Product Development Roadmap Template

About the Product Development Roadmap Template

Product development roadmaps cover everything your team needs to achieve when delivering a product from concept to market launch. On the other hand, a product roadmap offers context and helps define short-term and long-term goals worth reaching.

Your product development roadmap is also a team alignment tool that offers guidance and leadership to help your team focus on balancing product innovation and meeting your customer’s needs. The product development roadmap is agile, so reiterate details quickly and often. 

Investing time in creating a roadmap focused on your product development phases helps your team communicate a vision to business leaders, designers, developers, project managers, marketers, and anyone else who influences meeting team goals. 

Keep reading to learn more about product development roadmaps.

What is a product development roadmap?

A product development roadmap combines your product vision with your product strategy to build a detailed plan for how your team will get your product to market. 

Ideally, your roadmap would answer a few key questions, such as your product goals and how you plan to achieve them, who will build the product, what your key milestones are, your current status, and how to get to the market launch phase. 

When to use a product development roadmap

Product development roadmaps help your cross-functional teamwork towards a common goal, speed up your product’s time to market, and save time or money. 

A product development roadmap is useful to help teams:

• Decide on and work toward a focussed product strategy 

• Keep everyone motivated in the lead-up to a product launch 

• Help product owners plan and prioritize tasks 

• Understand a product’s strategic direction

• Offer transparency to all stakeholders affected by decisions made

Product development roadmaps also help you decide on your success metrics and compare them to your business objectives. Ideally, you want to find opportunities to make incremental product improvements. 

Create your product development roadmap

Making your own product development roadmap is easy. Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share them. Get started by selecting the Product Development Roadmap Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

1. Set some clear goals for your product development. Your roadmap is less of a to-do list and more of a success strategy. Work backward from market launch to set goals and initiatives with your teammates. Make sure you have a compelling high-level vision and can communicate it both with internal teams and external stakeholders.

2. Agree on who has ownership of tasks with your team. Every item on your roadmap should have a clearly defined owner. That person then agrees to take responsibility for reaching the milestone in an agreed timeframe. 

3. Monitor and update your roadmap as circumstances change. Milestones may change from quarter to quarter. Make sure cross-functional team dependencies (between UX, product, and development, for example) are kept up to date with changes. Share your Board with new colleagues as needed, so they can help implement changes too. You can toggle the ‘Anyone at your Team’ option to make the board appear on their dashboard. You can also choose the access rights of your team members.

4. Reprioritize goals as needed based on new information. The most successful roadmaps are the most up-to-date. Resources may shift, and priorities will change. Keep your product on track by thinking of this roadmap as a living blueprint rather than a static record.

Tip for Jira users: you can import Jira cards directly onto your Product Development Roadmap Template to visually organize and keep track of issues.