A customer-facing product roadmap is a great way to promote trust through transparency with your customers and prospects. This kind of roadmap is intended for people likely to be interested in buying the product when it hits the market, rather than for internal use. Some product teams choose to share their high-level customer-facing roadmaps publicly so both their customers and their prospects can see what the product team is working on and get a look into the future; this can build anticipation, deepen relationships, and prompt the gathering of valuable market feedback.
Key Features
- Lightweight theme-based roadmap that keeps customers up to date
- Color-coded so your customers can quickly identify the items that matter to them
- Broad or no time frame to prevent you from making promises you can’t keep
This roadmap covers a one-year time horizon, using quarters as the time unit—but you can easily switch the template over to a “no-timeline” look if you desire to keep the timeframe ambiguous. Rather than communicate to customers and other external audience members in specific features and deliverables, this roadmap uses containers to depict themes. It gives the product team the flexibility they need to choose the best ways to approach their objectives. If you want to communicate more specific deliverables under each theme, you can easily nest them as bars within the themes.