May 9, 2012. Paul Hixon
A well-designed product roadmap shows the potential within your market and product space and also sets out what the vision for your product lines are over the coming years. Here I’ll show you how to go about creating an initial roadmap in collaboration with work colleagues.
If you’re starting out completely new with a brand-new market/product then you have to start by canvassing for ideas from other departments. This involves brainstorming what new features or technologies could be used within your products. Ideally you should be focusing on one or two product lines. Try to include as many different viewpoints as possible.
It is the responsibility of the product manager to start organizing all of these ideas according to what markets they relate to. Each company‘s business development strategy should be considered in parallel with your product roadmap to establish which markets with truly be your main focus. This is important as when the company starts to expand and develop want to make sure the product lines make the most of this momentum.
The product manager should then define a product for each market that has been singled out. Research should be done as regards the size of the customer base within each market, possible penetration rates you could expect and the return on your investment within this market. Key to this is understanding what competition already exists and this may actually make some markets completely undesirable.
The product manager can then start to formulate file versions of the product roadmap which include architectural decisions. The CTO or head of engineering should be involved with this to define what sort of componentization or architectural decisions can be used in order to creative the nation product that can be expanded into many lines.
The product roadmap is then reviewed by your peers within the company and modifications made. Over time all product roadmaps needs to incrementally change in order to factor in new technologies, product lines or markets which the company wishes to pursue.
Updated May 9, 2012. Published March 13, 2011. Paul Hixon
