When it comes to designing, building and launching a digital product, one of the first - and most important - tasks your team needs to complete is creating a digital product roadmap.
Why? Well, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, “every year, 30,000 new products are introduced to the market. And every year, 28,500 of them, or 95%, fail to make the cut.”
The reasons for this are many, but one of the main contributing factors is the lack of an effective product roadmap. As the old saying goes, “fail to plan, plan to fail” – and in the world of digital product, this plan is your trusty roadmap.
What is digital product roadmapping?
Here at Adrenalin, we’ve helped numerous brands plan and create their digital product roadmaps, and through this, we’ve come up with a succinct definition of what digital product roadmapping is:
“Digital product roadmapping is the act of creating and maintaining a visual, step-by-step plan for your digital product’s development.”
Designed to communicate to your internal teams, customers, and other stakeholders how your digital product will evolve over time, the roadmap is typically organised by timeframes, e.g. months or quarters, and includes:
Key upcoming features
Planned product updates and functionalities
Important milestones
Technology considerations
Depending on your business context and the nature of your product, your roadmap may also cover off:
Your overall product vision
Technical complexities
Resource requirements
You can find further examples of a product roadmap here and here.
When does roadmapping come in?
Roadmapping usually takes place during the early stages of product development. That could be in the pre-development phase when the product idea is still in its conceptual stage, and additionally, during the planning and prioritisation phase, when you need to plan and prioritise features and functionalities.
But… a key point to take note of within our definition or roadmapping above is the act of maintaining your roadmap. It’s why we prefer to talk about ‘roadmapping’ as a continual process, as opposed to a ‘roadmap’ that implies something static and fixed. In fact, throughout the whole development, release and post-launch process, your roadmap is something you should come back to time and again to check, validate and update in line with testing and optimisation initiatives. It’s a living, breathing asset that accompanies your digital product throughout its entire lifecycle.
“Your roadmap is a living document. Make adjustments to dates and plans, update it with new ideas, and show the progress you have made against your goals.” Aha!
The benefits of digital product roadmapping
As we said before, “plan to fail, fail to plan”. But roadmapping is about so much more than just planning, it’s the main building block of any digital product, providing a wealth of benefits to both customers and internal team members. Our top three are easy to see:
Alignment - Building and launching digital products (especially multiple ones across complex Enterprise product portfolios) can get messy, so having a central product roadmap ensures that all internal stakeholders are aligned. By clearly articulating the product vision, goals, and priorities, roadmapping ensures that everyone is working towards a common objective. This alignment minimises misunderstandings, reduces conflicts, and fosters collaboration among teams, leading to more efficient and effective product development efforts. For more on how to balance user needs with business goals, read our recent article.
Prioritisation - By dint of better alignment, your digital product team will be better placed to make the right prioritisation decisions. The roadmap ensures these decisions are based on a balanced combination of customer feedback, business goals and competitor activity, guaranteeing that your digital product reflects the most strategic and beneficial initiatives, and maximises ROI.
Transparency and communication - They aren’t just about your internal stakeholders, they also apply to your customers. Making the roadmap visible to all affected parties ensures that everyone is informed about where the product is going in the short, medium and long term. This fosters trust, increases accountability and buy-in, and empowers stakeholders to make informed decisions.
Digital product roadmapping – roles and responsibilities
The core responsibility of roadmapping lies with your product management team who should own the documentation and process. Here, your relevant Product Manager is responsible for defining the product vision, strategy and goals, gathering inputs from stakeholders and customers, and for prioritising features, planning releases and communicating the roadmap.
But don’t forget, roadmapping is a highly collaborative effort that involves multiple other stakeholders from within your organisation. When considering who to involve on a roadmapping team, the following roles should feature as a minimum:
Development team – this representative is responsible for providing insights into the technical feasibility of proposed features, for ensuring the roadmap aligns with technical capabilities and constraints, and for helping to estimate the effort required for implementation.
Design team – someone from your design team should be providing input on UX, interface and visual design requirements. They should also help to prioritise features based on design considerations, and ensure that the product delivers a visually appealing user experience.
Marketing team – your marketing representative is responsible for providing insights on market trends, customer needs and competitive analysis. As well as aligning on marketing campaigns and ensuring a cohesive GTM strategy.
Sales team – the sales point of contact should additionally be adding to the customer insights with real-life feedback, providing input on pain points and feature requests, and helping to shape the strategy and prioritisation.
Customer support – here, your representative should provide another source of customer insight, able to identify common issues and feature requests.
