Journey to Success: The Seven Pivotal Purposes of Product Roadmaps
“The reason I’ve been able to be so financially successful is my focus has never, ever for one minute been money. The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant — and the success will naturally follow. If you do things that are purposeful, you’ll eventually be successful.” — Howard Schultz
Several years ago, I found myself in a heated discussion about product roadmaps with a client. This exchange unfolded over weak, black coffee in your typical, bland white-walled corporate conference room. The vivid memory of this interaction still sits fresh in my mind — an unforgettable moment.
The client, a mid-career senior executive from a Fortune 500 company, tended to challenge others. In fact, he relished the thrill of debate, transforming it into a sport. So as he leaned across the table and looked me in the eyes, he demanded, “Explain why I need a product roadmap.”
Forewarned by his reputation for intellectual sparring, I hesitated, rejecting my generic response that a product can’t exist without a roadmap. As I now understand, this isn’t necessarily true. Instead, I respond, “How can your team function without one?” mentally preparing myself for the subsequent challenge.
The executive shot back with a barrage of alternatives, “What about project plans, milestones, Gantt charts, kanban….” His list went on.
His argument raised a valid point, throwing me into a reflective pause. Why not, indeed? It made me question the absolute necessity of a roadmap. The conversation escalated into a rigorous debate, but eventually, we reached a consensus on the importance of a product roadmap. That day marked the start of my journey — a journey through the product labyrinth, rich with characters — gurus, industry experts, and encounters with individuals of all kinds.
As a product leader, it may seem unusual to admit that roadmaps aren’t always necessary. They certainly don’t serve to dictate every move a team should make. Contrary to popular belief, their primary purpose isn’t to guide the team. That’s simply a byproduct.
Purpose #1 — Product Roadmaps Provide the Foundation of Product Culture
The product roadmap is the cornerstone of product culture. It forms the basis for team interactions, creating a space for psychological safety, transparency, trust, communication, and collaboration within the organization. Just as concrete provides a strong base for a house, roadmaps lay a solid foundation for a flourishing product culture.
- Roadmaps create a safe space that enables employees to express themselves. They introduce a common language and a platform that encourages individuals to voice concerns, propose ideas, and engage in discussions. By presenting a clear direction, roadmaps empower team members to share their thoughts freely, dismantling barriers that might hinder the open exchange of ideas.
- Roadmaps serve as a critical tool in promoting transparency. By providing specific detail about the company’s plans, roadmaps allow employees to understand the objectives and how their work fits. Transparency fosters trust among team members, empowering them to realize the value of their contributions.
- Roadmaps contribute to trust — a fundamental element of successful teams in product-led organizations. Through openness and granting employees a clear understanding of the company’s priorities, roadmaps facilitate the development of trust-based relationships among teams and individuals. Shared language, objectives, and decision-making form the building blocks of these relationships.
- Roadmaps also enhance communication — a crucial element for productive relationships. They act as a central repository of information, ensuring everyone has access to the same data. This leads to clarity, limits misunderstandings, and promotes efficient collaboration among employees, stakeholders, and customers.
- Roadmaps foster collaboration — a force driving innovation, by offering a platform for idea exchange and feedback. By serving as a common reference point, roadmaps encourage teamwork and nurture an environment where employees can contribute. Such a collaborative approach guarantees consistent progression, the acceptance of novel ideas, and the development of innovative products and services.
Purpose #2 — Product Roadmaps Are Conversation Starters
Product roadmaps serve as an invaluable spark for conversation. Sharing a roadmap, stepping back, and discussing often lead to an unrivaled exchange. The primary function of roadmaps lies in facilitating communication.
As a communication tool, use roadmaps to:
- Convert your strategy into a tangible product, taking an essential yet abstract concept and giving it form.
- Foster mutual understanding by painting a shared vision of the future and the results achieved.
- Narrate the product’s story and journey, illustrating how it evolves.
- Encourage feedback by presenting a unique perspective.
So when building your roadmap, remember that its first and most important purpose is to drive discussion and debate. So keep your focus on it as a conversation starter and communication tool.
Purpose #3 — Product Roadmaps Are A Sales Tool
Think of a product roadmap as a sales pitch for your product. It doesn’t just show what you’re making but also why you’re making it and how it fits with your company’s goals. Thinking of your roadmap this way is helpful when you want to get support from stakeholders — important people who care about your product’s success.
