Product Managers have many responsibilities that lead to the successful delivery of a product. Creating a well-defined product roadmap contributes to the success of the product delivery. Therefore, product managers spend a lot of time preparing a product roadmap. It helps them in charting the direction the product development needs to go.

Product Roadmaps are excellent tools to communicate the product vision and the strategy with the product development team. A product manager uses a product roadmap to help the entire product development team understand the product path they have set. They also use product roadmaps to launch new products and enhance the existing products.

Importance of Product Roadmaps

A product roadmap is created with the help of various inputs and requests by the internal members of the organization as well as their customers. Product Managers are responsible for the creation of product roadmaps. These are effective tools to create and develop products that meet the requirements of the organization and its customers.

However, product development needs to evolve with the changing requirements of the organization or the customers. So, product roadmaps are reliable as well as dynamic. They can change according to the scenario, helping product managers in their endeavours of delivering a successful product for their organization.

Types of Product Roadmaps

As mentioned above, product managers create product roadmaps. These product roadmaps are created by communicating with the product development team, the stakeholders, and the customers of the organization. A product manager also needs to decide the right product roadmap for their product. However, they do take inputs from other departments of the organization for the decision-making process since other departments in the organization rely on the product roadmap as well. The sales team, marketing team, engineering team, and customer support team all depend on the product roadmap to help with their work in the organization.

Here are the 5 best product roadmaps used by a Product Manager:

• Strategy Roadmap – This product roadmap depicts the plan or strategy that a product manager has created to achieve the desired product objectives. It is a great tool to show the progress of the product to the stakeholders and other departments of the organization.

• Portfolio Roadmap – It shows the planned releases of the products portfolio for the organization. Portfolio Roadmaps are perfect tools for showing the work of the multiple product development teams in the organization.

• Epics Roadmap – It is used to visualize the work being done across multiple product releases. Epics Roadmaps helps product managers to plan and organize the tasks by compiling similar tasks together.

• Features Roadmap – This roadmap is used for communicating the timeline of delivery of the product features to customers and the internal teams of the organization.

• Release Roadmap – The release of a product for an organization requires a high level of coordination and communication between cross-functional teams. Release Roadmap helps product managers achieve the successful release of a product by effectively coordinating with the sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

Thus, we can conclude that a product roadmap is a valuable tool for a successful product manager. Product Managers can use this tool to successfully deliver products for their organization that meet the requirements of the customers as well. They can learn about creating a product roadmap and guiding the product management team to success through a verified professional product management training course. This will help them learn the various concepts of product management including the five product principles. Aspiring product managers (PMs) can gain a thorough understanding of the roles and responsibilities of a successful product manager through product management training.