When building new products, product roadmaps provide a clear way to your vision.

A product roadmap can be of many types. In any way, it’s an essential tool for companies of any size, including startups and enterprises.

This guide will explore the product roadmapping process for a successful product launch.

What is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap defines your app’s vision and how you will achieve it. It serves as a plan for steps you need to take in the upcoming quarters to achieve your product goals.

It’s the next step after creating your product strategy, leading to the actual steps. A good product roadmap is flexible and adaptable to iterations based on user testing and learnings. Hence, your team can collaborate easily on product management.

The Importance of Product Roadmaps

Product roadmaps, often referred to as “product strategy roadmaps”, have a crucial role in every company’s growth. Whether you’re a small startup in the MVP stage or a well-established company, product roadmaps serve a purpose, such as:

Alignment and clarity

A product roadmap provides great clarity and alignment on your vision. It ensures that every task is aligned with your goals. Hence, you can save yourself from what most startups suffer from — feature bloat.

When your vision and the steps to reach it are defined, you can easily prioritize the tasks that align with that vision. Such clarity can make product management much easier.

Quick launch timelines

Product roadmaps sharpen your tasklist, allowing you to launch your product more quickly. This also creates a positive feedback loop. The faster you launch your product, the more user feedback you can get — shaping your strategy further.

The key is quick implementation. With AI app builders like Natively, you can speed up your go-to-market timeline even more.
All you need to do is describe your app and let the agent build it. Once your app is ready, get user feedback and iterate. The best part is: It takes minutes to build an app and you don’t even need to code.

Practical planning

One common mistake with most startups is building apps without a plan. It generally leads to an unsuccessful launch and scattered ideas. A product roadmap can help with that.

When designing a product, the most important question for any team is: “Why are we building this product?” You want to define why this app must be built.

Other than product values and vision, the reason can also lead to practical decisions. It can help you allocate resources for tasks that actually align with a vision. Thus, your team gets some context on ‘why’ they’re working.

Key Components of a Great Product Roadmap

There are several types of product roadmaps and frameworks for different product needs and goals. However, here are the six basic components that are a must in every roadmap.

Who will work on it: The resources and teams you will need to complete certain tasks.
What to work on: The features you need to prioritize for the upcoming timelines.
When it launches: Key timelines for various product features and versions.
Where the feature will launch: In case of portfolios, which product this initiative is for.
Why it’s prioritized: The vision and goals your product aligns with.
How to measure growth: Metrics and specific goals that you will use to measure success.

You can create and visualize your roadmap however you want to. In all cases, these components stay the same.

6 Types of Product Roadmaps

Depending on your product vision and needs, there are 6 types of product roadmaps to choose from. The core components vary for each roadmap based on function and goals.

Let’s have a glance at these 6 types of product roadmaps:

1. Goal-based roadmap

Goal-based roadmaps are created based on extensive goals and objectives for each stage of product development. These include product features, timelines, and metrics. They are flexible and show a clear vision for the product.

Best for: Goal-based roadmaps are best for high-level products that need strategy and a long-term vision.

2. Feature roadmap

As the name suggests, feature roadmaps are focused on features. The roadmap generally outlines timelines and progress charts of when certain features will be completed.

Best for: The roadmap is best for coordination with sales and marketing teams that need constant updates on the product launch.

3. Timeline roadmap

A timeline roadmap uses a Gantt chart-style view to organize multiple milestones with their respective timelines in the same view.

Best for: Timeline roadmaps are excellent for detail-oriented planning, especially for coordinating workflows and cross-team collaborations.

4. Portfolio roadmap

Portfolio roadmaps are used to view development timelines for multiple products in one view. With the timelines, you can also get a high-level overview of different products align and contribute to your overall vision.

Best for: The roadmap is best for well-established companies who are working on multiple product lines.

5. Scrum roadmap

A scrum roadmap organizes current and upcoming features, and development plans as timelines. These timelines represent which feature will be developed in a particular phase.

Best for: The roadmap is best for agile model-based development teams that focus on quick execution within short timelines.

6. Epics roadmap

An epics roadmap is an agile product roadmap that aims for high-level strategic planning. It organizes features into the corresponding goal known as “epics”, creating overarching goals.

Best for: The roadmap is best for agile model-based startups that need to visualize how long-term product development supports overarching goals.

You can distinguish these various types of roadmaps based on the following factors:

High-level vs. detail-oriented
Strategic vs. tactical
Internal vs. external

In some cases, it may be best to use more than one type of roadmap simultaneously. For example, you can use an epics roadmap along with a scrum roadmap to plan your strategic, long-term vision and short-term timelines.

You can easily combine one roadmap for high-level planning and another for short-term goals to achieve the vision. Timeline and feature roadmaps are suitable for current tasks, for instance.

How to Create a Product Roadmap for Your App?

There are four stages to creating a product roadmap: Organizing, Prioritizing, Visualizing, and Iterating. All these stages tie all your product development tasks to the big vision. Thus, product roadmapping allows you to launch your app in time.

As you create your product roadmap, keep these steps in mind:

Speak to your customers

A good product roadmap always starts with the customers. In fact, speaking to your customers is the key to creating a product roadmap for your app.

Your goal is to understand what exactly your customers want. Find out why they would want to use your app. If you know your customers’ expectations, you can innovate to excel at them.

Define your vision

Your product’s vision doesn’t have to be set in stone — it can always open to change. But to get started, you want to have a vision.

Carefully think through and align on your vision for your product for now, and see how it grows in the future. Make sure that your overall vision creates a direction for your product and sets measurable goals for it.

Build on product features

It’s an essential rule that you should never put all of your product features and ideas into your app’s first version. An MVP is exactly what it is — a minimum viable product. It serves as the building ground for user testing, idea validation, and building an audience.

You need to prioritize which features go out on your app’s first version based on importance. Lead with the core features and other necessary features will follow in the next versions.

Create your roadmap visual

As you plan out new features and the development process, you can create the roadmap’s visuals using a template. This visualized roadmap will shape your product development process.

Lead with the major milestones and product releases, and then add timelines for smaller milestones from there. Make sure that your teams update the roadmap presentation as necessary.

Keep iterating

Product development is all about evolving, quick changes. You need to plan features with short timelines while staying flexible for long-term plans.

As you develop your product with user feedback, you need to be open to adjustments. Thus, ensure to design your roadmap for iterations.

Scale Your App With Natively

Roadmapping your product development is the first; it isn’t any actual work. From building an MVP to iterating with user feedback, there’s a lot of work to do before you launch.

That’s where AI-powered, no-code app builders like Natively can speed things up. Whether you want to build your app’s V1 or make iterations, it’s all set with prompting.

You don’t need to write a single line of code to build an app. Start building with Natively.