your entire team can plan, communicate, and execute your product strategy. If it’s off, you’re not going to excel. 

We’re firm believers at ProdPad that certain product roadmap formats can make you become a better product manager. By getting it right, you’ll ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page about what’s being worked on, and crucially why. Your team will have a transparent view of the product’s direction, boosting communication while also driving focus on the same aligned goals. Most importantly, a well-aligned product roadmap will help you remain flexible and responsive to changes in market conditions and your customer needs. 

By the way, there’s a lot more to product roadmaps than just the format you can choose. If you’re looking to absorb knowledge of everything you need to know about these tools, we’ve got an ultimate guide to keep you busy. It covers all the theory to help you build one, manage one, communicate one, and use one effectively. Click the link below to explore our guide. 

Now, we’ve already picked our no.1 product roadmap format (no prizes for guessing what it is – after all, our Co-Founders here at ProdPad actually invented it). The Now-Next-Later product roadmap format works for us and for most modern organizations, but we’re also aware that it’s not the only option out there.

Each alternative product roadmap format will have its pros and cons and its ideal use cases. That’s why we’re putting them in a lineup for you to find the perfect one.

What are the two main types of Product Roadmap formats?

Essentially, most product roadmap formats fall into two categories: 

Agile or timeline. 

These two ways of running your roadmap are like two warring wolves, opposites of each other fighting for your favor. We think there’s a clear winner between the two, but we’ll get to that in just a bit. 

The most common product roadmap formats can be grouped into these two camps based on their principles, the way the roadmaps are presented, and what’s being explored. Let’s dive into what makes these two main types of product roadmap formats so different.

What is an agile product roadmap format?

The tech world is super fast-paced. The need to adapt to change increases every year. As such, Agile has become the favored approach to product development in recent times. By introducing an Agile Product Development process, organizations become more flexible, more adaptive, and able to continuously improve their products.

If you’re a business working with an Agile methodology, you’re going to need an agile roadmap that matches it. 

Agile product roadmap formats promote iteration and a focus on customer value. They don’t emphasize specific features but instead are structured around themes or customer experiences. 

By staying away from a feature-oriented focus, teams that use agile product roadmap formats can easily shift gears and priorities when working out which specific initiatives best achieve the goals they want to hit. 

Agile roadmaps often have broad time horizons. This means that instead of strict dates and deadlines, things can be fluid, and ordered in priority of what’s coming next. Instead of “this is getting done by the 1st of the month” it’s more “this is getting done first, then this thing next.”

Now, let’s get this out upfront – agile product roadmap formats, are far superior to their old-fashioned timeline forefathers. That’s right, we’re not beating around the bush here! Agile roadmaps aid with faster delivery and provide higher quality outcomes when compared to output-focused timelines.

What is a timeline-based roadmap?

Ah, timeline roadmaps. The roadmap only a mother can love. Sorry to be harsh, but we really think you can do better than a timeline roadmap. We just can’t hide it, they’re icky and don’t offer as much value as agile product roadmap formats. 

A timeline roadmap lays out what you have planned for a product on a chronological timeline. It shows what features or changes are planned and when you plan on making them. Nine times out of ten, a timeline roadmap will look like a Gantt chart, showing a clear linear view from the product’s current state to its future state.

On the surface, that looks like a pretty neat and tidy way of mapping things out. So, what’s the problem?

Well, when is Product Management ever that simple? By setting deadlines on your roadmap, especially on potential ideas planned way in advance, you may be going too granular too early, as you’re unlikely to have all the knowledge you need to make a good estimation. That results in deadlines getting pushed back or changed. Being so linear and rigid adds the pressure of hitting those deadlines. You can overpromise and underdeliver, which can result in your pushing out features that may not be ready or that may not have been 100% needed. That’s a textbook example of a feature factory. 

By being so focused on dates, you zone in on getting things done for the sake of doing them. There’s less freedom for exploration and discovery and less flexibility. That’s why you need to move away from your Timeline Roadmap. Here are some steps on how .

Of course, there are situations where you want to present things as a timeline. Your release planning is one of them, where you come up with how and when you’re releasing new features, updates, and bug fixes. You may also want a timeline-based plan for any work that’s immediate, but you certainly don’t want it for your roadmap. Your product roadmap is all about your long-term vision and strategy. Don’t compromise it with a timeline.

Now, timeline-based roadmaps are becoming less and less popular (yay!), and we like to think that the Now-Next-Later roadmap has played a big part in that. You’ll find that most of the product roadmap formats we explore will be more agile in their approach – that’s just the way the industry is evolving – but we have also provided examples of timeline roadmaps, too. It wouldn’t be a complete list without it. 

Naturally, we urge everyone to move away from the restrictive, old-fashioned timeline roadmaps, but we understand you’re adults and can make your own decisions about what’s best. Love comes in all shapes and sizes, so let’s explore all the possible product roadmap formats to find you the ideal partner for your product planning.  

The complete list of product roadmap formats

Are you ready to go product roadmap speed dating? Here’s our complete list of the product roadmap formats to help you find your perfect match. 

Now-Next-Later roadmap

The Now-Next-Later roadmap is the best example of an agile product roadmap format. It was created by our very own Co-Founders Janna Bastow and Simon Cast, so we know a thing or two about it. 

Also known as a lean roadmap or time horizon roadmap, its whole principle is stripping away deadlines and strict timelines and instead replacing them with broader timeframes. In this product roadmap format, you’ll group your product initiatives and ideas into three columns, one for ideas you’re working on now, one for initiatives to be tackled next, and one for all the long-term stuff you’re going to look at later on. 

It’s a product roadmap format designed around outcomes, built to enable more flexibility, allowing more time  to put toward product discovery and experimentation. It’s not a to-do list; instead of organizing tasks to complete in order, you’re declaring the problems you want to solve, giving your team more space for creativity on how they solve that problem. 

Now-Next-Later is a very visual roadmap and is designed to be easy to understand at a glance. You can get a good overview of what you’re working on, with the ability to dive deeper into each Idea. It’s an excellent way to see what you’re working on without getting overwhelmed by dates and deadlines that you’ll never hit. 

It works as an agile product roadmap format because it accommodates change. Prioritizes can shift, and blockers can be introduced. This approach lets you move things around and suits teams that value being nimble and responsive. The Now-Next-Later roadmap gives your entire team transparency on what they should be focusing on in the short term (everything in the Now column) while also giving them a heads-up on what’s planned for Later.

Overcommitting to deadlines can lead you to push products out the door, focusing on just getting things done instead of getting good things done. The Now-Next-Later roadmap prevents that from happening. 

Our CEO Janna has talked loads about why Now-Next-Later is the way to go. It is her baby after all. You can learn more about her reasons for inventing this product roadmap format, and how it can benefit you. 

Feature-based roadmap

Feature-based roadmaps are a pretty straightforward option. They focus on organizing your product development around the specific features you want to build. When working with a feature-based roadmap, you’ll map out your features in priority order. You can choose to set specific deadlines for them (and make it a timeline roadmap) or position them across a Now-Next-Later format and use broad time horizons.

Having said that, if you’re using a feature-based approach but laying out those features across a Now-Next-Later roadmap format, you won’t technically have a Now-Next-Later product roadmap. Fundamental to the Now-Next-Later roadmapping approach is structuring your roadmap items around problems to solve. The Now-Next-Later product roadmap format should have roadmap initiatives and within each Initiative, you have a few different Ideas that you will experiment with, test, and evaluate. If each roadmap item is a specific feature rather than a problem to solve, you have a feature-based roadmap, not a Now-Next-Later roadmap. Just having three columns labeled now, next, and later, does not make a Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

A feature-based product roadmap format can provide a clear plan of what you’re working on, but it can be pretty limiting. There’s little flexibility and can cause you to focus on just getting features out there instead of solving user problems. 

A feature-based roadmap can work if you have a clear understanding of what needs to be built and when, but can struggle to support product discovery and user objectives. This product roadmap format has a lot of the same pitfalls as a timeline roadmap and makes you far less adaptable to new ways of thinking to improve your product. 

Goal-oriented roadmap

Using goal-orientated roadmaps helps you rethink the way you perceive your product development and approach it from a different angle. Also known as the GO Product Roadmap format, this roadmap is structured around your business and product goals – not features, or themes. 

In the roadmap, you’ll be inputting the desired outcomes and benefits that you want your features to achieve. This helps you justify the changes you’re making and dive into why you’re making them. By focusing on goals rather than features or output, you’ll be driven to make stuff of value. 

Created by Roman Pichler, the roadmap is built around three main elements:

• Your Goals: The high-level achievements you want to achieve. These are often ambitious statements. 
• The Objectives: These are the specific, measurable metrics and KPIs that once hit show that you achieved your goal.
• Actions: This is where you detail the tasks and features you need to create to achieve the desired objective.

This approach helps you avoid feature creep, where you’re making more and more features for the sake of it without much rhyme nor reason. By adopting this product roadmap format, you’re forced to have a justification for every Idea you have. It ensures that everything you do is aligned with your overall objectives. 

By being focused on goals, it gives you the flexibility to try different ideas to hit those goals. It’s far less rigid, making it a good example of an agile roadmap. 

The drawback of these roadmaps is that they’re a tad less granular than other options. It’s harder to see the specific requirements of what you need to do, especially from a higher-level view. 

To effectively use a goal-based roadmap, you’re going to have to first set your OKRs and the metrics you want to track. Goal setting can be tricky, especially as there are so many metrics you can choose to track. Want to make things easier? Check out our eBook that details 25 ready-made OKRs that you can adopt. 

Goal-oriented roadmaps vs. outcome-based roadmaps

You may have come across the term outcome-based roadmap. This type of product roadmap format is essentially the same as a goal-oriented roadmap –  the term describes the same thing. They both organize your roadmap into the problems you want to solve and the goal you want each Idea on your roadmap to achieve. 

If you want to get super picky about things, you can choose to use the goal-based roadmap term to be super explicit about the link to your strategic product goals. Outcome-based roadmaps may refer to roadmaps that are a bit more broad with what you’re hoping to achieve and may not be as closely tied to your company objectives.

The Now-Next-Later product roadmap format is both an outcome-based format and a goal-oriented format. On a true Now-Next-Later roadmap, every item should declare a problem to solve and the desired outcome, as well as being linked to a specific product objective and key result. You can see how this works in real life by visiting the ProdPad sandbox environment, which is pre-filled with a host of example roadmaps that follow this structure. 

Theme-based roadmap

As the name suggests, a theme-based roadmap is organized around high-level themes instead of specific features or dates. These themes can be considered as broad areas of focus. By using a theme-based roadmap, you’re given better flexibility on how to meet your objectives. 

For example, a theme may be something like, “improving user onboarding”. Within that theme, you can explore the various features you can add, the experiments you can try, and the enhancements you can make to make that happen. 

Now a theme-based roadmap is pretty similar to a goal-based roadmap. In fact, you’ll find that most agile roadmaps have a lot of similarities and crossover. The difference here though is that a goal-based roadmap is focused on specific results aligned to business goals and metrics. A theme-based roadmap uses much broader areas of focus.

One of the reasons to use a theme-based roadmap is because it provides overall freedom while maintaining strategic alignment. You can communicate the overall direction of a product and explore new ideas without getting bogged down by specifics. 

Theme-based roadmaps are interesting, as they can be used in an agile way or a timeline way. Typically, they’ll be agile, allowing you to figure out what features or tasks best fulfill a theme through ongoing learning. That said, you can make them timeline-based if that’s what you really want to do (please don’t). 

This is done by mapping out the themes into their own swimlanes on a timeline roadmap so that each feature that belongs to a theme is grouped together. You’ll be working to rigid deadlines, but linking ideas and tasks to the broad themes that connect them. 

Release roadmap

Well, this is awkward. Release roadmaps are a weird one because we don’t really think they should be considered roadmaps at all. Instead, they’re more of a timeline that shows your deliverables. 

This way of planning your releases details the timing and scope of the upcoming product features you have planned. They’re used to break the development process into specific release schedules. 

Release roadmaps – let’s call them release plans because they ain’t roadmaps – they may be great for immediate planning, but not ideal for communicating longer-term strategic thinking. 

This ‘roadmap’ is extremely timeline-focused, making it rigid, especially for fast-paced environments where priorities can shift on a dime. 

Although many other people call this way of organizing your releases a roadmap, we think it’s better to see it as a way to plan your upcoming launches so that your entire team is coordinated with what’s due out. It doesn’t work as a roadmap because it’s so focused on the short term. 

By using this as a roadmap, you’re sacrificing your long-term decision-making and planning. It’ll also force stakeholders to judge you on output, not outcomes. If your roadmap is filled with releases, it suggests that you only value getting those new features out, and not the outcomes and effects of those releases.

Epics roadmap

If you’re working on huge tasks that span multiple sprints and require input from multiple teams, then you may be drawn to the epics product roadmap format. An epic is a large chunk of work that encompasses many smaller tasks within it. It’s the War and Peace of Product Management: long and tough to get thorough. They’re the big accomplishments you want to achieve on your roadmap.

To make any sense of epics, you’re going to need to cut it up into smaller pieces, known as user stories. An epics product roadmap format allows you to do just that. 

With an epics roadmap, you’re turning this whale of a task into more manageable chunks. By using this roadmap format, it helps you better keep track of your overall progress and maintain direction and strategy. All the ‘chunks’ (user stories) you create will be connected to your larger theme. Everything you complete within an epics roadmap will benefit the larger goal. 

The main purpose of an epics roadmap is to help you prioritize the different tasks that make up the epic, and work out what you need to do first. By visually breaking things down, it allows you to see what is more critical, helping you to have more of a solid plan for completing the epic.

When using an epics roadmap, it works best to take your overarching goal and place all the tasks and things that need to be done within that. You can then track the progress of each task, moving it into a done or ready state when completed. As epics often span across multiple teams, it’s good to assign responsibilities to create a sense of ownership and accountability to each task.  

