Navigating the jungle: The art of modern product roadmaps

The air is thick with the unknown, and every step could either bring you closer to your destination or lead you astray.

Now, imagine venturing in without a map.

You know there are challenges ahead, like a treacherous river you must cross. But you also know there will be unexpected dangers—perhaps a hungry tiger or a venomous snake lurking in the shadows, and even opportunities like discovering a shortcut.

While these obstacles are daunting, they are merely milestones on your journey. 
The real goal is to navigate through the jungle and emerge safely on the other side.

To do so, you must keep your destination in mind, stay aware of your route, and recognize when you’ve successfully reached your objective.
(Story credit: Noa Ganot)

In the digital product world (or any business-related world actually), the equivalent of what the traveler requires is called: 
A Product Roadmap.  

If you’ve ever scrambled to meet a deadline, only to watch your carefully laid plans unravel, you’re not alone. 
Traditional roadmaps often resemble a Gantt chart, focusing more on project management and deadlines than on the strategic value of each piece of its content. 
This view tends to lack prioritization and visibility into the critical path of product development. 

In a fast-paced environment, where change is constant, even a single missed deadline can render the entire roadmap ineffective. 
When your roadmap is more of a rigid timeline than a strategic guide, it fails to account for unexpected challenges or opportunities, leading to frustration from failing to meet all deadlines, and even worse - lacking agility that results in missed opportunities.

A single product “traditional” roadmap example (ProductPlan)
 

Instead of a date-focused roadmap, modern product management benefits from a priority-based approach. 

Consider a startup that needs to pivot quickly due to a sudden market shift. With a rigid Gantt chart, they’re stuck, unable to adapt their timeline without derailing the entire project. 
But with a priority-based roadmap, they can reassign resources and focus on what matters most, ensuring they stay on track despite the unexpected.

The priority-based method concentrates on what's crucial on 3 ‘broad timeframes’:

now, 
next, 
and later, 

allowing teams to remain agile and responsive to change. 
This flexible approach is particularly beneficial for startups and agile organizations that aim to minimize bureaucracy and maximize impact.

These roadmaps are intended to have a fluid structure, to be modified as relevant to your needs. Nonetheless, a possible structure for such a roadmap can look like this:

Priority-based product roadmap example (“Product roadmaps relaunched”)

• Vision: The mission statement of your product. 
• Business Intents: Your stated OKRs. The areas in your product and business you wish to focus on to succeed, within the foreseeable future.
• Broad Timeframe: Your priorities. Considering your potential development capacity, this is where you simply place your features based on their priority of execution for your product and business. 
  Instead of calculating absolute deadlines, distribute them to groups of:
  Now - Features that your team should be working on right now
  Next - Features waiting to be worked on once resources are free
  Later - Future planned features. 

(!) As in most backlogs, features should be better defined as closer they are to the “Now” priority - while features designated for “later” are more likely to change drastically or be removed altogether.

• Product Initiatives: Your actual features, each associated with a relevant ‘Business Intent’ by a color key. 
  Maintaining a connection between each feature and a business initiative is crucial in helping us make sure we are focusing our efforts on our actual business goals.
  Building features that do not help us reach our business goals is a common pitfall that this simple color-key technique will help you avoid. 
• (Option): A useful degree of flexibility. Marking “Now” items as ‘optional’, identifies features that are valuable and related to currently developed features - but nonetheless can be postponed\skipped first when a better opportunity presents itself in the relevant future.

As mentioned, this is a suggested structure - and can be optimized as you wish, according to your requirements and your organization’s work methodologies.
Common additions include the likes of required effort, target audience, dependencies, product areas, etc.
Nonetheless, it’s best to keep it as simple and high level as possible - to maintain flexibility, and avoid time-consuming maintenance. 

 

1. Set Clear Business Initiatives and OKRs: Begin by defining actionable and objective business goals, preferably as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). These will serve as the outline for your roadmap, ensuring that every subsequent step aligns with your strategic objectives.
    
2. Organize Your Backlog: Streamline your product backlog by retaining only those items that are valuable, relevant, and feasible.
   (!) Associate each feature you keep in the backlog - with a business initiative, using a color key.
    
3. Prioritize Features: Utilize tools like the Features Prioritization Tool Template from Miroverse to rank features based on their alignment with business objectives.
    
4. Assign features to priority buckets: ‘Now’ | ‘Next’ | ‘ Later’: After all the preparations in the initial 3 steps, you should have the most comfortable setup ready for making your roadmap decisions, in a way that is also easy to communicate with stakeholder for reaching mutual agreements.
   →  Assign your top priority features (Step 3), that drive your top business initiatives (step 1), under each bucket of ‘Now’ | ‘Next’ | ‘ Later’, according to your available\potential  resources.

Features prioritization tool (Yuval Eitan, Miroverse)

The transition from traditional Gantt charts to priority-based roadmaps marks a significant shift in how businesses plan and execute product strategy. This approach not only aligns with the agile methodology but also ensures that every feature developed is strategic and purpose-driven.

Are you tired of rigid plans that don’t reflect the reality of your product development? It’s time to adopt a roadmap that works with you, not against you. 
Start by using our prioritization tool to sort your backlog, and proceed to realign your roadmap with your strategic goals by booking a workshop with us. Leave us a message.