A product development roadmap can help you plan your initiatives and map your release schedule. Organizations should maintain a product development roadmap as a centralized resource to track and refer to everyone’s strategic role in bringing a product to market. Product development is a broad effort that involves many teams across a company: marketing, design, development, QA, etc. and this kind of roadmap is meant to track and communicate the associated initiatives and milestones.
Key Features
- Great for mapping out your product development initiatives over time
- Teams are grouped together in swimlanes
- Color-coded according to overall strategic goals
In this example, the timeline is organized into two-week sprints as product development roadmaps often cover a shorter time horizon, usually only a couple of months. The swimlanes represent four different teams working on various areas of the product: security, front end, back end, and operations. The initiatives are color-coded according to strategic goals such as enhancing usability and increasing performance, making it easy for stakeholders—like executives—to understand the “why” behind your product decisions.
The value of a product development roadmap like this one is that it communicates the “why” behind decisions and gives stakeholders a visual overview of what’s coming next.