Product roadmap
Also called roadmap.
A plan showing what a product team intends to build over the coming months, and the goal behind each step.
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What it is.
A roadmap works at the level of goals and themes: "self-serve onboarding this quarter", "reporting next quarter". The backlog holds the detailed work that delivers each theme.
Good roadmaps are firm for the near term and loose further out. Many teams use now, next and later columns instead of exact dates, because plans more than a few months ahead change as they learn.
Why it matters
A roadmap lines up the business, sales and engineering on the same order of work. It explains why something is not being built yet, helps plan hiring and budget, and gives a place to weigh new requests against what was already promised.
In a product build
In a product build the roadmap usually starts as the milestone plan from discovery: the first release is the narrow version, and later items stay on the roadmap until real use shows they are worth building.
Common mistakes.
- 01
Treating it as a promise with fixed dates a year out.
- 02
Listing features without the problem each one solves, so nobody can judge trade-offs.
- 03
Never updating it, so the team and the roadmap disagree within a month.
Work it out with a tool.
Related terms.
- Backlog (product backlog)The ordered list of everything still to be built or fixed in a product, with the most important work at the top.
- Discovery phaseThe short stretch before a build where the team works out the problem, the users, the scope and the rough cost.
- MilestoneA checkpoint in a project where an agreed piece of work is delivered, checked and, often, paid for.
- MVP (minimum viable product)The smallest version of a product that real users can use, built to test whether the core idea works.
Guides and pages
Browse the full glossary or read answers to common questions.
