Build a Product Roadmap

Product or application owners and managers are tasked with breaking down overarching goals into manageable and plannable tasks to be executed by different delivery teams.
They are also expected to build a roadmap that will communicate components of those plans to various stakeholders to obtain buy-in, validate strategy, and manage the product lifecycle.
While planning is imperative to development, long-term planning can prove to be wasteful when strategic elements are yet to be validated or requirements are subject to change.
Stakeholders have drastically different communication requirements, priorities, and technical understanding of development, which demands different views of the product.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Projects can learn from products. While clear-cut distinctions exist, many aspects of product-based delivery will benefit your projects, including dynamic, strategic, and flexible product roadmaps.
Consider roadmapping as a spectrum. Don’t treat roadmaps as either tactical, technical, detailed, and committed or strategic, goal-based, high-level, and flexible. Use elements of both to build the ideal roadmap.
How flexible do you need to be? Shorter delivery cycles and greater volatility require more flexibility to drive value with your roadmap.

Impact and Result

Determine the characteristics of your product and its disposition and also the internal and external constraints of your organization to establish the appropriate type of roadmap you should use.
Establish the communication objectives of the roadmap: Who is the audience? What language will you use to describe the future of your application?
Build the structure of your roadmap and define the standards for the artifacts that will populate it.

Build a Product Roadmap Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to understand the key challenges and factors that influence the objectives and audience of a product roadmap.

Build a Product Roadmap – Executive Brief

1. Know your product

Understand the factors that impact the different approaches to product roadmapping and determine roadmap ownership, audience, and communication objectives.

2. Build your roadmap

Build the structure and define the components that will populate your roadmap.

Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Anthem Entertainment

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Hans was able to lean on his past experience to give me ideas on how to direct stakeholders to think about how projects align to strategic and oper... Read More

Anthem Entertainment

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 2-phase advisory process. You'll receive 4 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Know your product

Call 1: Run through our diagnostic tool to determine the best approach to product roadmapping and other attributes you should consider.
Call 2: Discuss your audience, what you need to communicate, and who should be accountable for the roadmap.

Guided Implementation 2: Build your roadmap

Call 1: Learn how to use Info-Tech’s tool or alternative methods. Identify and build the timeline structure of your roadmap.
Call 2: Learn the components and how to populate your roadmap with artifacts, milestones, and other key attributes.