Product Roadmap

What Is a Product Roadmap?

It is a product document that defines the vision for the product, containing a breakdown of the feature list of what we are building that is spread across sprints to ensure the development team has the capacity to develop the features and the QA team has the capacity to test the features that are being built.

Product Roadmap

What approach to use in defining the roadmap?

Different product team approach their roadmaps differently. Some common best practices are:

Value proposition vs. effort - the feature that gives the maximum value proposition while requiring the least amount of effort, is planned first.

Feature heavy roadmaps are built when there is a high level of clarity on the vision for the product.

Time sensitive roadmaps are generally built to meet a time sensitive goal that is generally critical to business operations.

Understanding business pain points

Whether your role is a Product Manager or a Business Analyst, the role requires the person to have a full understanding of the user’s problems or pain points, before they can propose the right solution (product).

Understanding business pain points

There are 3 key levels of analysis that can help us fully understand a problem:

1. The Business-Level: Discuss with the business and the operations team to understand about their current business and operations process flow and what are they trying to achieve and why (business goals). Create a business / operations process flow diagram (a visual model).

Important: If the user reference a solution as a pain point, ask them why they need that solution. Keep up this process until you get to the root cause of their pain points.

2. The Engineering-Level: Discuss with the engineering or system support team to understand the engineering components that relates to the business workflows.

3. The Information-Level: Discuss with the business and the data team to understand the current state of how and what data and information are stored, maintained, data modeling techniques and what are they trying to achieve next and why.

Once we understand the current state, we can:

1. Identify multiple possible solutions.
2. Prioritize potential solutions.
3. Make a decision.