When you share your roadmap with stakeholders, you’re setting expectations. You show them where your product is going and how it will get there. This clear picture can build trust and confidence, making it easier for stakeholders to back your product. After all, people are more likely to put time, money, or resources into something they understand and believe in.
As a sales tool, use roadmaps to:
- Share the vision and set expectations with customers and internal stakeholders
- Get customers and stakeholders excited about what’s next
- Motivate the team that’s making and delivering the product to customers by showing them the why and the bigger vision
- To guide release management communications which should be viewed as a marketing document
In short, a product roadmap isn’t just a planning tool; it’s a sales tool. It’s a way of selling your vision to stakeholders, inspiring your team, and ensuring everyone is on the same page and moving in the same direction. But remember, it’s up to you to make the sale, so be sure to spend time crafting your product roadmap sales pitch.
Purpose #4 — Product Roadmaps Serve as Negotiation Documents
In negotiation, knowledge is power. A well-made roadmap puts you in a good spot to talk with internal and external stakeholders. The first draft of a roadmap shows your dream and vision for the product. But as you share it with stakeholders to start conversations and get them excited about your dream, you might get asked to add features or change what’s most important.
This situation is when the roadmap becomes a tool for negotiation. It helps you discuss what’s critical for your product and your priorities. For instance, if you believe one feature is more important than another, your roadmap shows this. But a stakeholder might disagree and think the other feature should be more important. You can use your roadmap to talk about this and make trade-offs — that’s when you decide to give up a little on one thing to gain something important.
As a negotiation tool, use roadmaps to:
- Point out absolutes and priorities that can’t be moved or changed
- Have real talks about trade-offs when thinking about changes to priorities
- Guide talks about assumptions, dependencies, and limits with other teams
- Keep stakeholders and teams up-to-date with ongoing talks about priorities
A piece of advice — as you prepare for talks about priorities based on your roadmap, remember to separate the people from the discussion. And when you start talks based on your roadmap, focus on interests, not positions, and look for creative ways to come up with solutions that help everyone. Don’t just ignore requests and focus on your priorities. Keep an open mind when sharing the roadmap.
Purpose #5 — Product Roadmaps Set The Stage
Your user should be the star of your roadmap. There should be no other focus. Every theme, initiative, epic, and story should make something valuable for your users. And together, all these elements should tell a story that can excite even the most doubtful and challenging users.
When you make your roadmap, think about your users’ situation when they use the product. This situation is the set of conditions and events around your user. For example, your user using your product on a desktop at home or on a smartphone in a supermarket is part of the situation. This situation is also important to include in your roadmap.
So, when you make your roadmap, make it clear to the team who your user is, the value they’re getting, why they should care about what’s being delivered, and where, how, and when they’ll use the product. If you’ve spent time on your product strategy, this should come from the user-centered value story.
Think for a minute that you were told to drive somewhere but not told why or how. You were just given a list of steps to put together into a journey. If you were able to get to the destination, and that’s a big if, would your trip be enjoyable and/or efficient for you or your passengers? Absolutely not; it would be full of stress and delays. But putting together separate steps is what we ask our teams to do with roadmaps.
So without a doubt, your job as a product manager is to help your team see the journey and put themselves in the user’s shoes through the roadmap.
Purpose #6 — Product Roadmaps Guide Teams to Deliver Results
Notice I didn’t say product roadmaps are contracts with teams on deliverables due on exact dates. The words contract, dates, and roadmaps should never be said together. Instead, talk about roadmaps, outcomes, and targets. Roadmaps show a path for teams to deliver results to users (and buyers) within a specific time. And before you say I’m contradicting myself, know that exact, agreed-upon dates and targets are very different. One is firm; one is a guide that can be changed as you learn.
