How to Build a Product Roadmap for a Startup in 2022?

What will you do if you are on a trip and want to reach the destination without wasting your time and fuel? You will need a roadmap. Same way while developing a product, you need a roadmap to turn all your planning systematically into execution.

A product roadmap is the backbone of product development with 100% success. It gives the whole development team - developers, marketers, stakeholders and clients, where you will start and how it goes.

However, the landscape of the product roadmap continually shifts as per the customer's desired outcome, the company’s growth and because of other factors. And while product development teams leave behind the dust and start building the software without making required changes in the product roadmap.

What is a product roadmap?

It's a visual representation of all your short and long term goals as a company. It is an important step in executing all your vision and strategy to make your product alive for usage.

However, don’t begin with the roadmap designing until or unless you have a clear strategy in your mind. Here is the hierarchy of high-level planning:

• Vision
• Strategy
• Goals
• Roadmap

However, while most people associate roadmaps with planning, they’re most useful as a communication tool.

1. Begin with Research

There are two purposes of Product roadmaps, first to set your goals in priority and build support for your plan. To begin with, in roadmap designing, think about the audience of your roadmap. Your team will work on different elements designed for the audience. When you will be ready with your roadmap, it will clearly state the type of audience you will be targeting.

Now, think about your company’s current state. The product roadmap changes with the growth of the company. A product roadmap of a startup is completely different from the company which is handling multiple products at a time.

2. Decide the desired outcome as per business need

Product roadmaps are outcome-driven planning, especially for Agile teams. This means they focus on the change you want to achieve to further your overall strategy. The features or products you build are just a means to an end.

The best place to start is with a business need. In other words, what is the desired outcome for your roadmap and why does it matter?

Revisit your strategy and vision to find areas of impact. Or, dig into your other resources like market research, competitor analysis, internal requests from stakeholders, external requests from users, or even existing tasks in your backlog.

Gather some teammates and key stakeholders together and brainstorm a few critical elements:

• Desired outcome: What is the business need you’re trying to solve? For example, “become the top retailer of iPhone cases in North America.”
• Impact Metrics: What metrics signal that you’re solving a problem in the best way possible? For example, increase revenue by 15% or increase average order size to 3 items per customer.
• Behaviour change: What user behaviours need to change to hit your goals? For example, you could increase revenue by focusing on top-of-funnel users or upselling current ones, or even focusing on reactivating churned customers.

3. Focus on Actual Problems

Analyse the state of your product and find out what changes you can bring to the product to offer the desired outcome to the user.

Wondering how you will find out the user's requirement? Focus on the following place to identify the problems:

• Feedback - Customers' direct feedback is the best way to find their expectations and product-related problems to solve the problem. If you can’t communicate with them directly, connect through social media platforms, and customers, check their reviews on an online web page or analyse the customer support queries.
• Product Backlog - On solving each problem, you can take reviews from customers to solve the problems instantly. Focus on each problem.
• Data Usage - If you don’t get exactly what your customers want focus on the way they are using your product/services. It will tell you a lot about the problems they are facing and the solutions they are expecting.
• Look into Competitors - If you want to lead the market, keep an eye on your competitors and the way they are solving each problem. If customers are still unsatisfied with the solution introduced by your competitors, then it will be a golden opportunity for you to build a unique solution and become the market hero.

Take time in problem discovery to find the right problems and desired outcomes.

4. Decide a timeframe

After finding the problem and solution, the roadmap needs an ultimate destination and timeline to cover it. Firstly, analyse the type of product problem you are working on, whether it can be solved in a short time or a process of months.

Indeed, each process takes time but make sure you are not blindly chasing the outcomes only.

5. Set problems into high-level themes

Do you know what a reverse funnel looks like, going from problems to solve to desired outcomes?

Desired outcomes (based on business needs) → Impact metrics (to track success) → Problems to solve (that will change user behaviours)

It will be quite challenging to change the desired outcomes based on the customer's requirement to change their behaviours.

Don’t jump to any single solution, product work is a combination of data, intuition, actual solution and experience.

Look at your problems and find a thread that can tie different themes together.

6. Prioritise themes and features from Beginning

While developing a product there are several paths you can take to reach the desired outcome. However, it's your choice which process should be done first for successful product development.

Prioritising all the themes from the beginning of the product development is an art itself.

• Judge features based on how feasible they are to produce the desired outcomes and whether they support the whole product development strategy.
• To find how different features are going to have a high impact on the product functionality. You aim to achieve a high impact from low-cost efforts/features.
• Another way is going by the RICE method. Where you will deeply analyse and divide the features into multiple categories.

First - how many people will be impacted by it at a given time? Is it aligning with your development strategy? How confident are you about the success of such features? Put all the question answers on a number scale and multiply each number together and find the ‘total impact per time worked’ metric.

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