Product Roadmap is one of the marketing concepts that shouldn’t be underrated. It’s not just a simple list of features, it’s an effective tool for organizing your product marketing activities and making sure you deliver the highest customer satisfaction. But there are numerous challenges in creating a Product Roadmap. To help you get started, here are some tips to create an awesome roadmap.
Who needs this?
Marketing professionals who want to build effective strategy by aligning their teams around common objectives
- Project managers who need to set priorities
- Sales people looking for ways to increase sales opportunities
- Anyone interested in learning how planning could be improved with better communication between different departments within a company
- Most importantly entrepreneurs & startup founders looking at what should be next on their roadmap to make a big splash
1. Use a tool that is easy to use and understand
The product roadmap should be easily understood by everyone in the team. Complex tools may not be appreciated by your team members who manage the day-to-day activities of their own departments. Tools like Aha! can help you create visual roadmaps which are easy to understand by everyone, while enabling collaboration & effective communication within your organization.
2. Prioritize Your List of Features One of the biggest challenges in creating any plan is prioritizing what needs to be done first, second, third, etc., Not just between various plans for future releases but even on ongoing projects you need to track where each stands based on priority & timeline. If you’re managing a team, it’s also your job to ensure these various projects & features are being given appropriate attention by the developers who will be working on them. Tools like Aha! that provide visual roadmaps of planned product releases can help you keep everyone in sync with what is being worked on at any given time.
3. Plan Your Future One of the most important uses for a product roadmap is planning & prioritizing future releases of your product. Product managers will need to determine when new features or products might be released based on development resources, budget cycles and other factors. When creating a release plan for your next year, quarter, month or even week – it’ll be easier if you have a visual representation of how things fit together.
4. Prioritize Projects Everyone loves the idea of new features, but not everybody needs them right away. A product roadmap can help you prioritize your projects based on business value and customer feedback. Add an additional level of detail by segmenting customers into categories like “power users”, “long term partners” or “new customers”.
5. Align With Sales When it comes to selling new products, marketers are typically speaking to their prospects first. We all know that this rarely leads to closed deals because sales teams need some context about why new high-value features would make their lives easier (or harder). By communicating new releases via a visual roadmap (maybe even one that’s public), you can give salespeople the information they need to influence key accounts. At the same time, you’ve given prospects signals that your company listens to them and is ready for business when they are.
6. Gain a Competitive Advantage One of the best ways to gain a competitive advantage is to deliver value effortlessly. That’s because ease of use can be incredibly powerful when it comes to getting your users hooked on your software . By building product roadmaps, marketers can foster collaboration between teams and accelerate company growth by accelerating product adoption.
7. Improve Engagement While most companies realize that cross-functional collaboration is important for hitting business goals, not all “big” ideas come from executive boards or core teams . Product roadmaps ensure that marketing teams are including more voices in key discussions about messaging, positioning and pricing — which means every team member has the power and opportunity to give feedback and share their own creative sparks with others across the organization. 8. Enable a Data-Driven Culture When ideas are shared across the company, roadmaps become an invaluable source of intelligence. Instead of building insights from anecdotal customer behavior or isolated focus groups, product managers can now conduct surveys and analysis on large populations to understand what features resonate most with users and why . This not only enables your team to make smarter investments in future projects—it also helps you better support your customers (and hopefully improve upon that one thing they wish your product could do). 9. Gain Visibility into Customer Experience
The ability to prioritize initiatives by their impact on the customer experience is crucial for any successful business. Bottom line results like revenue growth can’t be achieved if you don’t ensure that every user’s interaction with your brand leaves them feeling satisfied and confident in continued engagement. It also lets you identify opportunities to delight customers—it’s much easier to keep a customer than it is to win over a new one, after all.
How we do it: Mixpanel gives you the insights into your data that can be hard to see when looking at numbers alone. With features like funnels and event trails, among others , you’ll get access to actionable metrics that help you better understand how users engage with your product .
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