Executive leadership – last, but by no means least, your exec representative should provide overarching direction and clarity on business goals, setting priorities and supporting with resources.
Head here to read more on building strong digital teams.
The different types of digital product roadmap
As with so many things in the digital product world, there is more than one way to create a roadmap. One of the first exercises your team should undertake is to evaluate the different types and work out which is best for your business. Here are four types you’ll want to consider.
Timeline roadmap – aka, a Gantt chart. Your timeline should appear along the horizontal axis and your features or releases (organised by planned delivery dates) should be added in under these timeline phases. A timeline roadmap is great for visualising the sequence of activities and their interdependencies. It’s most commonly used for ensuring internal alignment.
Theme-based roadmap – this type of roadmap organises features and initiatives around overarching themes rather than specific timelines. Instead of focusing on when features will be delivered, theme-based roadmaps emphasize what will be delivered and why this matters. This type of roadmap is perfect for boosting innovation and brainstorming.
Goal-oriented roadmap – this roadmap approach aligns product initiatives with specific business goals or outcomes, such as revenue growth, customer acquisition, user engagement, or product performance metrics. Goal-oriented roadmaps help ensure that product development efforts are very much focused on driving tangible business results.
Technology-driven roadmap – tech-driven roadmaps emphasizes the development and implementation of new technologies or technical capabilities. They may also prioritise initiatives based on advancements in software development frameworks, infrastructure upgrades, scalability improvements, security enhancements, or other technical considerations. Technology-driven roadmaps are often used in organisations with complex technological environments or those undergoing digital transformation initiatives.
What’s included in a digital product roadmap?
Once you’ve decided on the best type of roadmap visual to use, you’ll then want to consider the specifics of what goes into it. Obviously, you’ll be led by the roadmap format and structure, but typically your roadmap should include these ten elements:
Product vision and strategy
Timeframes and release dates
Key features and initiatives
Prioritisation factors
Dependencies and relationships
Status and progress
Objectives and goals
Metrics and KPIs
Resource allocation
Risk and mitigation strategies
Steps to create a digital product roadmap
To pull together all of the information you’ll need to populate your digital product roadmap, it’s important you assign due care, time and attention to the roadmap planning steps. Here are the steps we’ve commonly followed with Enterprise brands over the years:
Define your product vision
Identify your key internal stakeholders
Gather inputs – namely, customer feedback, competitive analysis and business objectives.
Prioritise your product features
Create the roadmap
Review and iterate
Communicate the roadmap
Prioritisation in roadmapping: frameworks and techniques
It all sounds easy, right? In actual fact, by following this tried-and-tested approach, you’ll ensure you’re covering all bases and your team will land on a robust digital product roadmap. That said, many teams often get stuck at step four in the process above, i.e. prioritising product features. Luckily, there are a number of frameworks and techniques available to help with this prioritisation effort. Here are our top 4:
1. Scoring
There are a few different approaches to scoring, including:
RICE scoring (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)
Weighted scoring
Opportunity scoring
With all of these, the idea is to score or rate the product feature in question, thereby quantifying the potential impact it may have on your business.
2. The Kano model
This model aims to categorise features based specifically on their impact on customer satisfaction. It divides this impact into three categories: Basic, Performance, and Delighters, and helps identify which features are essential for meeting basic customer needs, which are performance enhancers, and which are unexpected delights!
3. Value vs Effort matrix
This commonly used matrix sets out to assess features based on their potential value to users or the business against the effort required to implement them. Features are plotted on a matrix, with the x-axis representing effort and the y-axis representing value.
4. User story mapping
As the name suggests, user story mapping involves visualising the user journey and breaking down features into smaller user stories. This approach is often used when the digital product is heavy on design or user interface facets.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, crafting a successful digital product roadmap and understanding the complexities inherent in this process is a highly nuanced endeavour. Roadmapping is all about balancing your business objectives and customer feedback with your internal capabilities and skillsets. On the flip side, however, it’s an effort that pays off in the short-, medium- and long-term due to both the internal alignment benefits it brings, and the customer transparency it yields.
The Adrenalin approach
In addition to the strategic roadmapping we have discussed in this article, at Adrenalin, we incorporate a tactical layer into the process, which we call the Production Roadmap. This additional 8 step approach allows us to delve deeper into the detailed tasks necessary to bring our strategic objectives to fruition. By integrating strategic vision with tactical execution, we bring all these different strands together for a cohesive approach.
If you’d like to explore how our expertise can help your team achieve more efficient and effective roadmapping, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.
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