Portfolio roadmap

If you’re a Senior Product Manager, Product Director or CPO overseeing multiple product lines, then it may be best for you to use a portfolio product roadmap format to give you greater visibility of all the products. 

Whereas a typical roadmap concentrates on one product, a portfolio roadmap shows the entire portfolio of the business. It lets you see everything that you offer. The benefit of this is that you’ll be able to get a better strategic overview of how each product relates to one another, helping with high-level decision-making. 

By seeing what’s being worked on for each product, it makes it easier to allocate resources, work out dependencies, and highlight potential conflicts. In this view that covers all your products, you can see the interdependencies, priorities, and timeframes of different initiatives, helping stakeholders understand how these projects align with the overall business strategy. It’s essential for organizations that have more than one product. 

Now, you can’t just have a portfolio roadmap and get away with it. With it being so top-level, you’re going to miss out on a lot of detail. Not all objectives in a portfolio roadmap will be in each product roadmap. The goal you want to achieve with one product may be different from another. That’s why you need to have your portfolio roadmap working alongside your more singular product roadmaps. 

Consider the portfolio roadmap an additional one that supports your product roadmaps to guide your entire product organization. 

In ProdPad, we make portfolio management easy, allowing you to create Portfolio Roadmaps that are either rolled-up overviews of your individual product roadmaps, and/or customized versions in their own right. 

Choose wisely

It’s so important that your chosen product roadmap format is a good fit for your business. Your roadmap is the blueprint of your Product Management processes and greatly influences the approach you adopt. 

We’ve laid out all the common product roadmap formats you need to know about to give you complete transparency of the options you can go for. That said, only one has truly captured our hearts: The Now-Next-Later Roadmap. 

This isn’t because of blind loyalty to our Co-Founders and its creators. We find it super effective and have seen, firsthand, how it’s helped thousands of people become better Product Managers. But, we get it, you can’t just take our word for it. 

ProdPad is designed around the Now-Next-Later roadmap, it’s one of our key features. Why not give it a try in our sandbox environment for a first-hand experience of how it works and how it can improve the way you do things? Go on, give it a whirl.

The post The Complete List of Product Roadmap Formats: Find Your Perfect Match appeared first on ProdPad.

• What a roadmap presentation is
• How to prepare for one
• How to give your roadmap presentation
• How to align stakeholder expectations during the presentation
• How to handle feedback during the presentation
• Common mistakes and how to avoid them
• How detailed your presentation should be
• How to follow up

What is a roadmap presentation?

Presenting your product roadmap is your chance to share with everyone, from your team to stakeholders and even your customers, the exciting directions your product is heading in. It’s about painting a picture of what’s to come and laying out how and why you want to get there.

What are the key elements of a product roadmap presentation?

These are the core building blocks of your presentation. Once you’ve got all of these clear in your mind, you’ll already have the foundation of your presentation at your fingertips.

You’ll need to include:

• Vision and strategy: Everything starts with a clear product vision. What are you aiming to achieve? What’s your game plan? This vision sets the foundation for everything that follows in your presentation. It’s your North Star, guiding every decision and strategy you discuss.
• Key objectives: Here, you spell out the major goals. What milestones do you need to hit along the way? What outcomes do you expect from your work? These objectives should mesh seamlessly with your overall business goals and help bring your vision to life.
• Initiatives and features: This part gets down to brass tacks – what specific actions, features, or enhancements are you planning to tackle these objectives? It’s about connecting the dots between your grand strategy and the tangible steps you’ll take.
• Metrics: How will you know you’re on track? By setting specific metrics or KPIs to measure your progress. These metrics are crucial for keeping the presentation grounded and focused on tangible outcomes.

Why present your roadmap?

This is your best chance to get everyone on the same page. A well-delivered roadmap presentation ensures that everyone, from your development team to your executive board, understands and supports the direction you’re taking.

It’s your platform to talk strategy and progress. It’s where you manage expectations and keep everyone informed about where the product is headed.

With a clear and concise presentation, you help the senior decision makers what you think needs to be done and why. Knowing what’s important will help them make better-informed strategic decisions – so tell them what resources are required, what challenges you might face, and how you plan to tackle them.

A roadmap shouldn’t be set in stone. This presentation is also a great opportunity to gather feedback, making it a dynamic tool that adapts and evolves based on real input from those involved. There are few things worse than a roadmap made behind locked doors – you need to have your assumptions challenged!

Nailing your roadmap presentation will do more than just give everyone an outline of your plan – it’ll build trust and confidence among your stakeholders as they get some transparency on what you’re doing and, importantly, why you’re doing it. It ensures everyone is committed to the strategic path laid out and understands their role in making the vision a reality.

So when you step up to give a roadmap presentation, you’re really setting the stage for the future success of your product.

How to prepare for your roadmap presentation

The key to a successful roadmap presentation starts long before you step into the meeting room. It’s all in the preparation. In the words of Shakespeare, “All things are ready, if our mind be so.”

Here’s how to set yourself up for a successful presentation:

Understand your audience

First things first, know who you’re talking to.

Is it your Tech team, the Marketing department, or perhaps senior executives? Each audience has different interests and concerns.

Tech teams might look for technical challenges and milestones, whereas executives are more interested in strategic alignment and ROI. Tailoring your presentation to the specific interests of your audience will make it more engaging and relevant (more on this below).

Set clear objectives for the roadmap presentation

What do you want to achieve with this presentation? Are you looking to gain approval, solicit feedback, or simply inform? Much like with product initiatives and ideas, make certain you know the outcome you want to achieve before you begin work.

Setting yourself clear objectives will help you structure your presentation more effectively and guide how you interact with your audience during the session.

Structure your content

A well-structured roadmap presentation helps your audience follow along and absorb information. 

Start with the big picture – where your product is headed. Break down the roadmap into manageable parts, explaining the why behind each step. This will help you demonstrate how each part of the roadmap contributes to the overall strategy.

Keep reading for a full breakdown of what to include in your roadmap presentation and in what order. 

Rehearse and revise

Never underestimate the power of rehearsal. Practice delivering your roadmap presentation a few times to smooth off any rough edges. Rehearsing will help you refine your messaging, adjust the pacing, and get comfortable with the material. As you practice, you might find areas that need simplification or more detailed explanations – perfect for fine-tuning.

Use tools for clarity

This is where ProdPad can be your best friend: it helps you visualize your roadmap in a way that’s easy to understand and engaging. You can use its features to highlight different aspects of the roadmap depending on your audience’s interests. For example, filtering capabilities allow you to show only the most relevant information, keeping your presentation focused and on point.

Although it’s useful to have a presentation deck for your introduction – somewhere you can map out what you’re going to cover, it’s always best to then move to the live environment in which your roadmap lives.

This will not only make your life a lot easier and cut down on the work involved in preparing a deck, but it will also help your stakeholders get familiar with your roadmapping tool and how to navigate it. 

With ProdPad you can save filtered views of your roadmap that contain the exact level of detail that you require. So when you’re preparing for your presentation for the first time, simply set up the view you want to present and it’ll be there each and every time you need it. 

Using ProdPad, you can even publish this view and embed it on your intranet or somewhere else that your stakeholders can easily find it. This means they can self-serve the updates they need and you might find yourself having to do fewer roadmap presentations in future! 

What to include in a roadmap presentation

Ok, so you know how important getting your presentation right, and some useful tips on how to do it, let’s get into the real nitty gritty: what you need to actually put in the damn thing!

Here are the ten things you’ll want to make sure you include when you present a product roadmap:

1. The agenda

Set out what you are going to cover and the outcome you want from the session. Also, consider defining the scope of the presentation so people also understand what you won’t be covering and where they can go to get that information should they need it. 

2. The bigger picture 

Whether you’re introducing it for the first time, or reminding everyone in the room, make sure to outline your Product Vision to set the stage. Also include your value proposition, target audience, and differentiators.   

3. An overview of your objectives

Whatever goal-setting framework you use (here at ProdPad we use OKRs), include a slide where you outline the main objectives you are focused on as a Product Team.

4. The roadmap (obviously!) 

Start by introducing the full roadmap. If you’re using Now-Next-Later (and we recommend that you do), now is the time to define your time horizons so everyone is clear and expectations are aligned. 

5. What’s coming up ‘Now’

Go through each Initiative in your Now column, introducing the problem to solve, the objective this will impact, and the target outcomes. Then briefly introduce the Ideas you are tackling as part of this Initiative, and give an update on their status in your workflow, taking time to explain how you will measure results. 

6. What you’re doing ‘Next’

Do the same with the Initiatives in your Next column.

7. What you’re planning ‘Later’

Here you shouldn’t go into each and every roadmap card, but rather list out the key problems to solve you will be tackling in the future. 

8. How they can stay updated

Be sure to include a slide that tells your stakeholders where to go to stay up-to-date with roadmap progress. Give them a link to your roadmap tool or the location of the appropriate published view.

9. Submission guidelines

It’s worth including this in every presentation you give – a short, fast reminder for everyone on how to submit feedback (either their own feedback or feedback from a customer) and how to submit product ideas. Briefly remind people of the process you go through to review incoming feedback and ideas. 

10. A Q&A session

Once you’re done talking, open it up to the floor! Hopefully, everyone’s still awake.

Right. Now you know what to include in your roadmap presentation. Great stuff! But… how should you deliver it? 

How to give your roadmap presentation

When you’re gearing up to deliver your roadmap presentation, think of it as your moment to shine and really connect with your audience. Here’s how you can make that connection meaningful and impactful:

Kick off with the vision

As we’ve suggested above, start strong by sharing the overarching vision and strategic goals of your product. But make sure you deliver this with some passion! Hype it up and get your audience enthusiastic about what you’re building here.

Starting with the vision sets the stage and helps everyone understand the ‘why’ behind the roadmap, which can often be one of the hardest things to get across.

You’re setting the context for the rest of your presentation – think of it as giving your audience the destination before you show them the path.

Customize your content

Remember, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to presentations. Who you’re talking to should shape what you’re talking about:

• Executives: For the C-suite, keep the altitude high. They’re keen on seeing how the roadmap aligns with broader business goals, the return on investment, and market positioning. Focus on key milestones that impact business outcomes and support strategic objectives. They’ll appreciate concise, data-backed arguments that reinforce the product’s contribution to the company’s success.
• Technical teams: Your tech folks need the down-and-dirty details. They’re looking at what’s under the hood—technical requirements, specific features, and the challenges those features might bring. Share details about technical dependencies, resources needed, and potential hurdles. Using time horizons like in the Now-Next-Later roadmap will help them see when things need to happen and why.
• Sales and Marketing: These folks need to know all about how the product can be sold. They want to know about new features, enhancements, and how these changes solve customer problems or add value. Explain how these features will attract new customers or improve retention. This perspective helps them craft compelling narratives for their campaigns and pitches.
• Customer Support: Support needs to brace for the influx of customer queries each new update might bring. Give them a heads-up on new features and any anticipated issues or common questions these might trigger. They need this info to provide stellar support and keep customer satisfaction high.
• External stakeholders: Partners and investors are eyeing the bigger picture – how the roadmap influences growth and stability. Highlight aspects of the roadmap that show promising market expansion, risk management, and long-term profitability. They’re particularly interested in how strategic initiatives align with market opportunities.
• Customers: Yes, your customers! They’re your audience too, especially if you’re a SaaS company, in a B2B space, or launching a major update that might significantly change how customers interact with your product. Show them directly how the updates will improve their experience or solve problems they care about. This builds trust and reinforces their loyalty to your product.

Bring in the visuals

A picture speaks a thousand words, as the old saying goes, so let them do the heavy lifting in your presentation. Use clear, straightforward diagrams and charts to map out time horizons, dependencies, and major milestones. This can make complex information more accessible and easier to grasp.

If you’re using ProdPad, you can tailor what you are showing to your audience, and use it to demonstrate the linked Ideas and customer feedback that you used to determine why an initiative is worth the resources it will need. This can make communicating the “why” a lot easier!

Ask for feedback

Who says presentations have to be a one-way street? Sprinkle in some interactive elements like live polls or as I mentioned above, a short Q&A session to keep things lively. It’ll keep your audience engaged and make them feel like part of the conversation.

It’ll also give you a chance to test your assumptions about your roadmap, and to ask more questions. This is your chance to get everyone on the same page.

Don’t limit the conversation to the presentation. Be sure to ask for any further feedback when you follow up after the presentation (again, more on that below).

How do I align stakeholder expectations during my roadmap presentation?

When you’re rolling out your roadmap presentation, making sure everyone’s expectations are in sync can be a bit like herding cats – everyone comes to the table with different ideas and hopes.

But don’t worry, there are some solid ways to get everyone on the same wavelength:

Communicate transparently

Start with the basics: be crystal clear. Share where your product stands today, where you plan to take it, and why. Being upfront about potential hurdles and limitations is also crucial. This kind of open communication prevents misunderstandings and helps everyone understand what’s realistic and what’s not.

Set realistic goals

It’s tempting to promise the moon to please everyone, but resist the urge! Overselling what you can deliver only leads to disappointment and erodes trust.

Aim to set goals that are within reach – achievable and manageable. This way, you can avoid the pitfalls of expectations that outpace your actual capacity.

Explain how you prioritize

Sometimes, people’s frustration can stem from not really getting why you’re doing things in the order you’ve picked. Take some time to explain the logic behind how you’ve prioritized your roadmap.

Show how the sequence of initiatives and features ties into the broader business goals. This transparency can help soothe any irritation about timing or perceived oversights.

Engage in interactive discussions

Get everyone involved in the conversation. Interactive sessions, like workshops or games like “Prune the Product Tree,” can be great for this. It’s engaging and fun, but importantly you’ll be giving your stakeholders a firsthand look at the constraints and trade-offs you have to juggle. Basically, you’re getting them to manage their own expectations.

