Maintaining a Product Roadmap

Name: Maintaining a Product Roadmap
Author: Sean Timiney

Learn how keep your product roadmap relevant through regular maintenance

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 7 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

(electronic music) Welcome to Maintaining a Product Roadmap. In these lessons, you'll learn how to ensure your roadmap doesn't get forgotten or misused by working towards constant awareness. You'll also know how to conduct regular meetings with the appropriate team members and supervisors. Through these lessons, with the right tools, you'll be able to design a successful roadmap. Once your roadmap has been created, it is suggested that you define a procedure for regularly reviewing and revising the roadmap, particularly with your stakeholders. This will increase the likelihood that they'll support it. Here's what is generally considered the best cadence for maintaining a product roadmap. Annually. Review your product and corporate strategy once a year to make sure your roadmaps are current and continue to be the strategy for the organization. Monthly. Look over your roadmap every month with key stakeholders. Some suggestions to look at are metrics or KPIs that are being used to measure the achievement of your strategy and roadmap. If you are using KPIs, it's best if they are a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics. For example, you can include adoption, revenue, customer satisfaction, hitting release dates, engagement, and costs. Using this meeting time to ensure that stakeholders are supporting and investing in the product roadmap can help it excel. If they're not, it's best to document it. It is a best practice to formalize these meetings and maintain notes about attendance and discussions. Weekly. For your weekly roadmap meetings, you can meet with your product development leader and the development team. Checking to ensure that your organization is continuing to take the steps necessary to achieve the roadmap is beneficial here. It's also best to make sure your development plans are aligned with the roadmap. If they're not, corrections or escalating the problems to stakeholders may be necessary because your roadmap may no longer be correct or the development plan needs to be modified. Daily. Consider having daily meetings as well. Input from scrum meetings and utilizing it to create a backlog of items for the product roadmap can be useful. The attendees at these scrum meetings are generally the people doing the development work. The roadmap can help you prioritize daily development decisions. This can be as simple as using language from the roadmap while making requests. It also doesn't need to be a formal review of the roadmap. While it could seem tedious to discuss the roadmap on a weekly basis, it is beneficial to keep it front and center as a guiding document for the products you're producing. The document is best reviewed weekly with the development staff, along with a monthly formal meeting with the stakeholders to solicit their input and incorporate changes. After your organization has invested in the development of a product roadmap, it's suggested to diligently update and maintain it. If you don't, your products can drift away from the vision, and you might not achieve your goals.

Intermediate Provider : Sean Timiney 7 Lessons · 21m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

Learning how you can maintain your product roadmap will be core to your success as a product manager. KnowledgeCity’s Maintaining a Product Roadmap course lays out the key aspects of how to keep your roadmap relevant through constant updates via a structured process, which includes reviewing and revising with key stakeholders.

You’ll learn how to make sure your roadmap doesn’t get looked over by maintaining regular awareness. You will learn about how to promote your roadmap and keep it at the forefront of discussions in development meetings with the appropriate parties and what to address at relevant times throughout the course of the year. You’ll be given tips to overcome challenges you may come across in these meetings, as well the best practices to follow to avoid any difficulties you may run into. Lastly, you’ll be given examples and templates to help teach you the best practices to build effective product roadmaps.

What You'll Learn

Promote your product roadmap and build support for it within development meetings
Understand the importance of updating and maintaining your product roadmap through constant updates
Discover the processes needed to support and keep your roadmap relevant
Use tools, templates, and best practices to create, manage, and use a product roadmap
Review and revise the roadmap with key stakeholders
Overcome common challenges encountered in roadmap meetings

Key Takeaways

Maintaining a product roadmap is core to success as a product manager and requires keeping it relevant through a structured process of constant updates.
Reviewing and revising the roadmap with key stakeholders keeps it accurate and useful.
Regular awareness and promotion keep the roadmap at the forefront of development meeting discussions with the appropriate parties.
The course provides tips to overcome challenges in meetings along with best practices to avoid difficulties.
Examples and templates are provided to teach best practices for building effective product roadmaps.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is this course for?

It is designed for product managers, since maintaining a product roadmap is described as core to success as a product manager.

What does this course cover?

It covers reviewing and revising the roadmap, promoting a product roadmap, considerations, templates and tools, challenges, and best practices, ending with a Test Your Knowledge lesson.

What skills will I gain?

You will learn to promote and build support for your roadmap, understand the importance of updating and maintaining it, discover the processes needed to support it, and use tools, templates, and best practices to create, manage, and use a product roadmap.

Does the course provide practical resources?

Yes, it provides examples and templates to help teach the best practices for building effective product roadmaps.

Does the course address difficulties in roadmap meetings?

Yes, it gives tips to overcome challenges you may come across in these meetings, along with best practices to avoid difficulties.