This product roadmap template helps you lead with a clear strategy and dynamically fine-tune the details during the product development journey. Here’s how:

• Plan and prioritize product initiatives.
• Track progress by feature, quarter, team, strategic theme, and more.
• Share updates with stakeholders and provide direction to team members.

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap translates your top-level vision, goals, and strategic objectives into product initiatives and scoped tasks with target launch dates. Product roadmaps help teams and their stakeholders align on the direction of product development and track progress of the features and updates in the pipeline.

Who is this product roadmap template for?

This product roadmap template is designed to help product managers and leadership map out and document all product initiatives in one place. It can also be used to align various stakeholders across an organization, including executive leadership, engineering, design, marketing, sales, and customer success.

How do I build a product roadmap?

1. Define your product vision and strategy

Your product strategy should underpin each of your product initiatives or features. Before adding a new initiative onto the roadmap, answer these questions: What is your product trying to achieve, and why? What pain points or customer needs are you solving for? How does this differentiate you from competitors? And how does it all ladder up to your business goals?

Using task forms, you can add these questions into a “task template” for any new initiatives you include on the roadmap to capture these details in the description from the get-go.

2. Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders and teams

Product development is a team sport. The input of your stakeholders, customers, and team members is integral to your roadmap—not only at the development stage but also later when marketing, sales, and customer success teams communicate with your customers about your product.

Cross-post Slack comments into the in-task chat to centralize the discussions you have with your stakeholders about which initiatives should be on the roadmap and have a clear decision log that you can reference in the future. And using group mentions, you can notify entire teams like @sales or @design about updates to the roadmap that impact them right away.

3. Prioritize requirements

Deciding which features to invest your time and energy on developing is half the battle when you’re creating a product roadmap. To see your priorities at a glance, you can group your product initiatives by a time milestone (e.g. Q2), specific strategic theme (e.g. improve our onboarding experience), or business goal (e.g. boost retention rate by 10%).

Custom attributes like ‘Priority’ and ‘Effort’ help you weigh each initiative on the scale and focus on the ones that deliver the biggest benefit to your customer and value to your business. You can use filters to look at high-priority initiatives only or to exclude initiatives marked as ‘Won’t do’ to take the noise out of your roadmap and keep it organized.

4. Create a timeline

A good product roadmap has clear milestone estimates, and is also flexible to shifts and changes. Set ETAs for your initiatives and their target launch dates.

Attributes such as ‘Blocked by’ and ‘Blocking’ help you visualize dependencies that may impact your timelines and communicate them early on with your stakeholders. You can always adjust launch dates and re-prioritize what’s shipping when on-the-fly to keep your team in the loop and focused on what matters.

5. Assign clear owners

While roadmaps are high-level overviews of your big goals, setting clear expectations and owners who’re responsible for achieving them keeps your team aligned and on track.

You can assign an initiative to more than one owner if it’s a cross-functional project. With infinite subtask nesting, teams can drill down into the details of each initiative and set distinct subtask assignees. And any initiative or subtask can live on concurrent lists like #roadmap, #design, and #feature-AI, so everyone on the team can view work from the angle they need.

What are the key elements to include on a good product roadmap?

You can create custom attributes for any components you’d like to include on your roadmap. Here are 10 core elements to get started:

1. Strategic theme: High-level business or product goal that overarches multiple initiatives.
2. Feature description: Overview of the new or improved functionality and how it delivers value to users.
3. Product requirements: Specifications for the expected and desired capabilities that must be included in the product.
4. Team roles & responsibilities: Who’s handling which tasks, and what’s expected of them.
5. Timeline estimates: Target dates for finishing each stage, laddering up to an approximate release date.
6. Effort: Rough estimate of the resources and team capacity needed to build this feature.
7. Status: Which stage the initiative is at (e.g. In progress, In review, On hold, Done, etc).
8. Progress tracker: How far along you are in developing and releasing the feature.
9. Dependencies: Related projects or tasks that may hold up your progress.
10. Metrics: How you’ll know you’ve met your goal (e.g. acquire 100 new customer, improve UX of time tracking feature).

There are various types of product roadmaps you could create, depending on who you’re sharing the information with and the level of detail they require. In Height, you can switch between different views, or even create companion smart lists that display only certain elements of your roadmap, while keeping your primary, fully-detailed roadmap intact. This can be helpful when sharing a customer-facing roadmap with sales or customer success teams, for example.