Regular updates

Keep the communication flowing even after the presentation. Regular updates on your roadmap’s progress help keep everyone informed about how things are evolving based on their feedback and market changes. Closing your feedback loops fosters trust and keeps everyone committed over the long haul.

Aligning stakeholder expectations is less about managing demands and more about building a shared commitment to the roadmap. By fostering this shared understanding, you’re not just smoothing the way for your plans; you’re also strengthening relationships with the people who help make your product a success.

How to handle feedback during your roadmap presentation

Alright, so you’re in the middle of nailing your roadmap presentation, then someone asks a cutting question that challenges everything you’ve shown them so far. Do you curl up in a ball on the floor and panic? Hopefully not!

How you handle feedback, both during and after, can be as crucial as the presentation itself. It can really shape how your product evolves, so let’s dive into how you can manage it smoothly:

Encourage open dialogue

First up, make sure everyone knows their feedback isn’t just welcome, it’s wanted. Set the tone from the start by creating an environment that values input.

You’ll gather a wider range of viewpoints, and it helps your stakeholders feel like they’re a meaningful part of the process. Remember, the more involved they feel, the more invested they’ll become.

Listen actively

Now, when you’re in the thick of getting feedback, focus on really listening. This means tuning in closely, asking questions to clear up any doubts, and repeating back what you’ve heard to confirm you’ve got it right.

Active listening takes more than just hearing the words coming out of people’s faces – you need to make an effort to understand the deeper concerns and ideas behind them. This can lead to richer, more productive conversations.

Prioritize feedback

Not all feedback is created equal. Some of it will be spot-on, aligning perfectly with where you want your product to go. Some might not fit the bill as closely.

Get good at spotting the feedback that aligns well with your strategic goals, and prioritize that. It’s not about ignoring the rest, but rather focusing on what will really push your product forward.

Manage conflicts

Sometimes, feedback will clash. When it does, it’s on you to steer these conversations toward a common ground. This part can be tricky – it might mean making tough calls or finding compromises, but keeping your strategic goals in sight can help navigate these waters.

Again, keep asking questions. You might feel like the moderator in a debate, but you’ll probably generate some really useful insights if you can get everyone involved to help you find a solution to their disagreements.

Document and analyze

Here’s where tools like ProdPad come in handy. Use it to collate all the feedback you get, and attach that to each initiative on your roadmap. This helps you organize it and think it over later, especially when you need to share or revisit insights with your team.

Common roadmap presentation mistakes and how to avoid them

Roadmap presentations can be a tightrope walk – get it right, and you align your whole team; slip up, and you could end up faceplanting on the sidewalk.

Let’s talk about some of the usual suspects when things go awry and how you can dodge these common pitfalls:

Information overload 

Ever sat through a presentation that felt like drinking from a firehose? Yeah, not fun. It’s easy to want to show off everything you’ve planned, but too much information can confuse your audience.

Stick to the essentials: key milestones and strategic goals. Keep it tight and make sure everything you mention connects clearly to your bigger picture.

Ignoring audience needs

This one’s big: not tuning your presentation to the vibe of the room. Who’s listening matters. I’ve covered this already, but it bears repeating – know your audience, and adjust accordingly.

Lacking flexibility

If your roadmap feels like it’s carved in stone, people might hesitate to give you honest feedback – they might think it’s just shouting into the void.

Show that you welcome their ideas and that you’re ready and willing to make adjustments. This doesn’t just make your plan better; it also makes everyone feel like they’re truly part of the process.

Overpromising

We all want to be the hero who says yes to everything, but overcommitting can backfire. If you promise the moon without a rocket, you’re going to lose trust.

Be realistic about what your team can deliver. Clear, honest communication builds credibility and trust, and it helps everyone plan better.

Neglecting follow-up

Sure, cool guys don’t look at explosions, but if you just walk away after dropping your presentation bomb on your audience, you miss the chance to deepen both your and their understanding.

Send out a summary, highlight the next steps, and keep everyone in the loop as things progress. Regular updates not only maintain momentum but also strengthen your team’s commitment to the roadmap.

How detailed should a roadmap presentation be?

Figuring out the right amount of detail for a roadmap presentation can feel like you’re trying to hit a moving target. It’s all about understanding your audience, the purpose of the presentation, and just how much information you need to share without leaving your stakeholders feeling swamped or scratching their heads.

Here’s how you can find the Goldilocks zone and get your presentation just right:

• Keep it clear and simple: Start with the basics. Your roadmap should easily communicate where your product stands now and where you hope to take it. Avoid complex jargon or acronyms that could confuse people who aren’t familiar with the daily grind of your product development.
• Focus on what matters: It’s easy to get lost in the weeds with too many details. Highlight only the key milestones and significant updates. This keeps your presentation from becoming overwhelming and helps your audience focus on the strategic objectives that matter.
• Streamline your content: Aim to fit your roadmap on a single page or screen. If you find the content spilling over, it might be a sign that you’re diving too deep. Keep it concise to maintain a strategic overview.
• Adjust the depth: Different audiences need different levels of detail. For internal teams who are more involved, go a bit deeper. For external stakeholders or less technical audiences, keep it high-level to ensure it’s digestible.
• Use the product line view: If you’re discussing multiple products, integrate these into a unified presentation using ProdPad’s Portfolio view. This will help your stakeholders understand the broader strategy without the need to jump between different documents.

Remember, the goal is clarity and relevance, making sure everyone walks away with a good understanding of your product’s direction.

How to follow up on your roadmap presentation

Alright, you’ve just wrapped up your roadmap presentation and it went great! But what now? Well, the journey’s only just begun. Here’s how you can keep the momentum going and make sure all that planning doesn’t just sit on a shelf gathering dust.

Send a thank-you note and recap

Kick things off by shooting a quick thank-you email to everyone who attended. Attach the presentation slides, links to the appropriate view of your roadmap in ProdPad, and any extra materials that could help them remember the key points. This isn’t just good manners – it’s also a gentle reminder of the discussions and commitments from the session.

Gather and organize feedback

You probably got a lot of feedback during your presentation. Make sure it doesn’t slip through the cracks. Write it all down, categorize it, and maybe even use ProdPad to help you track and organize it all. 

This organized approach means you won’t miss out on any nuggets of wisdom that could make your roadmap even better.

Set up a feedback review session

Now, pull your core team together for a deep dive into the feedback. This isn’t just a casual chat; it’s a strategic session to sift through the insights and figure out what changes need to be made. It’s your chance to align everyone’s understanding and decide on the next steps together.

Update the roadmap

Here’s probably the most important step – now you’re armed with all that feedback, you’ll need to go ahead and adjust your roadmap. Maybe some time horizons need shifting, or priorities need tweaking.

These updates are really important – they show that you’re responsive and that your plan isn’t etched in stone.

Communicate the updates

Once you’ve made your changes, let everyone know. A quick update, whether through an email blast or a short meeting, can do the trick. It’s about keeping everyone in the loop, so they see how their input has shaped the roadmap.

Keep the check-ins coming

Finally, don’t just set and forget. Schedule regular check-ins to go over the roadmap’s progress. These can be as formal or informal as you like, but they’re essential for staying on track and making any necessary adjustments along the way.

And map’s a wrap!

Remember, it’s all about how clearly and engagingly you communicate your roadmap. Whether you’re mapping out your plans in ProdPad or diving into strategic discussions, you have to adjust your presentation to your audience.

Make your roadmap presentation not just accessible but truly engaging, and then watch the magic happen as everyone pulls together, rallying behind your vision. Get ready to see your project spark to life as everyone jumps on board, filled with enthusiasm and understanding.

Your roadmap presentation is more than just a one-off event. It’s the beginning of a dynamic roadmapping process that keeps everyone engaged and drives your project forward. So keep the communication clear, the feedback flowing, and the updates coming – your roadmap’s success depends on it!

The post How to Nail Your Roadmap Presentation appeared first on ProdPad.

What’s an initiative?

An initiative is generally a larger-scale effort that aligns with your strategic goals for your product or your business. Each initiative is most commonly based on a problem area to solve, an opportunity to tackle, or an area to go after.

People sometimes call them “themes”, but this term is a little bit outdated now. You’ll still hear people (even us, occasionally) talking about theme-based roadmaps because it’s such a common term.

But, as I’ll go into a bit more, themes have somewhat evolved into the concept of initiatives because there’s generally some confusion about whether themes meant objectives, which are not initiatives. Speaking of which…

What’s an objective?

In the ProdPad world, and as I’ve seen in lots of other companies out there, objectives represent your higher-level goals, sitting above your initiatives. They’re there to guide the Product team, to help them decide what they should focus on over a particular period.

Your objectives will have various initiatives that you take on to achieve them, and any one initiative might be linked to multiple objectives. Each initiative could help you move the right needles for your business by solving one or a few different objectives.

There are a number of different goal-setting frameworks that organizations subscribe to – for example, here at ProdPad, we’re fans of the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) model. Other frameworks include Balanced Scorecard, BHAGs, Strategy Maps, and GSM. What all these frameworks have in common are top-line objectives – so whichever framework you favor and whatever terminology you use, you should have ‘objectives’ in the sense of the core pillars of your overall strategy – the most important things you want to achieve.  

What’s an epic?

Epics are at one level down from initiatives on the roadmap cards that you see in our famous Now-Next-Later (NNL) roadmap.

If the objectives are like saying “Why should we do this initiative?”, and an initiative is asking “What’s the problem we’re solving?”, then your epics are where you ask “How might we solve this problem?” Epics can still be considered large bodies of work, but they’re related to a particular feature, a particular solution, or a particular way of tackling things.

Your epics can then be further broken down into user stories, and once you have those user stories, you might even break those down into different tasks (though we don’t feel the need to get quite that granular at ProdPad). How you approach that is highly subjective and is based on how your team works and their suite of task management tools.

Epics should be experiments

When talking about where epics sit vs initiatives, I like to think of epics as experiments you could run. In the ProdPad world, we call epics Ideas (and those Ideas sync directly with JIRA epics). But I like the term “Idea” because it’s pretty all-encompassing for the number of different things that an Idea could be.

It’s a potential solution, or it’s a new feature, or it’s a change in pricing or packaging. By thinking of your epics/Ideas as experiments, you’re actually outlining what might be done to solve a particular initiative. “Will implementing single sign-on reduce friction on our sign-up page? Let’s find out!”

I also like the term “experiments” when talking about epics, because an experiment could be something like building a feature, which might be a great way to solve a problem. But the best way to solve that problem could also be to take away a feature or change a feature.

By looking at your epics and Ideas as experiments, you’re not constantly driven towards just having a bunch of features on your roadmap, and building new stuff all the time. Rather, you’ve got the flexibility to find new, innovative ways to solve your customers’ problems. Your roadmap itself can then act as a tool for experimenting.

It’s about understanding what you already have and adjusting that. You want to find ways that you could solve those problems for your product, your business, and your customers… and that doesn’t necessarily just mean having to create new code!

Can epics span multiple initiatives?

Epics normally fall under one initiative. That said, you might have an epic that is related to multiple initiatives for various reasons. Perhaps part of that epic solves for the desktop version of your app, while another part of it solves for the mobile –  you could have those as two different initiatives on two different roadmaps.

Generally speaking, though, you have initiatives covering wider time spans, and then the epics underneath relate to those initiatives. But here at ProdPad, we’re not dogmatic about it! If you have a reason to connect an epic to multiple initiatives, then you can put it in there and do just that. That way you can work on one epic and make progress against multiple initiatives. 

How do larger initiatives fit into your roadmap?

While an initiative could be big enough to span various time horizons, you would typically look to either bind it to just one or break it up into smaller pieces that still represent initiative-level stuff.

If you’re looking at an initiative that’s going to take you the whole year, then sure, you could just make it one big initiative, with all the things that you’re going to tackle… and it’ll just be super slow moving. It’ll be stuck in the Now column for quite some time because it’s a big thing to take on and you’ve got to take your time over it.

What often makes more sense is to take that initiative and articulate it into three or more smaller initiatives. You might call each part V1, V2, V3, and so on.

You might say for V1 you want to create the space for somebody to join this new community you’re building. And then V2 is about having people expand their usage of that community. And then V3 is about monetizing the usage of it.

It’s a more effective approach than just having an initiative saying “build a profitable community” – it’s too big. In this situation “build a profitable community” might actually be your high-level objective that feeds into all of those initiatives.

In ProdPad you can use tags to link those initiatives together, and that way you can filter down, and even create a version of your roadmap that just looks at that initiative. You can get an expanded view of the initiative, and all the objectives that are tied to it, all in one place.

How do you ensure that your initiatives and your efforts are aligned with your business goals, customer needs, and objectives?

By cascading things down. You should be able to read your roadmap from the top down and bottom up.

A big hat tip here to Martin Eriksson’s work on the product decision stack – As ever, the terminology differs, but the concept is simple and effective, and is a good way to visualize where your initiatives sit vs your epics.

You have your vision, your strategy, and your top-level goals. Below that you have your initiatives, then you have your epics, and finally, you have the user story-level stuff. The idea is that you go down the ladder from one level to the next, simply asking “How?”

Say your objective is to get more revenue.

Okay, how? Build a profitable community. – There’s your objective.
Okay, how? Start by building this part of it – There’s your initiative.
Okay, how? Well, let’s start with this experiment. – There’s your epic.

It also climbs up the ladder too, by asking “Why?” 

Why are we doing this login field? Because we’re building the front-end of our community… and so on up the ladder again. It’s a great way of understanding and communicating how and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

It also helps people align around how what you’re working on is going to impact the right areas of the business, and it allows you to show your work at a level of granularity that’s appropriate to the stakeholder you’re talking to.

Your execs probably don’t care about your epics, they don’t care about the future-level stuff. But they do want to know whether that initiative is making progress, whether that initiative is happening now, next, or later… But really, it’s about how that reflects back to the overall goals.

