7 Product Roadmap Examples to Inspire Your Team

7 Product Roadmap Examples to Inspire Your Team

Public product roadmaps help organizations be transparent with their customers, and share plans for upcoming releases. They can act as a valuable conversation tool with customers that also builds trust. That’s why a lot of industry leaders like Intel, Microsoft, Google (who have multiple roadmaps for their varied products) and others have made their roadmap public.

What is a public product roadmap?

A public product roadmap outlines the direction of a product, and works towards its vision and priorities. It outlines the plan to achieve the goals of the organization, the strategy to reach those goals, and timelines to release changes to the product. Product roadmap examples generally include the following, in no particular order:

• Goals for the quarter
• Responsibilities for goals
• Defining ways to measure success
• The plans for product
• Customer needs and market trends

A business roadmap example shows what new features and ideas customers might expect, and aligns them with its short-term and long-term goals of the product.

The need for a product roadmap

A public product roadmap is, in essence, a chronicle of the product – past, present and future. They allow teams and stakeholders to make critical decisions, as they can see what’s been done and what is tabled for the future and provide feedback opportunities. In the long term, having a public product roadmap creates a transparent workspace.

Features of a product roadmap 

A good product roadmap balances development priorities against business goals, and can be created in many different ways – be it Trello, a public roadmap tool like Roadmap Portal, or a customized solution. While the structures differ, roadmaps in general should facilitate the following:

• Simple design that is visually appealing and easy to read. The language should be easy enough for all stakeholders to understand its contents. The fine line between too much information that overwhelms stakeholders and too little information that makes roadmaps intimidating to read, should be threaded by the product manager.
• Enhanced user experience allows customers to navigate the product easily and understand the features better. Information that is presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner will get users to interact more with the roadmap.
• Relevant information at a high-level, gives stakeholders an opportunity to give informed feedback instead of generalized ones. Features can be easily prioritized so that customers get interested in the future developments of the product.
• Communication between all stakeholders helps customers voice their opinion, and enables product teams to prioritize based on the direction of the product. Roadmaps centralize all feedback and features in one place, so that product managers can easily listen to the customer feedback and list them in the order of importance, so that the products can be better.

7 Product Roadmap Examples

As mentioned before, roadmaps can assume many different flavors – from simple scrum boards to detailed videos, they can be represented in any style. The language used can also vary vastly, based on the importance of the updates to come. Here are a few product roadmap examples that work well: 

1. Buffer

Buffer’s product roadmap gives a clear view of what the stakeholders are working on. It also lists the features that are under development and what are the expected features that will be approached later. The behind the scenes look comprises four lanes – Exploring, In progress, Done and Leaving it for now.

Highlight: ‘Leaving it for now’ section also provides details about the features that did not make the cut. The effort put in shows that the team has looked at the issue from all angles before deciding not to pursue it.

2. Front

Front’s Roadmap allows users to find what has been shipped recently, what are the features that are currently being worked on, and what to expect next. The feedback mechanism makes it easy for their users to voice their opinions and vote for the features they want implemented.

Highlight: Dividing the updates based on Quarters, allows for easy navigation across different tabs.

3. Github

Github’s roadmap gives how far each item is from seeing the sunlight, neatly arranged on a project board. Products and features are added to a project board column, based on the features expected to ship in the next quarter.

Highlight: Github’s roadmap repository denotes existing issues as read-only, on which users can add their comments. and conversations get locked after a decision is taken.

4. Slack

Slack’s platform product roadmap aims to be transparent. The items in the roadmap are divided into near-term, mid-term, long term and released – each section aiming towards clarity of the platform’s goals.

Highlight: Items in individual lists are not ordered by recency buy the number of interactions/votes it has, keeping the most important issues on top instead of the most recent ones.

5. Monzo

Monzo’s publicly shared product roadmap supports and sustains a feedback loop that keeps users engaged and ready to comment. Their responsiveness leads to customer endorsements for new users, and their authenticity keeps them apart.

Highlight: ‘Priorities’ section goes into detail about why the feature is given importance, and constant feedback replies keep customer needs in mind.

6. Attendify

To make events more engaging, measurable, and meaningful for everyone – Attendify tries to unlock the immense, untapped potential of event data. Their public product roadmap contains three major sections that show feature development in three distinct cyclesis guided by a single focus on unlocking the value of event engagement.

Highlight: The short descriptions of the 3 stages (research, design, development) gives users an idea of what to expect; the company is straightforward in mentioning the percentage of features requested and executed in each stage.

7. Google workspace

Google Workspace uses a simple tabular structure that appears inadequate for a detailed product roadmap, but the interface has a very good filtering mechanism that makes reaching the details of the feature very easy. The ‘Product’ column is arranged alphabetically by default, but users can change the appearance based on their needs.

Highlight: The simple column structure provides important details – the product that is being affected, description of the feature that is being modified, and the status.

Creating an effective roadmap, on the go

Building a public roadmap that is as impressive as the ones mentioned above can be a matter of a few clicks, with Roadmap Portal. A Jira-native app that creates roadmaps on the go, Roadmap Portal also simplifies customer feedback management. It helps you gather votes & comments from stakeholders, so that you can prioritize feature introduction in a meaningful way. It offers flexible configurations like adding tabs on the roadmap, creating columns within the tabs, and so on. With Roadmap Portal, you can get started on creating an effective roadmap in a matter of hours, and publish a public roadmap in just a few minutes. The robust Jira service helpdesk and the power of JQL work together to make the roadmap board dynamic, and provide a centralized view of the process.

Making the most of public roadmaps

A public roadmap builds customer confidence, interdepartmental transparency, better work- relationships, and loyalty. By publicly sharing progress, organizations can be more customer-centric by consolidating feedback across different platforms. By prioritizing requests with a product roadmap, teams can close the feedback loop and get into the next improvement iteration.