Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty

In many organizations (and particularly in technology organizations), this responsibility carries the title of product manager, product director, or product owner. Depending on the nature of your business and structure of your team, however, these duties may be handled by a myriad of other roles and functions, including project manager, development manager, engineering manager, technical lead, operations manager, program manager, user experience designer, customer success, QA, and many more. In today’s fast-moving business environment, responsibilities and titles can change as frequently as the technologies we work with.

We wrote this book to be accessible to anyone involved in product, regardless of title. If your job includes strategizing about where your product is going, contributing to alignment around a shared vision, or developing a plan to execute, then we hope this book will be relevant, enlightening, and useful to you.

In addition, we want this book to be useful for product people of all experience levels. Whether you’re a product newbie, a seasoned veteran, or a senior leader responsible for a range of products (or a team of product people), we believe the approach we describe here will help you and your team communicate product direction effectively.

Maybe you had never heard of product roadmapping before you came across this book. That’s OK! (Welcome aboard, we have life jackets.) If you’re new to product development or new to the concept of roadmapping, we’ve designed this book to be a helpful introduction.

Or maybe you have a product roadmapping process but have realized it’s flawed. Maybe what you thought was a product roadmap was actually a business plan, a marketing plan, or a project plan.

Recognizing that you don’t have a working product roadmapping process is actually a great place to be. This means you can wipe the slate clean and start fresh.

How to Use This Book

Product roadmapping isn’t a destination; rather, it’s a journey, marked by a collection of actions that help define how to deliver the highest possible value to the customer. The following list identifies the key principles we’ve found are crucial to a successful product roadmap. You may already have some of these in place, and each company, product, and set of stakeholders is different, so we’ll talk about how you can mix and match based on your needs and the readiness of your organization.