They don’t care that you’re working on features, they just care that you’re making an impact, so show them the level of work that will speak to that. 

How should you prioritize your initiatives vs your epics?

It should all be driven by the business outcomes, the business objectives, and the outcomes that are desired. So this actually takes a different turn.

Other product management tools (mentioning no names) call themselves “customer-driven” or “data-driven” or, you know, “whatever-else-driven”. I’d argue that the point is not to be driven by these things. It is to be informed  – by data and by your customers.

Ultimately, you should be business-driven, objective-driven, or outcome-driven (which is the term that I like to use).

What that means is making sure that your outcomes, the things that you’re doing, align back to the overall company goals, which is why the Now-Next-Later framework is so powerful.

What Now-Next-Later allows you to do is to very easily capture your high-level goals and objectives as they relate to your initiatives and vice versa. And then to break those down into how you’re going to do those and how you’re getting on with that, which is your ideas and the workflow status information.

You’re able to get that all visible on one page, so if anybody’s wondering what you’re working on, why, and how it’s going to impact things, it’s there at their fingertips.

Show your work!

ProdPad is the only tool that directly connects your Now-Next-Later initiatives to your OKRs. That’s really helpful because you need to make sure that the work that you’re doing, the initiatives, and the epics that you take on, are actually going to contribute to that all-important level of business goals. Whether you’re trying to build the bottom line or to get market share or whatever is important for your business, you need to be able to show the work that you do.

That’s why ProdPad has a view that shows your completed initiatives and epics (Ideas). Not only are you able to outline what you’re actively working on and what you’re seeing in the future for your initiatives and their related epics, but you can show off by saying “Here’s what we’ve already done, and here’s what we got out of it.”

The Completed area of your roadmap shows you quite clearly what’s been worked on, and what worked and what didn’t. It’s just as important to show what didn’t work for your initiatives as what did work. It’s a little bit like math class, when you still get half the points for showing the workings, even if you didn’t get the answer you were looking for.

If you want to be outcome-driven, it’s essential to be able to look back on what you did and say whether you got good outcomes or not. It helps provide transparency and it helps to prove the ROI of your Product team, which is especially important in today’s world when businesses are becoming more and more focused on showing how you’re contributing to the bottom line.

Your product is not just a sum of the features that you’ve launched or the features that are in there. It’s a sum of all the learnings that you’ve had that have led to you choosing the right features for now and for later.

Don’t be afraid to fail, and importantly, don’t be afraid to communicate your failures. Do not sweep your failings under the rug.

Themes are out, initiatives are in

As I mentioned before, the term “initiative”, in its current context, is a newer concept that’s started to solidify around what people have previously been calling themes. “Themes” is a very popular term in the Agile world, but it can easily be misconstrued. Even theme-based roadmaps are falling out of favor and initiative seems to be taking its place.

You could call it an initiative-based roadmap, but people don’t call them that (probably because that’s just way too many syllables!). Hey, though, I don’t want to invent another new term!

Even a very popular roadmapping book I wrote the foreword for in 2017, Product Roadmaps Relaunched, talked more about themes as a concept. But, over time, the words we use evolve, right? We’ve learned some stuff in the last seven years!

Using initiatives vs epics in the real world

Here’s a direct example for you: on ProdPad’s public roadmap, we break things into initiatives and Ideas (AKA epics as we’re talking about here). I have seen literally thousands of people move towards this way of working – having a roadmap that lines up your initiatives and your epics as opposed to having a feature-led roadmap.

And that’s not just our users. I talk to a lot of people who are trying to get away from timeline-based, feature-led roadmaps, to move into a more Now-Next-Later style. In fact, we created a course on that very subject since we were always being asked how to make the transition from timeline to Now-Next-Later. You can see just by the popularity of the Now-Next-Later framework, and how people are thinking more about initiative-level stuff, that it’s had an astounding effect on how people are working.

Another big hat tip here to Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree, whom we had a great chat with for one of our webinars. It’s a great way to work out a hierarchy for your ideas, which then maps to your initiatives and epics.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you do everything you come up with when making your tree, and call everything that you pull out of the top of it an initiative, and therefore everything under it is an epic… But these are certainly things that could become candidates for it.

Initiatives vs epics – A rose by any other name…

So, my final thoughts on initiatives and epics:

• Make sure to use them!
• What you call them isn’t as important as how you use them.
• Don’t think of epics as just features to build but as experiments to conduct.
• Make sure that everything you’re doing is linked back to your objectives. 
• And if you’re using ProdPad, don’t forget to integrate it with Jira, or whatever dev tool you’re using!

I hope this run-through of my personal take on initiatives vs epics has helped you to reach your own understanding of how it fits with your product, and how your team can use them more effectively.

If you want to learn by doing, I’d highly recommend taking our live Sandbox for a spin, so you can see how it all fits together in terms of your initiatives vs your epics, how they help you realize your strategy, and how ProdPad can make you a better Product Manager.

The post Initiative vs Epic – What’s the difference, and how do you use them? appeared first on ProdPad.

I’m also assuming, since you’re here, that you know why the Now-Next-Later roadmap, and lean, agile roadmapping in general, is a much better approach. But again, if you want a refresher on that, lesson 2 in the course will see you right. Alternatively there’s a short, sharp explanation on the benefits of the Now-Next-Later framework in our Ultimate Guide to Product Roadmaps.

In short, the Now-Next-Later helps you stay outcome-focused and not out-put focused. Rather than a roadmap populated with specific features, you will have a strategic planning tool that prioritizes broader Initiatives, articulated as problems to solve, across three time horizons.

Within each Initiative are different Ideas, or experiments, you are exploring and validating as possible ways to solve that problem. In this way, the Now-Next-Later roadmap framework affords you the flexibility to experiment, learn and iterate to find the most successful solution that will drive your desired outcome. You are not committing to an exact feature too early, nor are you giving exact dates until you know for sure what you are going to build. But you are making a clear and easy to understand declaration of the important problems you are going to solve (for the business and/or the customer) and in what order you are going to tackle them.

Sounds good right? You want that for yourself don’t you? But if right now you’re sat in front of a well-established timeline roadmap around which all your product processes and stakeholder expectations are centered, how on earth do you get there? How do you go from that, to the better way of working that I’ve described? 

After all, a lot of work will have gone into that timeline roadmap, however troublesome it might be. So how do you transition to the Now-Next-Later roadmap without completely throwing out all that work and starting from scratch? Well, don’t despair, it is possible. Just work through the steps I’m going to walk you through in this article.

Let’s get started…

The 8 steps to converting your timeline roadmap to a Now-Next-Later  

1. Go get your Strategy and Vision
2. Check your OKRS
3. From features to problems 
4. Creating your Initiatives and Ideas
5. Aligning to your Product Objectives
6. Defining your time horizons
7. Getting your Initiatives in the right columns
8. Reviewing your Now-Next-Later roadmap

Step 1. Go get your Strategy and Vision 

Before we pick up your timeline roadmap and start the transition, we need to make sure you have solid foundations in place. The outcome-focused nature of the Now-Next-Later framework means it is intrinsically linked to the value your product is trying to drive for both your customers and your business. As such, any good Now-Next-Later roadmap is grounded in a strong Product Vision. 

We won’t dive into the art of creating a compelling and effective Product Vision here, but if you don’t have one, or think yours could do with a refresh, then be sure to check out our Product Vision Template for guidance on how best to create one, and our collection of good Product Vision examples to help spark ideas.

But if you have one, go get it and just double-check that your Vision…

• Is inspiring and motivating
• Includes details on your buyers and users
• Covers your value proposition and links back to the desired outcomes 
• Is unambiguous and not open to multiple interpretations

Step 2. Check your Objectives

The second pillar of your Now-Next-Later roadmap foundation is your Product Objectives. Regardless of the goal setting framework you favor (be it OKRs, a Strategy Map, GSM, Balanced Scorecard, or any other), you should have a set of things that you are trying to achieve as a product and a business. You may or may not have drilled down further to specific, measurable goals with exact targets, but at the very least you should have around 3 to 5 core product objectives. 

Again, if you think you’re lacking here, then it’s a good idea to work your way through our course on how to create Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). That is our preferred goal framework here at ProdPad and the one that most closely aligns with the Now-Next-Later approach. 

Gather your Objectives and have them to hand as you work through the next steps.

Step 3. From features to problems

The chances are, if you’re currently working with a timeline roadmap, the items you have on there are specific feature ideas, rather than broader themes, areas of focus or problems to solve. 

Structuring your roadmap as a series of specific feature ideas is a bad idea. Among other things, it creates an output mindset instead of an outcome-focused one. Why is this so important? Because measuring output isn’t relevant to a product’s success – you need to measure outcomes and have the confidence that you’ve solved the problem you intended to solve.

A Now-Next-Later roadmap should never be populated with a series of cards or items that are specific feature ideas but is, in fact, structured around a two level hierarchy –  namely, Roadmap Initiatives and their corresponding Ideas. 

These Initiatives are focused on the problem to solve – the broader customer or business value you’re trying to deliver – and the Ideas within each Initiative are the possible ways you could go about solving that problem and delivering that value. Depending on where the Initiative sits on your roadmap those Ideas will be a list of possibilities that still need to be considered, researched, and explored. Or they’re Ideas you have run discovery on, validated, and are ready to proceed with.

So, how do you take a bunch of feature ideas from your timeline roadmap and convert them into this Initiative > Ideas structure? Get yourself a whiteboard (virtual or otherwise) and follow these steps.

Firstly, make a sticky note for every item on your timeline roadmap and stick them on your board. Now you’re going to do an Affinity Mapping exercise.  

Gather your team around (or do this on your own if you’re so inclined) and group these sticky notes by theme. Don’t be tempted to consider certain areas of the product a theme, or particular user personas. Those examples are not outcome-focused – and being out-come focused is key to the Now-Next-Later roadmap framework! The Now-Next-Later is designed to keep you results-orientated and make certain you’re prioritizing what will create the most value and building things that will help you succeed and grow. 

In order for your NNL to be most effective, you’ll want to group your feature sticky notes based on the problems they are trying to solve. That problem could be related to your customers, or even to your business.

For example, you might have a bunch of features on your timeline that are ideas related to helping your customers share content more easily, or features that are all attempts to improve collaboration for your users. In these cases, your problem to solve could be ‘How can we help customers collaborate more effectively?’ 

So have a look through all the sticky notes on your board and think about the value the feature would bring (to the customer and/or the business) if it were successful. Now think about that value as the solution to a broader problem. Now articulate that problem in a short sentence – we find questions work well, particularly for things in your Later column (but we’ll come back to that). That is your theme/problem to solve title. 

Now continue through all of your sticky notes and when you identify a problem to solve that is already captured on your board, move that feature sticky note over to that group. Remember to keep your problems to solve broader than the specific solution that one particular feature would bring. For example, you might have a feature which is a Slack integration – at this stage, keep the problem to solve much broader – in this example it could be something like ‘How can we help our customers increase collaboration with other departments?’ Later on we will come back to each problem and get more specific – but more on that later.  

Step 4. Creating your Initiatives and Ideas

The groupings you’ve created with your Affinity Mapping session are going to become your Roadmap Initiatives with their related Ideas. With just a little more work, we’ll get you from a board of stickies to a list of Initiatives ready to start mapping onto your Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

Let’s start with picking off any groupings on your board that have a lot of feature sticky notes within them. If you don’t have any groups with more than 4 or 5 features, then you can go ahead and skip to the next step! But if there are one or more groups with 5+ features within them, you’ll want to spend some time looking at those. 

You’ll need to break down any problems where you have a large list of features all trying to solve that issue. Let’s use an example to illustrate this….

Once you are happy that you have your problems-to-solve broken down to the right level, you have successfully reframed a bunch of specific feature-related roadmap items into a series of broader initiatives. 

The feature roadmap items that you have in each grouping then become your Ideas for how to solve each of those problems. 
 

Step 5. Aligning to your product objectives

The last step in finalizing these Initiatives is to map them back to your Product Objectives. This is an essential component of the Now-Next-Later roadmap format. The outcome-focused nature of the Now-Next-Later roadmap framework requires that everything on your roadmap is not only focused on delivering value in the form of solving a problem, but also by contributing to the achievement of your Product Objectives. 

So, looking back to step 2, grab your core Product Objectives (that no doubt align to some extent with your overall business objectives) and give each a color, icon, or flag of some sort. 

Now go back to your Initiative groupings, one by one, and determine which Objective each of them is helping to achieve. Color code the grouping (or add the flag or icon to the group) with the relevant Objective or Objectives (remember, it can help you achieve more than one of your objectives). 

Now you have a set of nicely agile roadmap Initiatives that are outcome-focused and linked to your Objectives. 

Next up is the timing. How do you now take what was once mapped out on a timeline and translate it into the Now-Next-Later framework?

Step 6. Defining your time horizons

The first stage is to define your time horizons. This is important because everyone can have different interpretations of what now, next, and later mean. You need to be explicit about how you’re defining these horizons so you’re setting the right expectations with your stakeholders. 

A good option for when you’re weaning a team off a timeline roadmap is to use more exact time parameters like fiscal quarters.

Remember, you don’t even have to stick to Now, Next, and Later as your time horizon headings! You can adopt the process and principles of the Now-Next-Later without being tied to those exact terms.

In fact, even in ProdPad, we allow our customers to customize the column headings and call them whatever they want. You might want to be more explicit about the time brackets for each and call them ‘This quarter’, ‘Next quarter’, and ‘The future’.

Once you’ve decided what you mean by Now, Next, and Later, you’ll be able to roughly map the periods on your timeline to these horizons.

