Rethinking the Product Roadmap: Bring Back the Utility and Practicality

A successful digital product has long been touted as fulfilling three criteria. Strong products live at the center of what a business is uniquely good at, what consumers are yearning for, and what is technically feasible to produce. While certainly correct, this 10,000-foot view creates far too much potential for folks to overlook one of the most critical determinants of success: An organization’s ability to operationally ship new value regularly and quickly. Over the years, numerous frameworks and operating models have been developed to address the complex task of managing a product’s lifecycle and doing so within the bounds of a large organization, often centering on a key artifact in every product manager’s toolkit: the Product Roadmap.

Product roadmaps are essential but deceptively challenging to craft, maintain, and leverage as anything more than a dated or performative document. Roadmaps should serve as much more than an anticipated timeline; they should serve as a tool for aligning cross-functional teams, they should drive strategic focus, and they should drive critical conversation around the muscles that are required to deliver value to consumers; should being the operative word.

In this article, we show how leveraging design principles into your roadmap process results in roadmaps that best serve as living tools for team alignment, strategic clarity, and operational success.

The Three Core Purposes of a Product Roadmap

When executed with finesse, Product Roadmaps serve many practical purposes that I believe can be distilled into three critical areas:

1. Driving Clear Communication

A well-crafted roadmap is a visual summary of the product team’s objectives, priorities, and delivery timelines. It promotes:

• Transparency: Offering visibility into the team’s goals and progress.
• Accountability: Ensuring all teams understand their role in achieving product milestones.
• Milestone Tracking: Creating a unified view for tracking key deliverables.

With clear communication, roadmaps serve as a common language for product teams, facilitating alignment and minimizing misunderstandings.

2. Visualizing Strategic Alignment

Product roadmaps are designed to ensure that every team, from product and engineering to marketing and sales, is aligned with the overarching business strategy and product vision. This alignment is crucial for:

• Risk Management: Highlighting potential issues before they become bottlenecks.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Fostering and forcing collaboration to build joint ownership over product direction.
• Vision Alignment: Reinforcing the product’s goals within the broader organizational mission.

Strategic alignment through roadmaps keeps all teams focused on the shared vision, fostering a sense of collective ownership.

3. Organizing Product Operations

Beyond strategy, roadmaps are operational tools, helping teams to coordinate resources, align on deliverables, and assess organizational readiness. They drive:

• Cross-Team Collaboration: Breaking down silos to facilitate seamless delivery and dependency awareness.
• Portfolio-Wide Prioritization: Allowing teams to make informed decisions about what to prioritize.
• Profitability: Ensuring projects are in line with the business’s financial goals and resourcing models.

In this way, roadmaps serve as both a planning guide and an operational backbone, organizing the work required to bring a product to market effectively.

Roadmaps in Practice: Out-of-Date and Ineffective

Despite these promises, roadmaps alone do not guarantee success. More often than not, they are incomplete and out-of-date by the time they are shared. Seasoned product managers understand that whether you use a thematic, Now-Next-Later, OKR-based, or Lean approach, the roadmap’s real value lies in its role as a communication and alignment tool. And while tools like ProductPlan, Jira, and Asana offer extensive features, they often lack the structured guidance needed to build roadmaps that drive measurable business value and deliver meaningful results.

For that reason, we set out to explore how we might make roadmaps more practical, actionable, and aligned with the dynamic needs of modern product teams. We aimed to ensure that we defined an approach that accounted for the product lifecycle.

A Fresh Approach: Reviving the Product Roadmap as a Strategic Tool

We set out to experiment, hypothesizing that adopting a few intentional practices could help teams realize the promised benefits of a strong roadmap. Our approach centered around three key ideas:

1. Creating Ceremony: By infusing ceremony in the process, we believe we will better reinforce what the roadmap is and how it should be used.
2. Co-Creation: By engaging cross-functional teams in co-creation exercises, we believe we will better capture dependencies, requirements, and considerations early on in the process to ensure they are well accounted for in the output.
3. Defining Value Propositions at Each Stage: By clearly outlining the intended user value at each stage of the roadmap, we believe we will better prioritize early wins that build momentum and demonstrate progress for consumers — dissuading stakeholders from solely focusing on large feature initiatives.

Defining these beliefs, we broke down how we might test these assumptions within the throws of working with a few of our partner organizations.

Let’s take a look.

The Process: Defining the Product Roadmap Lifecycle

Shown here, we defined a general roadmap creation flow that would allow us to experiment with these hypotheses.