Leaving dates out, roadmaps and the specific initiatives, epics, features, and stories all exist to guide teams to deliver something a user wants to achieve. For example, this might look something like:
- Initiative: Make digital recruiting better so that the time to hire is cut down by 25%
- Epic: Use AI learning models to show preferred digital channels and scenarios by job type so recruiters can speed up hiring
- Feature: Let recruiters see three scenarios to post a job in their hiring process with predicted chances of successfully reducing the time to hire
- Story: As a recruiter, I want to see the predicted chances of success so that my choice of using a specific digital channel to recruit can be confirmed/disproved
The feature might match up with a particular calendar quarter and the story to a sprint, but neither to an exact date. To underscore the point, roadmaps are guides made to point the team in a direction and help them see progress toward results while learning. So, as you plan to make a roadmap or add to it, only add items with specific results for the user described as ideas with goal dates that you can change or move away from as the team tries things out and learns.
Purpose #7 — Product Roadmaps Help Decide What’s Most Important
Unexpected things will happen. When they do, the difference between project plans and product roadmaps shows. If it were a project plan, you’d ignore the new information and keep going. But because it’s a roadmap, you need to stop and think. And if the change makes more sense than your current path, you pivot.
Since roadmaps are made to be flexible, changes are not just okay; they’re encouraged. But when new opportunities arise, you must make some tough choices. The question then is how. How do you decide or recommit to what’s most important?
Prioritization is the seventh and last purpose of a roadmap. Roadmaps guide you to what’s most important. Each initiative, epic, feature, and story has value when done right. It helps reach an outcome. It has a level of importance and effort. It has a place in the story. Given these inputs, you can reach a decision — do we change our roadmap or keep going? And while a lot is written on the mechanics of deciding what’s most important, often overlooked are the reasons a roadmap is important to the process of determining what’s most important, including:
- Understanding Impact — Without a well-crafted, outcomes-focused roadmap, it would be impossible to assess ‘what happens if’ we make a change. Clear standards for assessing impact lead to clear communications about changes. And while it’s impossible to make everyone happy all the time, if you do make a change, you need a clear, objective way to explain why you made the change to all affected stakeholders.
- Trust & Transparency — Trust comes from understanding. Trust is crucial to product teams, and all teams for that matter. You will lose trust when you communicate changes without a roadmap and a clear impact assessment. Losing trust is the ‘soft’ impact of change. Decisions made based on objective assessments, value trade-offs, and based on the results outlined in the roadmap lessen the damage to trust. Especially when communicated transparently.
- Communication & Checking in with stakeholders — Imagine for a moment trying to communicate a change to stakeholders, including customers, when there’s no roadmap, objective assessment, or story around why the change is happening and when the impacted item will come up again. The communication wouldn’t go over well or might not happen at all. Well-made roadmaps make communication easier and enable product managers to check in with stakeholders in a way that explains what changed, why it changed, what the new path forward is, and the benefit to those affected.
Bringing it together at Microsoft
When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a company that was seen as losing its relevance. Microsoft struggled to keep up with the rapid changes in the tech industry, and its efforts seemed scattered and uncoordinated. Nadella realized that a clear, unified vision was needed to revive Microsoft.
Nadella introduced a new vision for Microsoft: “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” This was more than just a slogan; it was a strategic direction that was reflected in their product roadmap.
In line with this vision, Microsoft shifted its focus towards cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and creating a more integrated product ecosystem. The product roadmap showcased this shift with clear outcomes and milestones. For instance, the roadmap detailed the development and rollout of Microsoft Azure, their cloud computing service, and the evolution of their staple products like Office into more integrated, cloud-based services.
This clear roadmap helped Nadella sell his vision to stakeholders and customers. It gave them an understanding of where Microsoft was headed and how it planned to reclaim its position as a tech industry leader.
Most importantly, the roadmap rallied the Microsoft team around this new vision. It provided a sense of direction and purpose, enabling them to understand the ‘why’ behind the changes. They were not merely creating new products or updating old ones; they were part of a larger mission to empower individuals and organizations across the globe.
The transformation of Microsoft under Satya Nadella’s leadership is a strong example of how a product roadmap can be used to sell a vision and rally a team. Moreover, it underscores the importance of the ‘why’ behind a product roadmap and how it can guide a company toward success.
In Conclusion
Roadmaps have many uses. Knowing why we use roadmaps is essential for creating one that helps you succeed. Too often, product managers treat roadmaps like a project plan or, worse, an afterthought. Because roadmaps have such strategic value, I urge you, as product managers, to invest time and effort into your roadmaps. When done right, they can accelerate your success. When done wrong, they can wreak untold havoc on your product, credibility, and career.
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