Step 7. Getting your Initiatives in the right columns

So now you have a bunch of Initiatives with their Ideas, and a set of well-defined time horizons, now you need to combine the two and distribute those initiatives across your Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

Here are the steps to follow:

1. In order to roughly match the priority order you had on your timeline roadmap (so you’re not completely dismantling all the stakeholder expectations that already exist), take each Initiative and look at the Ideas. Find the Idea that was place soonest on your old timeline roadmap – now assign the entire Initiative to the time horizon column that corresponds to that date on your timeline
2. Once you’ve been through each Initiative and placed it based on where the earliest feature was on your previous timeline, then you need to go back to each initiative and sense-check whether those feature ideas are actually right for the NNL stage you’ve placed them. You want to do this based on the stage each feature is at. How validated is this feature? How confident are you that this feature is going to solve that problem? Place in now next later based on that- does it need more discovery to validate it? Then put it over in next or later. Have you done a lot of that validation work? Are you pretty confident it’s the right thing to do to solve that problem? Then put that in now – it’s ready. 
   
   Essentially, the placement on the NNL roadmap should correlate to the degree of confidence you’ve reached for the Ideas within each Initiative. And the level of confidence you have will be influenced by the work you’ve done and the amount of time you’ve spent on the idea. 
   
   Broadly speaking, the placement of Initiatives on your NNL should look something like this. 

3. You’ll notice that the Initiative title is different for each time horizon column. As your Initiatives move from right to left, working through your process and maturing, you’ll be able to narrow the problem down and get more specific. It’s also helpful to update your Initiative titles and descriptions to reflect that. 
   
   So, based on these maturity stages, do any of the Initiatives on your NNL need to shift? Is there an Initiative in the Now column with Ideas that haven’t been validated yet? Are there feature ideas that need more discovery done before you can confidently say that they are the right solution to that problem and are what you should be building? If so, move it back to the next column to allow time to do that research and validation work. 
   
4. Remember to watch out for any hard deadlines that need to be hit. If it’s important that something is shipped by a certain date, then you won’t have the flexibility to move it back. Make sure you’ve checked through everything for any hard dates like these and have your Initiative in the relevant time horizon column.

If something has to move (and there’s no hard time sensitivity to prevent that), remember to make a note of the change so you have a list of where you’ve significantly diverged from the priority order as it appeared on the previous timeline. You’ll likely need to communicate those changes to your stakeholders when you present your new NNL roadmap. But do not fear, you have solid reasons for pushing it back – it will enable you to validate the idea, ensuring you’re spending expensive development time on something that stands a better chance of driving the results that are strategically important.

Step 8. Reviewing your Now-Next-Later roadmap

For the most part, where your Initiatives are placed is based on where they were on your timeline. Now it’s time to sense check that placement now that they are reframed around problems to solve and linked to your objectives. 

So take a step back and look at what you have. Are these the most important problems to solve? Did you struggle to associate any of these Initiatives with your Objectives? If so, should you be doing them at all?

At an Initiative level, are these feature Ideas still the right ones to work on? Now that you’ve grouped the feature ideas under the problems to solve, have you got multiple features that are working to solve the same problem? Do you need all of them? Or is one likely to prove far more effective than the others? In which case, consider ditching the other feature Ideas so you’re being as efficient with your resources as possible. If you can solve the problem with one feature rather than three, great – build and measure that one feature and then move on to the next problem to solve.

This is one way in which the Now-Next-Later format helps you solve more problems in less time! Deliver more value, faster. You’re more efficient and effective working in this way and staying focused on the problem to solve rather than being a feature factory.

I would love to hear from you after you’ve made the transition from timeline roadmap to Now-Next-Later. Heck, I’d even like to see your new Now-Next-Later and offer my thoughts. So please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know how the move goes. Good luck, you won’t regret it.

The post 8 Steps to Convert Your Timeline Roadmap to a Now-Next-Later appeared first on ProdPad.

Where did Jira Product Discovery come from?

So, as you all know, Jira Software has been around for a long time. It’s been a lynchpin of the Atlassian offering for many years. The original Jira tool was built as a project management tool specifically tailored to tech delivery, sprint planning and dev ops. The tool is for engineering teams, but as product management developed as a discipline, some product managers found themselves trying to bend the tool to their roadmapping and backlog management needs. And, again, as I’m sure you know, that never ends well.

Jira Product Discovery therefore, represents Atlassian’s realization and acknowledgement that Jira Software is not the place to run product discovery and strategy planning. It is a system for delivery and release planning and Product Managers need a space to do their ideation and prioritize what to work on next. 

Product Managers within organizations who used the Atlassian suite would typically either struggle along with Jira Software or they would get themselves a purpose-built product management tool like ProdPad with deep integrations with Jira Software so they could run their strategy and discovery in ProdPad and push things over to the engineering team, via Jira Software, when something was ready to be built.  So the creation of Jira Product Discovery is an attempt to get a piece of that latter pie and give PMs a dedicated space for their product management… 

But does it go far enough? 

Does Jira Product Discovery go far enough in providing a dedicated strategic space for product managers?

In short, no. Jira Product Discovery facilitates a new issue type of Ideas and allows you to prioritize those on a Now-Next-Later roadmap, attaching feedback and creating tickets to pass over to Jira Software… but it’s a very manual tool that does nothing to free up your valuable time or guide best practice. Neither is it the tool to help you establish a product culture outside of your immediate team and foster collaboration across the whole organization. 

ProdPad, on the other hand, is the only complete product management platform focused on saving you time and getting you to impactful product decisions faster. Through advanced AI, deep integrations and best practice workflows and suggestions, ProdPad helps Product Managers not only enjoy their own dedicated space, but actually save time, move faster and deliver more. 

What is Jira Product Discovery missing?

Jira Product Discovery is a tool to help you tack roadmapping and backlog management in front of the sprint planning and release planning the engineering teams might be doing in Jira Software. 

It delivers a smooth and efficient process for moving Ideas from the product backlog into delivery, but discovery, validation and the customer feedback loop appears not to be part of their focus. 

Jira Product Discovery is missing some of the most important features to help you:

• Develop a solid strategy both top down and bottom up
• Easily communicate that strategy with all stakeholders 
• Enjoy the benefits of a single source of truth for all things product
• Successfully facilitate collaboration across the organization

Jira Product Discovery has…

Feedback

• No integrations with CRMs or support systems to automatically (or manually) route feedback from customer-facing teams
• No feedback portal or widget to gather feedback from your users
• No tools to surface the themes in your feedback
• No easy way to distinguish between the feedback you have triaged and the feedback still to look at

Strategy

• No strategy canvas or place to describe your overall strategy or capture your product vision
• No OKR, product objectives or goal management tool

Roadmapping

• No hierarchy or nesting ability to the roadmap items – just one flat issue type
• No external roadmap sharing or embedding
• No portfolio management or view across different roadmaps
• No in-built document creation for specs, PRDs, designs or anything else – all that must sit externally 

Other

• No email notifications to help you drive action from the team and collaboration
• No AI assistance to help lighten the load and unlock more time for the most valuable work

Is ProdPad the best Jira Product Discovery Alternative?

Spoiler alert: everything listed above, that is missing in the Jira Product Discovery tool, is available in ProdPad

But let’s map that out for you feature-by-feature. 

Jira Product Discovery vs ProdPad feature comparison

	Jira Product Discovery	ProdPad
Roadmapping
Now-Next-Later roadmap
Completed and candiate roadmap columns by default
Toggle to view roadmap grouped by Product Objective
AI Roadmap Initiative and Idea generation
Porfolio management and roadmaps
Roadmap publishing and external sharing
Initiative > Ideas hierarchy
Strategy
Product Strategy Canvas to map out Vision, value and more
Central documentation repository
Full OKR management with goal setting
Personas
AI Product Coach
Idea Management
Idea management
Jira Software integration with 2 way sync
Impact vs Effort prioritization chart
Customizable prioritization scales
Confidence rating mapped to prioritization chart
Unsorted and backlog lists for refinement and triaging
Idea Canvas to guide your ideation and discovery
AI Assistant to automate backlog refinement
Bulit-in product specs and document creation
AI Assistant to automate backlog refinement
Generative AI for idea descriptions, etc
Workflow management for pre-delivery planning – discovery & validation
Feedback Management
Chrome extension for feedback capture
Slack and Teams integration
Customer feedback portal & widgets
Integrations with support systems and CRMs to pull in feedback
AI feedback theme analysis
AI feedback summarizer
Collaboration
Free, unlimited contributors
Email notifications
Comment discussion board integration with Slack, Teams & email
And there’s more!
Customizable automation rules
Comprehensive API access

Let’s dig into some of ProdPad’s key differentiators – the headline benefits if you will. 

Only with ProdPad will you get: 

• Effortless feedback gathering and deep AI analysis
• A home for your vision, strategy and OKRs – guiding your roadmap and prioritization
• All the tools to easily communicate a clear roadmap and keep everyone informed
• A central hub and single source of truth for organization-wide collaboration 
• An AI-powered assistant and coach to help you automate the grunt work and deliver more value

Gather feedback from more places and more people

ProdPad has the most advanced feedback gathering capabilities of any all-in-one product management tool. There are more ways to submit or automatically route feedback into ProdPad than in Jira Product Discovery. 

We’ve already suggested that feedback analysis isn’t a big focus for Jira Product Discovery, but the team here at ProdPad have prioritized the development of our feedback management tool precisely because they recognize the fundamental importance that user feedback plays in informing and shaping the product strategy and your prioritization decisions. In fact, it’s through these feedback tools that we were able to identify that effective feedback management is a primary need and problem to solve for y’all! 

In short, ProdPad’s feedback management tool is designed to ensure as many people in your organization as possible can submit feedback to the product team without having to log into ProdPad itself. Our powerful integrations, extensions and widgets mean your customer-facing colleagues can manually, or automatically fire feedback from wherever they work, directly into your feedback repository.  

With ProdPad you can gather feedback in the following ways: 

• Customer feedback portals and widgets (add your own branding) 
• Push feedback directly from Slack or MS Teams
• Integrate your CRM (like Salesforce) to easily get feedback from sales teams
• Connect your support system (like Zendesk) to automatically route feedback from your customer teams
• Email feedback directly into ProdPad
• Fast-add feedback from your browser with our Chrome extension

With Jira Product Discovery, aside from manually adding feedback directly into the tool, you can pull in feedback through:

• Slack and Teams integrations (but only from a dedicated #product-feedback channel)
• Chrome extension
• Jira Service Management integration

Jira Product Discovery has:

• No customer feedback portals
• No CRM integrations
• No support system integrations (aside from Jira Service Management)
• No email dropbox

Analyze your feedback to help fuel your thinking  

Of course, it’s not enough to just collect feedback – you need to understand what you have and use that insight in your decision making. Where Jira Product Discovery offers no feedback analysis tools at all, ProdPad has multiple ways to extract insight from your feedback faster. From the frequency charts that help you spot trends, to the AI Signals tool to surface the common themes. 

ProdPad’s AI Assistant will help you:

• Generate succinct summaries of any long pieces of feedback
• Automatically link feedback to relevant Ideas in your backlog
• Analyze your entire feedback repository and surface the themes in moments

ProdPad helps you go from a list of feedback, to strategic insights in half the time. ProdPad is the best tool to unearth insight from your feedback and feed your bottom-up strategic planning.

Where’s the why? Keep your strategy close by 

Another difference between Jira Product Discovery and ProdPad is the emphasis put on the bigger picture. ProdPad comes with a unique Product Canvas area which allows you to keep your roadmap next to a description and articulation of your wider product strategy. This is designed to ensure alignment, remind the team of the bigger picture and make sure everyone understands the context in which you are working and making decisions.

ProdPad’s unique Product Canvas provides a space to map out your Vision, value, strategy and more, capturing that all important, overarching reason for being. It’s proximity to your roadmap (the very next tab!) means you’re never more than a click away from that north star, helping to keep you – and everyone who visits the roadmap – aligned to the ultimate goals. 

ProdPad can even provide coaching to help you better align your product Ideas with this strategy and Vision. Whenever an Idea is added to ProdPad, our AI Product Coach can compare that Idea to the Product Vision and give you considered, constructive guidance on how to improve alignment and focus on your core objectives. This can be a game changer when it comes to Idea submissions from different teams and other colleagues. Rather than you having to devise appropriate feedback to give to the Idea submitter, you can let the AI Coach handle that for you. You get a backlog of better aligned Ideas and you’ve saved a bunch of time feeding back on that Idea. 

Know exactly how you’ll measure success with OKR management

To stay truly outcome-focused you need to be clear on the exact needles you want to move and the results you need to see. ProdPad’s full OKR management system goes deeper, allowing you to set specific, measurable Key Results under each of your product objectives. Our AI can even generate key results for you, getting you from broad goals to exact targets in moments. 

In Jira Product Discovery you can only list objectives and attach them to Ideas, but you cannot set and measure specific goals or Key Results, nor can you flag progress against goals or targets. 

The home of the Now-Next-Later roadmap

Jira Product Discovery is a roadmapping tool built around the Now-Next-Later roadmap – a roadmap format and practice that we invented here at ProdPad. Our Co-Founders Janna Bastow and Simon Cast invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap as a direct solution to the problems they were facing as PMs using a timeline roadmap. 

So, ProdPad is the home of the Now-Next-Later and the right place to come for the best guidance and structure to properly work within the principles of lean roadmapping and the outcome-based Now-Next-Later roadmap. 

For example, while Jira Product Discovery provides an infinitely flexible roadmap structure that you can configure however you like, ProdPad actively helps you instill good habits and best practice, driving consistency across the team by providing some unique areas of the roadmap, by default. Those include a Completed area where you move those roadmap Initiatives that have been shipped and measured – helping you demonstrate what you’ve achieved and tell the story of your product evolution. And a Candidate area for you to store those potential Initiatives that may make it onto the roadmap in time. 

In ProdPad, you can also toggle to view your entire Now-Next-Later organized by Objective, giving you a color coded view of what you’re doing to impact each of your core product objectives. 