As noted, the most impactful products emerge where a business’s unique value, consumer demand, and production feasibility intersect. While there are many ways to document and explore this space, we found it essential to embrace this widely accepted principle at the onset as we stepped into this experiment.

Leverage opportunity solution trees to create space for and organize opportunities worth exploring. This effectively sets the cultural bedrock for effective test and learn strategies.

Following the definition of the opportunities your product team sets out to explore, we lean heavily into a design-driven exploration and validation approach. In this stage we ideate and share concept iterations internally during regular design reviews, capturing stakeholders’ assumptions and strongly held beliefs along the way - all in preparation for consumer resonance testing.

Following this cycle we begin testing interactive prototypes with consumers to validate the core concept and challenge key assumptions. Addressing emergent themes, we iterate through the concept design by addressing findings from resonance testing, citing how choices align with the insights gathered, all while directly addressing the collected assumptions from stakeholders throughout the design review process.

Though this step may feel overwhelming, using the opportunity solution tree in Step 1 helps narrow your ideas into a manageable scope. Without clear visual representations, communicating the foundational work behind your solutions often falls short. Stakeholders either see an overly optimistic path or a bleak one filled with obstacles. This step is crucial for achieving strong alignment and discovery in later stages.

As validated design comes to fruition, we then move and ask our product and design leaders to identify, from the user’s perspective, what could ship on its own.

As those definitions become clear, we then draft feature briefs for each component to aid in the subsequent co-creation steps. As the key communication tool in the workshop, the goal is to outline what can be prioritized in the roadmap, with key dependencies noted. See the example below.

This brief includes a visual representation of the component feature and documents the following:

• Functional Overview: A summary of the functional requirements powering the feature.
• Open Requirements & Outstanding Design Qs: A list of any edge cases or key requirements that have yet to be explored.
• Technical Considerations: A list of the technical implications this concept introduces.
• Business Considerations: A list of operational or organizational challenges that must be addressed to support this functionality.
• Dependencies: A list of prerequisite work that must be accomplished to power this experience.
• Insights: A summary of the UXR insights collected during the design process.

This set of high-level, PRD-like documentation, serves as one of the key resources for the broader team in the following co-creation step.

We are now ready to host a cross-functional co-creative workshop with the product leaders and stakeholders. We begin by introducing each feature brief, ensuring definitions are clear, considerations are captured, and dependencies are noted.

Next, we subdivide into cross-functional groups. Armed with the briefs, participants build their own ordered roadmaps. Each group is tasked with the following:

• Create as many stages as you would like.
• Work to populate each stage with the fewest number of features possible, ensuring to create a new unique value prop for consumers within each stage.
• Ensure your ordering respects the noted dependencies
• You may not subdivide a feature

Each group presents their individual roadmaps, sharing their logic and rationale to the broader groups — identifying patterns across the team. A final roadmap is then created as one entire group, negotiating around divergences along the way. Last, the outstanding questions and considerations that need to be addressed prior to development are pulled from all feature briefs, ordered based on the roadmap, and assigned owners.

When investing time in this tool, it is critical that you have an adoption plan for it. As stakeholders meet regularly, the first step in that process is to weave this tool into the start of as many meetings as possible, showcasing this plan with a marker of where you are. This will anchor the team in the joint decisions made and help foster meaningful conversation. What this will allow for is conversations to be anchored in the unique value prop of various roadmap stages as challenges or shifts come up.

From here, teams estimate each individual unit of work as the outstanding questions are resolved, adding further shape and timelines to your roadmap. This central document then serves as the negotiation and prioritization framework for delivery.

This is also the time in which we celebrate change and iteration publicly. As more information is discovered, and as continued product validation research occurs while incremental product ships, we learn and adjust. The roadmap changes but we have a framework to fall back on to ensure clarity and alignment across the organization.

The Result: Where we are seeing wins and what we have learned

As we have tried this method out within a few wildly different organizations, we are seeing early signs of success!

1. Our partners have noted that teams outside of the product have been relying on it as a communication tool or even requesting to go through the co-creation exercise together.
2. Stakeholder “pet” initiatives have been deprioritized in favor of higher-value items, thanks to better clarity on dependencies.
3. The written value props associated with each stage have served as a defensibility tool for some of our partners.

I am excited to see how the ongoing maintenance and long-term delivery impacts continue to be shaped by this model with adjustments and learners sure to come as this process continues to unfold.

Jack loves helping organizations make the most of the product roadmap through his work at Livefront .

• Jack Cunningham

  Director, Product Management

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