How to build a product roadmap
Now that you know why it’s important to have a product roadmap, it’s time to create yours. But not so fast. Actually, the most important part of the roadmap process happens before you begin building your roadmap. Setting the vision and strategic goals for the product—and, more important, getting alignment on these with your stakeholders—is the first step to creating a successful roadmap.
Know your product strategy when developing a strategy that ultimately leads to a product roadmap. It’s important to identify and articulate your product’s vision and principles—the why.
Spend time before you begin planning your roadmap determining the product’s mission, and then distill it into a simple statement your stakeholders can understand. This statement should include the product vision, the problems it solves, target customers and value to the marketplace. Documenting this forces you to nail down many of the key items that will inform your roadmap.

This strategy-first approach has several benefits. It makes it easier to articulate the product vision to any constituency across your company and ensures stakeholders are on the same page before you begin the detailed conversations that follow. It also allows you to more clearly identify priorities as well as items that should be set aside because they don’t serve the product vision.
From the product vision, you can derive product goals that will in turn influence the initiatives that are on your roadmap. Coming up with these outcome-based objectives helps you translate your product strategy into an executable plan.
Bring in your KPIs
Once you nail down your product vision, next, you’ll need to consult your specific product goals. These product goals have metrics assigned to them and are shorter-term, maybe one to two years out. You may utilize a north star metric model or have a handful of equally weighted metrics.
Metrics are ideal for guiding your product decisions and your product roadmap. Business goals such as revenue, margin, acquisition cost and retention are a great way to tie roadmap initiatives to your strategy. Customer-specific metrics such as product usage and retention are important as well if those relate to your broader strategy.
Prioritize initiatives
Now it’s time to start mapping. While everything you want to develop will be documented in your product backlog, you’ll need to prioritize initiatives for the product roadmap. We recommend using the value vs. effort model. Take each initiative required to satisfy the vision of your product release and plot it on the value vs. effort scale.
[Credit ProductPlan]
Now, select a mix of the initiatives in the blue and yellow quadrants. Start with those that are low effort and high value. Those are the first things you’ll want to develop—the low-hanging fruit, if you will. Then select some initiatives that have really high value but are also really hard, and add those to your product roadmap. You may only tackle a couple of those on your roadmap because they’re hard to do. But they also might be some of the most unique, differentiating features that really set you up for positioning against the competition. Finally, sprinkle in some low-value/low-effort initiatives customers are asking for.
If you have difficulty determining which initiatives belong in each quadrant, or you need to further narrow your focus—say you have too many initiatives in a single quadrant and need to choose among them—you can score each initiative according to value and cost. Jim Semick, co-founder and chief strategist at ProductPlan, walks you through how to do this in our webinar, Everything You Need to Know About Product Roadmaps.
Another prioritization method is the Kano Model, which is also explained in the webinar above. In this model, you’ll consider each initiative in terms of how much it will delight your customers. There will be initiatives that are required simply to make your product work, initiatives you’ll need to pursue to increase performance and initiatives that will delight your customers. This model ensures you really set yourself apart from your competition.
[Kano graphic here: ProductPlan]
The RICE Scoring Model is the latest prioritization method used in product roadmapping. In it, you’ll evaluate each initiative based on Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort.
Reach: How many customers will be affected by the initiative?
Impact: What quantitative or qualitative effect will the initiative have?
Confidence: How confident are you in the initiative’s reach and impact?
Effort: How much time and effort will it take to complete the initiative?
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which prioritization method you use, only that you pick one and stick with it. You’ll then use the method as the basis for deciding how to adapt your product roadmap when key stakeholders make requests or changes throughout the development process, which is sure to happen.
Engage your stakeholders
The fact is, you should be working with your stakeholders from the very beginning and getting their input throughout your planning and development process. But a critical check-in point is after you’ve plotted your product roadmap using your prioritization method of choice.

If you’re working closely with them along the way, nothing during this step should come as a surprise to them. But what you’ll want to do is get their signoff on your roadmap and work with them to fine-tune the prioritizations. Even after you begin executing your product roadmap, you’ll want to continue to engage your stakeholders frequently. This is where your product roadmap really comes in handy. When, say, the VP of sales comes to you and says the product needs to have XYZ feature because one noisy customer said so, you can refer back to your prioritization method and your roadmap and work together to determine whether the feature really is worth adding.