Each of these built-in, by default, settings helps you easily tell the story of your product strategy in different ways, ensuring you have ready-made views for demonstrating what you’re working on and why. 

The Initiative > Idea hierarchy 

As we’ve mentioned already, with Jira Product Discovery you get one new issue type, not already seen in Jira Software. By default that issue type is labeled Idea, but you have the flexibility to call that whatever you want. Which is great. But…. that issue type is flat. You do not have the ability to nest a secondary issue type within it. And that causes a problem if you truly want to work in an agile way.

You see, without a hierarchy within each roadmap item, you’re doing nothing more than moving a series of feature ideas around a board. That sounds like project management, nor product management. 

To be truly outcome-focused and customer-centric requires a hierarchy that enables you to prioritize and communicate a problem to be solved and not one single idea. Then you’re free to group multiple ideas beneath that higher problem, leaving you open to explore and test each one to find the best way to solve that problem. 

ProdPad works differently. With a Now-Next-Later roadmap in ProdPad each item on your roadmap is an Initiative, within which you can add and link any number of Ideas. With the Initiative you are declaring the problem you want to solve, and with each Idea you’re putting forward a different ‘experiment’ or possible way it could be solved. 

WIth the Initiative and Idea hierarchy you are therefore free to experiment, learn and iterate to find the best solution to the problem. This hierarchy ensures you are not nailing your flag to a certain Idea or feature too soon, cutting out the opportunity to discover the best path.  

This also provides you with a roadmap format far more suitable for customer communications. With Jira’s single issue type you have no choice but to show everyone a roadmap with details of specific Ideas – that or you’ll need to build an entirely new roadmap in which you present the roadmap items as the broader problems. But now you have two different roadmaps to maintain at all times For more on the best ways to present a public roadmap, check out our guide on the topic.

With ProdPad you can keep one central version of your roadmap and simply click to publish a customer-facing version where you toggle off the Ideas and just show your top-level Initiatives. That published roadmap will dynamically update as you manage and amend your roadmap.

Which brings us onto another key way in which ProdPad is the best Jira Product Discovery alternative, solving more of your product management problems.

Effortless stakeholder comms

As the custodian of the product strategy, communicating the plan is a decent chunk of your job. But it’s also a part of the job that can get in the way of doing what you probably would rather be doing – namely, discovery, testing and making product decisions! 

It’s important that you have a roadmapping tool that prevents you needing to update documents all the time, field endless questions from people around the organization and explain your progress and decisions all the livelong day.

So how does ProdPad stack up as the best Jira Product Discovery alternative in terms of ease of communication and helping you solve this problem?

I’ll start with the bad news…. Jira Product Discovery has no ability for external sharing of your roadmap. Everyone you want to share your dynamic roadmap with will need to have a Jira Product Discovery login.

Clearly that’s no good if you need to share with leadership executives, colleagues outside of your every-day teams or even the whole company. Nor does it help you communicate your roadmap externally – to your customers, investors or even publicly on your website. So, if you have your roadmap in Jira Product Discovery, you’re going to have to continue the pain of creating slides and answering all those ‘is this on the roadmap?’ questions. No thanks.

Now onto the good news…ProdPad provides dynamic roadmap publishing, allowing you to create unlimited customized views and share externally or even embed on your website. Phew. 

Now you can manage one central roadmap safe in the knowledge that your published versions will stay up-to-date and show each group of stakeholders exactly what they need to know. Our deep and detailed filters allow you to build views that are as detailed or as top-level as you want. 

So you can quickly throw up a roadmap view for, say, your Sales Lead and not have to think about it again. That Sales Lead now has a link to their own, customized view whenever they need it. Now if anyone wants to know if something is on the roadmap, they can see for themselves. 

With ProdPad it’s super simple to publish a customer-facing version of your roadmap that is an Initiative-only, broad overview – communicating the problems you’ll solve, not the details of the Ideas. Check out our own external roadmap to see how that looks in action. 

Power a product culture with a true collaboration hub 

To recap a few of the things we’ve discovered already about Jira Product Discovery… 

• No integrations with CRMs
• No integrations with systems the Customer and Support Teams use
• No ability to email in Ideas or Feedback
• No sharing of roadmaps with people without a login

This makes it very hard for people outside of the product team to interact with what you’re doing – to contribute and collaborate. Because, let’s be honest, no one is going to bother logging into a new and different system, one that isn’t primarily their tool, to help you do your job. With the best will in the world, that ain’t happening.

But you do need contributions from other teams! Of course you do. You need feedback to be shared with you, you need input and suggestions from other teams, you need to create transparency and help everyone feel invested and involved with access to the strategy and the roadmap.  And, to get the richest backlog you can, you should be encouraging anyone in the organization to submit Ideas if they think of something good! 

If you want to foster a true product culture across the organization, you need to have a product management tool focused on providing easy access and removing all barriers to engagement by your stakeholders. So, with this in mind is ProdPad the best Jira Product Discovery alternative when it comes to getting the whole company on-board?

Yes, yes it is. You see, ProdPad is integrated with more of the tools your wider organization use. You can invite and capture discussion, ask for feedback and give people an easy outlet for their product ideas – all without needing to log in to ProdPad. This is the key to truly fostering a product culture and collaborating cross-functionally. This is the tool leadership will thank you for.

Jira Product Discovery also fails to offer a place for your documentation. Your working documents – your specs, PRDs, notes – all that decision tracking and discussion has to happen elsewhere. 

ProdPad, on the other hand, offers a central document repository per product, and built-in specification documents, design tool integrations and more, against each and every Idea. So you can enjoy a single source of truth for everything you’re working on. 

The most advanced AI capabilities of any product management tool

This one is a biggy. For many people, it’s the main reason why ProdPad is the best Jira Product Discovery alternative. I’ll cut straight to the chase… ProdPad has the most advanced AI capabilities of any product management platform. But we’re not here to compare ProdPad to all other tools, you’re looking for the best Jira Product Discovery alternative. So what are Jira Product Discovery’s AI capabilities like?

They are nonexistent. With Jira Product Discovery there is no AI assistance to help you work faster or better. You are very much on your own.

ProdPad, on the other hand, is not just a complete platform to manage your product process, it’s a team member and coach – a tool to help you and your whole organization work smarter and faster – getting to the most impactful product decisions in half the time. 

The AI tools in ProdPad come in a number of different flavors, helping you do different jobs in half the time. They include:

• AI tools to automate the grunt work and free up your time
• AI tools to do the writing for you – generate descriptions, user stories, feedback summaries and more 
• AI tools to kick-start your ideation – generating Roadmap Initiatives, Ideas and even suggesting Key Results to focus your efforts
• AI tools to coach you to do your best work – offering constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement whenever you need it
• AI tools to run analysis and suggest what to prioritize

Portfolio management

This one is pretty cut and dry. Jira Product Discovery does not easily allow for portfolio management and is ill-equipped to handle the needs of multiple product companies who need both individual roadmap views that automatically roll up to a portfolio level view. 

With ProdPad you can manage everything from a product, product line or product portfolio level. You can set OKRs and outline a strategy and Vision at portfolio level as well as at the individual product level.

Maintaining a portfolio roadmap is effortless as each product roadmap automatically feeds its Initiatives up to the higher level. 

The same also applies for product lines. Within your portfolio you can group individual products together across different product lines and easily view product line roadmaps and assign OKRs and vision statements unique to that product line. 

In short, Jira Product Discovery only facilitates the creation of single roadmap only. Any product line or portfolio roadmap would have to be manually built up in a horrible big cut and paste job. Not ideal if you’re trying to drive efficiencies and maintain a consistent picture of what’s happening across your product organization. 

But what if you need a tight sync with Jira Software?

After all, if you’re evaluating Jira Product Discovery, the chances are it’s because you’re already using Jira Software for your delivery planning and you want a smooth handover from one to the other. 

Well Jira Product Discovery aren’t the only product management tool who can provide that. ProdPad has a powerful integration, complete with two-way sync, with Jira Software. And that’s both for the Jira Software Cloud solution and the Jira Server & Data Center on-premise solutions. So it really is proving to be the best Jira Product Discovery alternative.

This tight integration means you can not only easily import your existing Jira issues when you first start out with ProdPad, but you can enjoy a two-way content and status sync from the moment you decide to push an Idea over to Jira Software to be picked up by the development team. 

In fact, if you’re currently struggling with a product backlog in Jira Software and think Jira Product Discovery would provide the easiest transition, take a look at our very own CEO and Co-Founder Janna Bastow explaining how quick and easy it is to import that backlog into ProdPad and have our AI tools clean it up! 

The final verdict

I know I set out saying we wouldn’t be bad mouthing Jira Product Discovery all over town, and I hope you think I’ve stuck to that promise, but also, the more I write out this comparison, the more I realize that there’s really no comparison. 

So the final verdict from me is ProdPad is the best Jira Product Discovery alternative.

Yeah, I know, I would say that. So if you’re not happy to take my word for it, why not take a look at what people are saying about ProdPad on G2. 

But probably the best way to decide for yourself is to start a free trial and see what all the fuss is about. Either that or book yourself a demo with one of our product management experts and get all your questions answered. 

The post The Best Jira Product Discovery Alternative appeared first on ProdPad.

Why you need a startup roadmap

Imagine you’re in a boat on a vast ocean; that’s kind of like running a startup. A well-thought-out product roadmap is your navigation chart. It helps you steer clear of getting lost in a sea of endless possibilities and limited resources, and lets you keep your eye on the horizon to know what’s coming next, and what you’re going to do about it.

Clarity and focus

One big headache for startups? Keeping a clear head about your strategy. A roadmap lays it all out – what you’re building, why it’s being built, and how it fits into your grand vision. It’s your guide to focusing on the big strategic goals and not getting distracted by every shiny new opportunity that floats by.

Stand out from the crowd

In today’s jam-packed markets, being different is what gets you noticed. Your roadmap is your secret weapon for showing off what’s special about your product. It’s not just about piling up features; it’s about creating something that solves real problems in a way no one else does.

Smart use of resources

When you’re a startup, every little resource is as precious as fresh water at sea. Your roadmap can help you nail your strategy, to help you prioritize where to put your time, money, and effort for the biggest bang for your buck. It’s all about making every drop count towards your growth and success.

Learning and adapting on the fly

The journey of a startup is all about learning and adapting, so your startup roadmap needs to be flexible; it changes as you get feedback from the market and your team. This adaptability is a superpower for startups. It lets you shift your strategy to stay relevant and ahead of the game.

Keeping everyone in sync

A roadmap is also a great tool for making sure everyone – from your investors to your team – is on the same page. It’s a way to communicate what the product is all about and where it’s headed. This shared understanding is key for keeping everyone aligned and focused.

Validating your market and customers

You can use your roadmap as a reality check with your market and customers. It’s a way to show your plans and get feedback, making sure your assumptions are on point. This finger to the wind is crucial for building a product that really hits the mark with your audience.

Setting up for the long haul

When it comes down to it, your roadmap is there to lay the groundwork for long-term success. It’s the bridge from where you are now to where you want to be. By providing a clear yet adaptable path, it helps you navigate the complex world of product development and market entry, all while keeping your eyes on the prize – achieving your big dreams.

In short, a startup roadmap is more than just a plan; it’s your strategy playbook. It brings clarity, focus, a unique edge, smart resource use, flexibility, team alignment, market validation, and sets you up for long-term wins. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for one document, but hey, that’s the startup life for you!

The secret sauce of a startup product roadmap

Now you know “why”, here are a few navigational markers to point you in the direction of “how”. In other words, here are some tips on what to keep in mind when you’re building your startup roadmap:

Sequencing is key

A ship can’t pull away from the harbor until the anchor is raised, the ties are That’s what sequencing on your roadmap is all about. You’ve got to figure out which problems to tackle first, second, and so on.

This is really important when you’re a startup with limited resources. You’ve got to focus on solving the most impactful problems first, and your roadmap is your script for making that happen.

Experiment like a mad scientist!

At this early stage, your roadmap should have a bit of a mad scientist vibe. Not Dr Frankenstein, though – it’s not about just listing features to stitch together into some zeitgeisty abomination. It’s about experimenting with different ways to solve user problems.

This approach keeps you flexible and ready to pivot based on what you learn from each experiment. It’s like having a lab where you’re constantly trying out new things to see what works best.

Be flexible with your time

When the water is choppier, the horizons are closer. You’re more focused on what’s right in front of you, but you’re also keeping an eye on what’s just around the cape, and the tips of the sails poking over the curve of the sea (or Now-Next-Later, as our CEO Janna likes to call it, somewhat less poetically). This flexibility helps you adapt as things change around you.

Keep it crystal clear and super simple

Your roadmap should be as clear as a sunny day. It’s got to communicate your startup’s vision and strategy in a way that everyone can get, from your team to your investors. This clarity keeps everyone marching to the beat of the same drum.

Stay lean and mean

It should be lean, and all about outcomes, not just a laundry list of features. It’s like being a chef who’s focused on creating an amazing meal, not just chopping vegetables.

Keep your eye on the prize

Every piece of your roadmap needs to be tied back to your business objectives. It’s like a puzzle where every piece fits into the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve. This alignment is key to making sure your product development is really driving your business forward.

Stay on your toes

The only constant in a startup is change. Your startup roadmap needs to be a living document, always evolving based on feedback, market shifts, and what you’re learning along the way. When you’re sailing a ship, you have to adjust your course as the winds change.

Feedback is your friend

Listening to your customers and the market is vital. Your roadmap should be a tool for testing your ideas in the real world and making sure you’re building something that people actually want.

Collaboration is king

Lastly, your roadmap should be all about collaboration. It’s a central hub where everyone from your team can contribute ideas and insights. Think of it as a campfire where everyone gathers to share stories and plan the next adventure.

Startup vs. established company roadmaps: what’s the difference?

