How to Build a Roadmap?

If you don't know where you are going, it's impossible to determine the best way to get there. A product roadmap is an essential tool for product planning and development. Product roadmaps outline when products are scheduled for release and include an overview of their primary and secondary features.

Here are a few points to consider while building a roadmap:

• Consider brainstorming the best possible applications of your technology.
• Try evaluating the best possible "outside the box" • Create the product roadmap document. This typically features a graphic representation of the time frame, as well as relevant explanation.
• For each market, ensure that you define the product which you would build for the target market.
• Size the market conservatively; consider using analyst estimates and feasible assumptions about your penetration.
• Ensure that you estimate the cost of developing and selling the product, and do not forget to calculate a rough ROI.
• Make sure you take into consideration your team’s experience, and the learning curve.
• Understand the competition, and what your technical edge is.
• Find the areas where you can make use of the experience gained in one product in order to develop your other products more quickly and successfully.
• Your roadmap should speak about itself as well as about your product and how your product is different from your competitors.
• Arrange the markets on these factors, and decide on one or two products that you would initially like to develop • Also analyse several other markets that make sense to pursue in the future, or if the first ones don’t pan out.
• Finalize the roadmap and distribute it to all stakeholders.

Once the roadmap is completed, you should avoid making major changes to it. A product roadmap is an essential blueprint for your company that should remain consistent.

How to Build a Roadmap?