Welcome to the fifth and final lesson of our Product Management for Beginners Course! 🤩 Congrats for sticking with us and we hope you've enjoyed everything you've learned so far.
In the last tutorial, we talked about how we can effectively communicate a product idea using wireframes, and how to take that product to market as an MVP.
Now, we're looking into the future together! We’ll explore:
- What is a product roadmap?
- What are product roadmaps for?
- What makes a good product roadmap?
- A final note on effective communication
Roadmaps give everyone a glimpse into what lies ahead and are an essential part of a product manager’s role 🔮 Let's take a look!
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a high-level, strategic tool which is used to describe the vision and direction of a product or service. It outlines the product’s envisioned features and functions and the expected time period over which these will be delivered.
A roadmap usually summarizes product development over roughly 12-18 months and uses clear visuals to display the following elements:
- Product vision: The product vision is a clear, concise statement articulating the overarching goals of your product. It should be ambitious but achievable—something that everyone on the product development team can rally behind.
- Goals/objectives: Objectives outline what the product is trying to achieve. They typically comprise a list of statements aligned with the company’s overall strategy. To ensure they are meaningful, they sometimes follow the project management mnemonic “SMART”. This stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Initiatives: The initiatives describe (at a high level) the cross-functional projects that need to take place to meet the product roadmap’s objectives. While these won’t go into detail, they’re nevertheless useful for providing different team members with oversight of their project responsibilities.
- Timeline: The timeline is a visual representation of the product roadmap. It should outline when each initiative starts and finishes. It’s often color-coded to make it easier to identify the different categories.
- Dependencies: The visual timeline often highlights a project’s dependencies. This is a list of tasks that need completing before the next stage begins. For instance, you might need to develop a particular software component before creating the features that rely on that component.
What are product roadmaps for?
The company vision informs the strategies that the various departments set and try to follow. Your product team will have one, as will your colleagues from marketing or customer care, etc.
Strategies and visions require long-term thinking; it might take years to get there! Creating a feature with your team in the here and now, on the other hand, or testing improvements—that's your day-to-day. So how do the short-term and the long-term come together? 🤝 A roadmap is a great tool to connect the dots between the two.
As PM, you'll be the one setting the priorities for your team and product. The other departments in an organization will have their own plans and priorities—so, being able to take a look at a roadmap in order to plan ahead will be a great help to them! They might have a dependency ("We can't launch the new campaign until the big new feature is released!") or they might want to know when new tools and features become available that they can advertise.
Roadmaps also form an excellent basis for discussion. Maybe someone has some doubts about an upcoming feature; Perhaps the customer care team is being inundated with requests for an improvement and they want to discuss where it could be squeezed in. Without the roadmap, everything's in your head, for no one to see—which is certainly not ideal in an organization where dozens or even hundreds of people are trying to work together to create the best product or service possible! 🤯
What makes a good product roadmap?
No two roadmaps are alike. It's not always obvious what a "good" roadmap should look like, as different people will expect to see different things. And there we already have the first thing to keep in mind:
Who are you making your roadmap for?
Is it for your own team? Then maybe you'll want to add a bit of detail; they know the product intimately, after all. Is it for your boss, or maybe other department heads? Go lighter on the details, and focus on milestones instead—especially the ones that will be relevant in order to meet company goals or those which other departments will depend on!
Roadmaps can focus on the mid-term (maybe the next couple of months) or they can give a long-term outlook (1 year and more). Keep in mind that the further we go from today, the fuzzier the goals will get.
In modern product management, we recognize that we cannot perfectly plan out the next years, months, or even weeks. We assume that things will go wrong, priorities will change, and plans will be discarded. In software development, we try to expect the unexpected, and so a good roadmap should account for some variability.
Roadmaps are not to be mistaken for a public long-term commitment. Instead, you should think of them as a communicated target to strive for. 🎯 When things go sideways, a roadmap needs to be adjusted quickly and the changes communicated to your stakeholders. They will need to make their own adjustments, so make sure you keep them up-to-date. It's your responsibility to react to change.
Flexibility and agility are of great importance in this field—but remaining flexible doesn't mean not planning ahead! The best product managers are able to plan for the future with confidence while reacting quickly to changes should they arise 💪
Read more about product roadmaps in our extensive guide: The Complete Product Roadmap Guide: How to Create One + Examples
A final note on effective communication
Have you ever told one of your parents about your plans to come to visit over the holidays, only to be called the next day by another member of your family, asking you about your holiday plans?
Think of a software company as a big family with lots of parents and siblings, and various communication paths. It's really easy to overestimate how much people know about your plans.
As the product manager, you spend a lot of time thinking about those plans, after all! But more often than not, it's actually extremely difficult to keep everyone abreast of what you're thinking. No one is in your head, and just because you told one colleague doesn't mean they passed on the information.
In the end, it often pays to over-communicate 📣 Keep bringing up your roadmap, refer back to it, and keep it in a place where everyone who's interested can always access it.
Prioritizing, planning, and communicating are key aspects of a product manager's job. As you advance in your career, you'll become better and better at predicting, and quicker at adjusting, all the while keeping your coworkers well-informed.
Wrap-up
That’s just about it for this lesson—which marks the end of our Product Management for Beginners Course!
We hope you now know how exciting a career in product management can be! It's a varied and rewarding career path; with the potential to earn well, too 💰 According to data from Indeed, the average product manager salary in the United States comes in at just over $108,000 per year. Find out more about what you could earn as a product manager in our salary guide.
If you enjoyed diving into the world of product management, join us and take part in one of our upcoming live events about how to become a product manager with CareerFoundry. They're free, and map out a proven route to becoming a job-ready product manager from scratch 🌱
You can also check out this short video with advice on how to become a product manager:
If you're ready to take the next step in your career change, hop on a call with one of our program advisors for 1:1 advice about a career in product management and what it's like to study at CareerFoundry.
And why not explore some of the work completed by CareerFoundry students and aspiring product managers in these projects:
- Garima Nahar's Intro to Product Management Portfolio Project
- Irena Medlin's Product Management Portfolio Project
Thank you once again for taking part in our Product Management for Beginners Course! 🤩 You’ll get the chance to take our Final Quiz after this tutorial. Get 70% or more and you’ll be awarded a discount on our Product Management Program.
Good luck! We look forward to welcoming you at CareerFoundry in the near future, and wish you all the best for the next steps in your career 🧡