Now, let’s talk about how startup roadmaps differ from those of more established companies. It’s like comparing a speedboat to a cruise ship – both are on a journey, but they navigate the waters differently.

Shorter time horizons

Startups are like speedboats, zipping around and making quick turns. Your roadmap is more about immediate and short-term goals because things change so fast. Big companies, like cruise ships, have longer courses planned out, with roadmaps that look years ahead.

Stretching resources

In a startup, you’re always making the most with what you’ve got. Every decision on your roadmap is about getting the maximum impact with the resources you have. Big companies have more room to play with; they can spread their resources across more projects and experiments.

Flexibility vs. rigidity

Startups are all about being agile and adaptable – your roadmap needs to reflect that. It’s constantly evolving. In contrast, established companies often have more set roadmaps based on in-depth research and long-term trends.

Risk and innovation

As a startup, you’re often pushing the envelope, taking risks to make a mark. Your roadmap will probably include bold, untested ideas. Larger companies tend to play it safer, focusing on incremental improvements and well-researched initiatives.

Everyone has a say

In a startup, everyone from the intern to the CEO might have input into the roadmap. It’s a collaborative effort. In larger companies, roadmaps can tend to be more top-down, often crafted by the Product Manager with inputs from different departments.

Experimentation is the name of the game

For startups, the roadmap is all about experimenting and learning fast. Established companies do experiment, of course, but they’re often relying more on established data and market research to guide their roadmaps.

Outcome-focused vs. Feature-heavy

Startup roadmaps focus on solving specific problems and achieving business goals, while established (or more old-fashioned) companies might have roadmaps that seem more feature-heavy, detailing numerous product enhancements and releases over time. (Though we heartily advise staying well away from feature-focused, timeline-based roadmaps.)

Visibility and communication

Your startup roadmap is a daily reference for everyone on the team. It’s like having an open book where everyone can see the plot. But in larger companies, the roadmap might feel more like a top-secret document, shared in detail only with certain teams or management levels (though, again, it shouldn’t!).

Navigating pre- and post-launch with your startup roadmap

Braving the waters before and after your product hits the market is a bit like preparing for and then embarking on a grand voyage. Your product roadmap is the chart pinned to a table in the captain’s quarters, guiding you through the pre-launch preparations and the post-launch journey. Let’s dive deeper into what each of these phases entails for your startup.

Pre-launch startup roadmaps

Aligning development with the big picture

Before you even think about launching, your roadmap acts as your navigation chart, making sure that what you’re building is not just technically cool but also aligns perfectly with your startup’s vision and what the market actually needs. It’s about ensuring that your product doesn’t just function, but also sings the right tune for your audience.

Your lab before going live

This phase is all about putting on your lab coat and experimenting. Your roadmap should guide you through testing all those big ideas you have about your market, customer behavior, and product functionality. It’s like having a rehearsal before the big show, refining your product based on real feedback, and reducing the chances of any unwanted surprises post-launch.

Getting everyone on the same page

Now, let’s not forget about getting your Marketing and Sales teams in the loop. Your roadmap should give them a clear picture of what’s coming up. It’s like giving them a sneak peek of the script, so they know the story, the characters (aka the problems you’ll solve and your value propositions), and the audience they need to captivate.

Building anticipation: the drumroll before the curtain rises

In the pre-launch phase, you want to start creating that buzz and excitement. Use this time to engage with potential customers, get the word out on social media, and maybe even tease with early access or beta testing. It’s like the trailer for your upcoming blockbuster.

Post-launch startup roadmaps

Listening and adapting

Once your product is out on the open waters, you need to turn on your radar, and constantly be scanning for feedback. This is where you listen, really listen, to what your users are saying, and adjust your course accordingly. It’s about building trust and showing your users via your roadmap that you’re committed to constantly improving based on their needs.

Iterative improvements

Now your roadmap shifts its focus to guiding the ongoing evolution of your product. It’s like a continuous journey of refinement, where you decide which new bells and whistles to add, which ones to polish, and maybe which ones to drop. Your roadmap helps you keep track of these decisions based on user feedback and usage patterns.

Measuring your voyage’s success

How do you know if you’re heading in the right direction? By measuring your success against the goals you set out in your roadmap. This is where you look at metrics like user engagement, revenue, and market penetration. It’s like checking your coordinates and making sure you’re still on course to your destination.

Keeping the crew informed

Communication is key, especially after launch. Your roadmap should serve as a tool to keep all your stakeholders in the loop about how the journey is going. It’s about being transparent with your progress, the challenges you face, and the victories you achieve.

Eyes on the horizon

Finally, while you’re responding to the immediate waves and winds, your post-launch roadmap also helps you keep an eye on the long-term vision. It’s about making sure that while you tackle the here and now, you don’t lose sight of where you ultimately want your startup to go.

In essence, your startup roadmap is more than just a path to product development; it’s a strategic guide for your entire venture. It’s about setting you up for both immediate wins and long-term success. It’s a document that evolves with you, keeping you focused, adaptable, and always moving toward your ultimate goals.

So there you have it! Creating a startup roadmap is a journey in itself, one that requires thought, planning, and a whole lot of flexibility. But with the right approach, it can be the key to navigating the exciting, if shark-filled, waters of the startup world. Happy sailing!

The post Startup Roadmap: How to Make One From Scratch appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a SaaS product roadmap?

A SaaS product roadmap is a visual representation of your comprehensive product strategy, and how you plan to improve your Software-as-a-Service product.

Simply put, it tells people the “what,” “why,” and “when” of your product team’s been doing.

For product managers, your roadmap isn’t just for planning. It’s a dynamic tool that shapes how your team works. It’s the ever-changing blueprint for your product’s growth and evolution.

A well-made SaaS product roadmap serves both as a bird’s-eye-view of your product strategy and vision, and as a boots-on-the-ground guide for your team’s day-to-day (and sprint-to-sprint).

Beyond being a vital planning tool, your roadmap is a fantastic way to improve your communication and transparency. Done right, it can convey your overarching strategy to anyone who reads it, from someone who’s never heard of your product to the C-suite of your company.

It gives a variety of important stakeholders, including your customers, insight into just how you’re going to make that strategy a reality. And it keeps your people aligned on the same goal, giving them directly visible feedback on how their work is influencing the progress of their product.

In other words, it builds trust, both with your team and with your users. And trust is a vital resource when you’re always online.

Why is a SaaS product roadmap different from other roadmaps?

There are a few things that make SaaS roadmaps a different beast from standard product roadmaps, let alone yon old fashioned beasty, the timeline roadmap (like the famously grizzled old veteran, the Gantt chart).

After all, SaaS companies have to constantly innovate while constantly maintaining, all the while constantly reducing their tech debt and (you guessed it!) constantly managing their backlog… 

SaaS products are never “finished” (until, for one reason or another, they are eventually sunsetted). They require repeated and sometimes speedy iteration, and things could go wrong at any moment, requiring flexibility and adaptability.

SaaS companies also need to have a customer-centric focus, because a subscription-based model lives or dies on making sure people think your service is worth the money, and then keeping them thinking that as long as possible.

SaaS products are essentially a single platform that is used by all customers. One platform for all. Therefore, it comes with the challenge of serving all your customers at the same time.

Unlike when you’re building on-premise software for individual (usually high paying) customers and you can build their product however they want it, when you have one cloud based software for all, you have the tricky challenge of balancing the priorities to ensure you have a product that serves the whole of your customer base (and your business). It’s a particular skill – an art even – and it’s what makes SaaS product managers so damn cool .

Outcomes and time horizons, not features and deadlines

A SaaS product roadmap works best when it’s outcome-focused. It also needs to regularly incorporate insights gained from data and customer feedback to inform what makes it onto the roadmap, and whether it needs to be done now, next, or later.

The best SaaS roadmaps don’t limit themselves to specific timelines, at risk of turning into a product factory, focused on nothing but deadlines for the delivery of product features.

Instead many use an Agile methodology, such as Scrum. Agile is all about being flexible, efficient, and constantly learning both about how to improve your product, and what the people using it think of it.

The SaaS marketplace can be volatile, and it makes sticking to old-fashioned timeline roadmaps problematic. That’s where modern outcome-based roadmap formats like the Now-Next-Later approach can really save your bacon.

The Now-Next-Later roadmap, invented by our very own co-founder and CEO Janna Bastow, allows you the freedom to adjust your strategy and tactics on the fly, based on data and the metrics you are tracking. But more on that later!

Why is a SaaS product roadmap important?

Having a roadmap for your SaaS product is absolutely vital. You need to know what’s going on, and you need everyone else to know it too. You need a central source of truth – to guide your growth, to manage your backlog, and to prioritize what happens when.

Alignment

In a SaaS company, a whole gamut of teams from the devs to sales, marketing, and customer support… everyone needs to be working in harmony towards shared objectives.

Your product roadmap serves as the central reference point, a living document that is the beating heart of your efforts, aligning all your departments behind a shared vision. 

Without a clear roadmap, your teams might very well wind up working at cross-purposes, making things that don’t really mesh with your strategy or your users’ needs.

The end result? Wasted resources, lost opportunities, and even internal conflicts.

Prioritization

A good SaaS product roadmap will help you to prioritize what features, upgrades, and fixes should be tackled first. It’ll help you make sure your time and efforts are spent on the initiatives that are going to provide the best value.

By keeping your finger on the pulse of customer feedback, watching market trends like a hawk, and keeping sight of your established objectives and key results (OKRs), you can determine which items on the roadmap are most critical for your growth.

It’ll help you with balancing quick wins and long-term investments, striking the delicate equilibrium between working on immediate customer needs and building a sustainable product that will stand the test of time.

Communication

A well-made product roadmap inherently fosters trust and transparency with your customers, investors, and team members alike.

When your users know what to expect and why, they’re much more likely to remain loyal to your product. Your investors will gain confidence in your ability to execute your vision. Your team will stay motivated because they’ll see how their hard work visibly makes a difference.

It also helps you to manage expectations (a vital part of the job!). For instance, let’s say some functionality that your users are clamoring for is on the roadmap, but it’s in your “Later” column. Directly communicating this to customers with a public roadmap will help them understand why you’re it’s on your to-do list, but not at the top of it.

SaaS products thrive on customer feedback. Your roadmap is a structured way to incorporate all of your user suggestions and requests, ensuring that your product remains aligned with your customers’ evolving needs.

Flexibility

The software development landscape is dynamic as it is, constantly changing and evolving. The SaaS world is doubly so.

New competitors, technologies, and market trends rise and fall, sometimes it feels like at a daily pace. That is why your SaaS product roadmap can’t be a rigid contract. It needs to be a flexible guide. 

It has to allow you to pivot, to adapt to circumstances as and when they shift. A new change in the market cropping up or customer needs unexpectedly evolving needs to be an opportunity to take advantage of, not a roadblock to your cut-and-dried plan. That means you need to be able to adjust your roadmap accordingly.

Accountability

A roadmap is a tool for tracking progress. It helps you monitor whether you’re hitting your milestones and delivering on your commitments.

Accountability really is crucial for ensuring that the product development process stays on track. It helps to ensure that your team members take ownership of their work, as they can see how it fits into the bigger picture.

If you find that you’re deviating from your roadmap, from reacting to unforeseen challenges or opportunities, it still provides a reference point for you to make informed course corrections.

What should be on a SaaS product roadmap?

1. Objectives & goals

These are the specific and measurable outcomes you have chosen. Your OKRs need to be aligned with your product vision and strategy. They make your roadmap actionable by defining what success looks like.

These objectives and goals should be easily accessible from your roadmap, allowing anyone who looks at it to understand what you’re doing and why.

The most effective SaaS product roadmaps clearly connect everything on it with its corresponding objective. By tagging roadmap items with relevant objectives, you clearly articulate your strategy, and you demonstrate how you intend to meet your targets.

2. Time horizons

Whether it’s a flexible, agile-friendly structure like Now-Next-Later or a detailed (and dangerously inflexible) Gantt-style timeline with specific dates, time is the backbone of your roadmap. 

Opting for broader time horizons (i.e. Now, Next, and Later – or something with a name that clearly explains what that means in your specific context) rather than detailed timelines provides the vital flexibility you need to be able to adjust based on learning and feedback.

3. Initiatives

This is the granular content of your roadmap and is made up of the specific initiatives and problems that your team is working on.

One important tip: If you frame your roadmap initiatives as ‘problems to solve’ rather than picking specific features to work on, you promote flexibility, innovation, and outcome-based thinking, in one fell swoop.

By using this tactic, you’ll start looking at each initiative as an opportunity, and each potential solution as a hypothesis to be proven. You’ll develop a robust and flexible approach, – if the first method you use to solve the problem fails, you’ll have a plan B, C, and so on.

4. Ideas

Each initiative on your SaaS product roadmap should include all the related ideas (aka “Epics” to Agile folks). These ideas represent various ways you can address problems and delivering value, such as potential features and enhancements.

Ideas can come from brainstorming sessions, suggestions from team members, customer feedback, market research, or previously identified issues.

You’ll need to sift through these ideas in your product backlog and pick the ones that you think are worth pursuing, associating them with the respective roadmap initiative.

The best roadmap format for a SaaS product

Maintaining a fixed timeline can be challenging when the ground keeps shifting under your feet.

Unexpected issues, market shifts, and customer feedback can all force you to pivot on a dime, frustrating and annoying your stakeholders and damaging their trust.

Traditional timeline-based roadmaps can really struggle to meet the ever-changing demands of developing a SaaS product. That’s why Agile, outcome-based formats like the Now-Next-Later roadmap (our preferred choice here at ProdPad) shine as the preferred choice for SaaS product development. 

Timeline roadmaps often lead to rigid commitments. SaaS products, by their nature, require flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and competitive pressures. Desperately trying to stick to fixed timelines is counterproductive – it forces you to rush development, miss opportunities, and just churn out feature after feature.

