Most product roadmaps I see aren’t roadmaps at all, they’re plans.

And a lot of this has to do with a lack of product strategy, because your roadmap should be a reflection of your strategy. 

Roadmaps help you visualize your strategy in a sequential manner so you can better communicate and action it.

But whilst similar, they’re still different things.

The problem is, without a strategy you’re likely to resort to prioritization by spreadsheets. Applying RICE formulas, WSJF and other scorecards where you’re really just stack-ranking a bunch of disparate ideas. There’s nothing ‘strategic’ about doing that.

What we then do is take that list and plot it along a timeline - and voilà!

We have a roadmap plan.

Product Roadmaps are NOT a plan or todo list.

If you have verbs like "discover" “design” “build”, etc on your roadmap you’ve got a ​plan not a roadmap​!

And whilst most product people get this conceptually, there’s still far too many roadmaps that look like gantt charts.

Last week, over 300 passionate product people joined me live for a free webinar on ‘Building Effective Product Roadmaps’ (the recording is below).

I want to share the results of the polls I ran during the webinar and figured, why not do a summary of the key points too.

Let’s get into it!

There are many different types of roadmaps and different formats that roadmaps can take.

Here are a few different shapes a Product Roadmap can take. I hope this gives you some inspiration and perhaps even makes you rethink your current roadmap format.