Rather than blinkered by focusing solely on features, the Now-Next-Later format centers on the desired outcomes and goals associated with each feature or initiative. Each item on the roadmap can be explicitly linked to specific objectives, allowing you to track progress towards achieving those objectives.

This outcome-driven approach ensures that every effort aligns with your goals/OKRs, keeping the product development efforts strategic and impactful because they are directly tied to the most important business outcomes.

For an in-depth explanation of the different roadmap formats you can create for your product, take a look at our Ultimate Guide to Product Roadmaps.

8 steps to create your SaaS product roadmap

The first thing you need to consider is the direction of play. The initiatives included on your roadmap should be informed from the top down, and the bottom up.

If you make sure that each item on your roadmap is addressing both a business objective (top-down) and a customer problem (bottom-up), you will be ensuring that you’re promoting this alignment. 

You will also be well served by ensuring you are performing user research and checking in with your most important stakeholders, both internal and external. By familiarizing yourself with their needs, expectations, and constraints, you can gain a clearer picture of what you should be prioritizing.

Once you’ve established an effective flow for generating your initiatives, and have communicated with your stakeholders, you’re ready to start building your SaaS product roadmap by taking these steps:

1. Establish your product vision and strategy

Begin by defining your product’s long-term vision. What are the product’s objectives, and how does it address customer needs? This vision serves as your roadmap’s guiding principle.

2. Set clear goals and objectives

Ensure your product goals align with your vision and overall business strategy. Utilize product goals and OKRs to define measurable outcomes.

3. Select your roadmap format

Review the roadmap format options and choose one that suits your product management approach and stakeholder expectations. Lean formats like Now-Next-Later offer advantages.

4. Create your initiatives

Start by brainstorming ways to achieve your vision and objectives. Consider solving customer problems that align with your product goals. Analyze customer feedback to identify common needs and match them to your vision and objectives. Examine your idea backlog for valuable insights.

5. Prioritize your initiatives

Prioritize at the initiative level, aligning your work with the product strategy and objectives. Consider the value, feasibility, and urgency to determine what’s Now, Next, and Later.

6. Add ideas to initiatives

Populate your roadmap with initiatives in priority order, then detail how you intend to solve problems and achieve product objectives. Mine your idea backlog, explore customer feedback, and brainstorm with your team. Use prioritization frameworks to surface valuable ideas.

7. Review and adjust

Share the draft with stakeholders, collect their feedback, and make necessary adjustments. Remember that a product roadmap is a dynamic document and should be regularly reviewed and updated.

8. Publish and communicate

Determine who needs access to your roadmap and at what level of detail. Tailor versions for each stakeholder group using a roadmap tool like ProdPad. Don’t forget to communicate your product strategy and plans to your customers, allowing them to see your vision. 

Why you need a public SaaS product roadmap

We’ve written before about how a well-crafted product roadmap is a vital tool for success, and that making it public can be a genuine game-changer for your business.

Not only will it align your team, communicate your vision, and ensure you’re light on your feet when responding to changes in your customers’ needs and the market as a whole… It’ll also drive engagement and build trust with your users, encourage accountability within your teams, and it’s a very effective way to validate your ideas. Just a few perks, then!

By embracing outcome-focused roadmaps like Now-Next-Later, and making the roadmap you’ve come up with public, you’ll go a long way toward maximizing the positive impacts it has on your SaaS business.

Incidentally, ProdPad makes it easy to publish and maintain your public roadmap. Both your internal and public roadmap are the same document, you just need to filter out the more inwardly-focused initiatives, and keep it focused on what will interest your external stakeholders. Check out ours to see what we mean!

Final thoughts

Whether your SaaS product roadmap is a bunch of Post-its being moved around a whiteboard, or is itself being handled by a SaaS product like ProdPad, hopefully you now know what makes it unique, and why you really need to get on top of yours.

It’s an important thing to master for any product manager who wants to keep innovating, stay flexible, and have a user base that trusts them and their team to build the right solutions at the right time.

The post How to Create a Great SaaS Product Roadmap appeared first on ProdPad.

What could go wrong?

If you don’t do this right, there are a number of risks. You could end up with:

Disappointed customers

We all know the disappointment that comes with unmet expectations. If you put the wrong level of detail on your customer-facing roadmap, or structure it in the wrong way, you could be creating a whole bunch of very specific expectations across your customer base.

After all, if it’s on your customer-facing roadmap, they’re going to expect to see it. If you don’t deliver exactly what you’ve declared when you said you would, disappointment will reign.

Unhappy team

That level of customer disappointment could bum out the team, as instead of positive feedback from customers and nice reviews and comments, you’ll all be getting grumbles and complaints. That’s not going to help your product team feel good about their work. 

That will then lead to an unhappy team, and possibly talent leaving the business. And it won’t just be the product team who aren’t happy. Your customer-facing teams won’t be having a great time either, fielding all these complaints from customers, and having to apologize and placate. Not fun. 

Looking stale and slow-moving 

You don’t need me to tell you that product managers are super busy – spinning a lot of plates. Depending on the tool you use to publish your customer-facing roadmap, you might be left with the overhead of manually updating it.

If that slips down the to-do list and you don’t get to it, you’re going to have a customer-facing roadmap out in the world that hasn’t changed for months. That’s not a good look. 

Competitors pinching your ideas

There’s also a risk that you give away too much detail and pour your secret sauce right into the laps of your competitors. 

Having said that, you shouldn’t let the fear of competitors learning your plans put you off publishing a customer-facing roadmap. This risk is easily mitigated if you follow our simple advice and avoid making these common mistakes. 

That goes for all of the above risks. This is what COULD go wrong, but it’s easy enough to make sure these problems don’t arise. 

Which brings us to our 7 no-nos. 

The 7 common customer-facing roadmap mistakes to avoid

The customer-facing roadmap mistakes you want to avoid are:

1. Don’t include dates

If you’re familiar with our ethos here at ProdPad, and know the teachings of our fine leader Janna Bastow, you’ll know that we are the home of the Now-Next-Later roadmap (our co-founders actually invented it). This is a lean roadmap format structured around broad time horizons, rather than exact dates (as you’d find on a Gantt chart-style timeline roadmap). 

We’ve written extensively on the general pitfalls of having exact dates and deadlines on your product roadmap, but this is particularly true for your customer-facing roadmap. 

If you have actual dates against the things on your roadmap, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. You’ll be left with no flexibility to work on what you’re building for longer (to make it the best it can be), or respond to unforeseen issues, problems, or opportunities.  

Let’s face it, if you are ever asked for a date, it’ll always be based on best guesses and rough estimates. You cannot predict the future and you don’t know what won’t work as you thought it would, or who on the team will be struck down sick, or what hidden problems you might uncover that will take time to figure out. In short, it is very hard to hit a deadline that was based on an estimate way back before you seriously started building. 

So, don’t give your customers dates that you’re going to struggle to meet. Either you won’t make that date and you’ll disappoint them, looking unreliable. Or, you will meet the deadline, but you’ll have shipped something that’s of a poorer quality because of the pressures of the deadline and the fear of annoying your customers. 

Here at ProdPad, our advice is always to follow modern product management best practice and use broad time horizons like now, next, and later, that give everyone a feel for your priorities and timescales, without restricting your ability to learn, adapt, and improve.

2. Don’t talk about specific features or designs

You might have seen some customer-facing roadmaps like this for the products you use – roadmap items that are specific features. You read the details and get a fairly thorough picture of exactly what this feature is, how it’ll work, and what it will do for you. So that’s what you are expecting. You might start to think about how you’d use that feature and plan for its arrival. 

But then, when the feature actually ships and lands in the interface, it works a bit differently and doesn’t look the same. It doesn’t do exactly what they said it would, it doesn’t apply to the areas of the product you expected, and it’s not even available on your price plan. Instead of being impressed by the new feature that is there, you’re annoyed that it’s not what was described and what you were waiting for. 

The moral of this story is simple: Do not describe specific features on your customer-facing roadmap. You don’t need to! It’s enough to tell your customers that you’re going to build something that will solve a particular problem for them, answer a need, or bring a certain benefit. How that is achieved is yet to be seen. But they can be rest assured that their problem will be solved, and that will create happy anticipation rather than exact expectations. 

You then have the space to run proper discovery and explore all the possible ways in which you can solve this customer problem. You have the flexibility to test, learn, and iterate in order to improve what you finally ship at the end. 

3. Don’t give too much detail

You need to consider your audience here. This is your customer-facing roadmap – for your customers. These folks should see a version of your roadmap that is tailored to them. Don’t just have a single roadmap view for all – you’ll end up with a jack of all trades that is a master of no one’s needs and doesn’t serve anyone particularly well. 

I would urge you to think about all the different stakeholders who need to see your roadmap and create a tailored view with the right level of detail for each. In fact, we’ve listed out what each type of stakeholder is interested in, so you can go check that out.  

What is important for your customer-facing roadmap, is to keep it high level. I’ve already said it’s a mistake to talk about specific features, but I’d also suggest you leave out the list of different ideas you’re going to explore for each roadmap initiative. 

You will be clouding the important message if you include the kind of detail that your internal teams need to know. Your customers only really need to understand what problems you are going to solve for them, and the order in which you’re going to tackle them. 

There’s also the risk of giving your competitors too much insight into what you’re doing, if you have a lot of detail on your customer-facing roadmap. As soon as you start attaching designs, including specs or even outlining the feature ideas you’re exploring, you’ll be running the risk of competitors using that intel.

Sure, the chances of them getting ahead of you and building a solution first off the back of what they’ve seen on your roadmap is pretty slim. If something is on your roadmap you’ll likely have a decent head start on the competition. But, if they’re already looking at that same problem to solve then they could well take your learnings and discovery and adapt what they’re doing to be more in line with your solution. 

4. Don’t include internally focused initiatives 

Remember, this customer-facing roadmap should be a version of your roadmap – not the complete and unedited roadmap to rule all roadmaps. 

You don’t need to include every initiative that’s on your internal roadmap, on your customer-facing one. You’ll just be filling up space with stuff they won’t care about. Which might make it less likely that they spot the stuff they will care about. 

Don’t bury what will really excite your customers in a load of stuff that won’t. 

Some examples of internally focused initiatives that shouldn’t go on a customer-facing roadmap:

• Bring down hosting costs
• Improve IT infrastructure
• Attract top developer talent 
• Optimize the signup flow

5. Don’t give your initiatives really commercial-sounding titles  

As well as not including roadmap initiatives that your customers won’t care about, also think about the angle you’re coming from with the title and description of each roadmap item. Think about how your customers will respond to the way you’ve positioned the ‘problem to solve’. 

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you have a B2B SaaS product that is charged on a per-seat basis. As a business, you are looking to grow revenue (I mean, who isn’t?). You have identified that one way of doing this is to grow the average number of seats per customer account. So you create an initiative on your roadmap and call it something like ‘How can we increase the number of seats each customer has purchased?’.

Imagine you’re a customer reading that on a customer-facing roadmap. There’s no benefit there for you – why should you care about that roadmap initiative? You shouldn’t. That is all about them making money, not you having problems solved. 

But what if that same roadmap initiative was titled something like ‘How can we help customers painlessly onboard their teammates?’ or ‘How can we make it easy for customers to train their teammates to share the workload?’. The goal will still be the same – get more paying users, but the benefit is now positioned to be more about the customer needs and less about your bottom line. 

So, consider those commercial-focused roadmap initiatives. Do you remove them from your customer-facing roadmap altogether, or reposition them to highlight the benefit to the customer over the benefit to your business?

6. Don’t make it hard to find!

The next mistake people make is to put their customer-facing roadmap somewhere relatively inaccessible. Don’t make your customers work to find it! Because they won’t and you’ll have missed the chance of building confidence and trust with your customers. 

Don’t have your customer-facing roadmap as a subtle link deep in a help center article – get it up loud and proud on your website. Otherwise, what’s the point? 

If you’re reluctant to make it fully public for all to see, then at least make sure it’s clearly signposted on your customer portal. 

Your customer-facing roadmap can be a very useful tool for your customer and sales teams. It can help them talk to the future plans for the product and explain how your product will solve their problems. This can be a very powerful resource to help drive retention and grow customer acquisition.

Therefore, make sure these teams can easily point users and prospects to your customer-facing roadmap, and have them navigate back to it whenever they need to.

7. Don’t have a static document

Now, I don’t want to be sensationalist here, or cause anyone too much alarm…. But I have to tell you, that some people create their roadmaps in slide decks . 

I know. I know. 

Or, worst still, spreadsheets . 

I’ve even seen some PDFs knocking about. 

Having your roadmap in a static document like this is a straight path to versioning headaches, access issues, and extra work. 

You can never be confident that everyone is looking at the most recent version. You always run the risk of the latest version being overwritten. You’ll definitely need to recruit some sort of design help if you stand a chance of making a roadmap look engaging in these formats. Or, even worse, you don’t get design help and have a roadmap that looks like s#*t.   

And king among the disadvantages of keeping a roadmap in a static file is the overhead you will be faced with when it comes to keeping it up-to-date. You’ll have to maintain this customer-facing version of your roadmap, alongside your main roadmap (and indeed any other versions you may have). Every time you update something on your main roadmap, you’ll have to scoot over to the customer-facing file and update that too. Groan. 

As I’ve already said, that’s likely to be forgotten from time to time, or get pushed down your to-do list as more pressing tasks take priority. And then you’re left with a stagnant roadmap out in the world, giving off the impression that you aren’t improving the product or delivering new value. 

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way. By building and managing your product roadmap in a tool like ProdPad, you can easily maintain one central roadmap that automatically feeds your published customer-facing roadmap based on the filters you’ve set and the selections you’ve made. 

I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors into customer-facing roadmaps. Once you’re ready to build and publish your public roadmap, be sure to start a free trial of ProdPad and see how easy it is to do it there!  

The post 7 Customer-Facing Roadmap No-Nos appeared first on ProdPad.