The Product

Roadmap Playbook:

Copyright © Productboard Inc. 2023 – All Rights Reserved

 Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Chapter 1

Best Practices for Building Efficient 


Roadmapping Processes 5

Chapter 2

Make Smarter, Data-Driven Prioritization Decisions 10

Chapter 3

How to Become a Master Roadmap Storyteller 15

2
Introduction
When the margins between product success and failure are so thin, it’s critical to have
a roadmap showing the tangible ways to success.

Product teams often struggle with creating a roadmap that aligns the business around
the product vision, and providing both the level of detail each function needs while
also staying connected to customer needs and business strategy. While effective
product roadmaps can take time to create, they also give stakeholders on different
teams the insights they need to position, sell, and expand the product.

What product teams are consistently doing WRONG

Too focused on hitting deadlines above all else, which can cause 

a lot of anxiety for the team
Build a roadmap once and then never look at it again or rarely
update it
Roadmaps are created and shared with static tools, like
spreadsheets and presentation software — resulting in stale data
and lack of trust from stakeholders
Roadmaps miss the why behind what the team is building and just
focus on features — which end up disconnected from the business
strategy and customer needs, with no clear goals

What high-performing product teams are doing RIGHT

Roadmaps are a product of collaboration and include the input of
many stakeholders and cross-functional teams
Roadmaps are always up-to-date, not one-time documents that are
outdated once you hit the save button — when these plans are up-
to-date, this builds trust between the stakeholders
Roadmaps reflect the outcomes the organization wants to achieve,
not simply outputs
Roadmaps support both customer needs and business strategy

3
To maximize your product team’s impact, it’s critical that you stop taking costly
detours–such as shipping features that your customers don’t even want–that lead
you away from your product vision.

Instead, you need to start building scalable roadmapping processes to help you
successfully – and swiftly – reach your ultimate product destination together with
the rest of the business.

4
Chapter 1

Best Practices

for Building Efficient

Roadmapping Processes
Understanding the fundamentals of effective product roadmapping will give you the
confidence you need to build products that drive results. 

5
There are 3 essential product roadmapping best practices that put outcomes in
full focus, and outputs in the rear view–which will help you create the strongest
roadmap possible.

Before diving into the best practices, take a moment to review the five levels of
roadmap proficiency–a rubric developed by Productboard to help you determine
where your roadmapping practices currently stand. Be honest with yourself about
which level most accurately describes your current practices, so you know where
your starting line is.

The five levels of roadmap proficiency

Level 1: Lack of understanding around the product roadmap leads others to question it

Level 2: Roadmap lacks clear objectives; long-term goals are private and undocumented

Level 3: Roadmap is shared, but focuses on outputs rather than outcomes

Level 4: Product roadmaps clearly communicate why some ideas are prioritized 

over others

Level 5: Everyone rallies around both the product strategy and roadmap

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Best Practice #1
Understand the “why” behind your roadmap
Once you’ve determined your roadmap proficiency level, ask yourself these questions up front:

Why do I need a roadmap in the first place?

What’s the best format?
How far in the future should it go?
Who has access?
Is it user-facing?
How will changes be communicated? And how often?
What criteria will we use to add something to the roadmap?
How does the roadmap clearly represent customer needs?
How does the roadmap clearly show it delivers on business strategy?

Every organization has unique priorities, so make sure you’re able to answer these questions
based on your business and customer needs.

Additionally, effective roadmaps should enable stakeholders to quickly understand how the
voice of the customer is influencing what the product team is working on. 

By leveraging customer-centric roadmaps–grounded in user feedback–product managers can

justify why certain features are being prioritized over others. This also enables product teams to
grow trusting relationships with stakeholders–and build confidence that the team is shipping
products that solve real customer problems.

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 Best Practice #2
Make sure your roadmap is OUTCOME
rather than OUTPUT-driven
Confidence in roadmaps is lower than it needs to be. According to a survey of over 1,000
product professionals, less than one third of respondents reported being confident that the
products and features on their roadmaps will deliver the desired business outcomes.

As you embark on your roadmap journey, one of the biggest fundamentals you need to keep in
mind is that all roadmaps should be outcome-driven rather than output-driven.

Outputs are the things we produce for a customer (like car seats for babies) while outcomes
are the impact our products have on our customers (like keeping kids safe in cars). Ideally, your
roadmap should effectively communicate both outcomes and outputs – so stop merely
focusing on “what” you need to build.

An outcome-driven roadmap focuses on the “why” instead of just the “what.” It provides clarity
to your stakeholders around where you are headed and what success looks like. An objectives
timeline roadmap is a great example of an outcome-driven roadmap because they are a great
way to communicate your product strategy and goals across teams. This will also help drive
organizational alignment around the product vision. 

BY OBJECTIVE

Product Hunt launch

With Productboard, you can organize each
feature by key business objectives–which also
provides transparency for other stakeholders
looking for information around what’s being
built and why. Focusing on outcomes not only
helps product managers prioritize which
features to build next, but also ensures the
organization as a whole stays focused on
achieving higher outcomes, rather than
becoming a feature factory.

"Focusing on the “why” in your roadmap instead of the “what”

communicates more clearly where you are headed, and what success
looks like. It also means your roadmap changes less often."

— Bruce McCarthy
Founder at Product Culture

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 Best Practice #3
Incorporate stakeholders into your
roadmap process
Cross-functional collaboration is one of the most important keys to product roadmap success -
so it’s important to collaborate with stakeholders early and often! It’s the ideal scenario when
all major stakeholders – including leadership, sales, marketing, and engineering – understand
exactly what is on the roadmap and why, and see how their previous feedback has been
accounted for.

C. Todd Lombardo, product leader and author, recommends that product managers have a lot
of one-on-ones.

“You build trust and rapport with each of these stakeholders because
you’re listening to them and you’re asking them why things are
important and how they’d think about it.”

— C. Todd Lombardo
Co-Author of Product Roadmaps Relaunched

While it takes more time, this will build trust with your stakeholders, help you better understand
what problems you can solve for them, and enhance team alignment.

Because buy-in from stakeholders is crucial, engaging them from the get-go can help you
uncover new insights, reduce risk, and increase your overall speed to execution.

Building Effective Roadmaps:

A
Check out the Product Survival Kit: A Product Survival Kit

C
The tactics you need to create effective

Building Effective Roadmaps 


product roadmaps that drive results.

to discover more modern

roadmapping best practices.

The ABCs of
7
Product
Management
Chapter 2

Make Smarter, Data-Driven

Prioritization Decisions
In order to prevent a risky investment in products that your customers might never
use, effective prioritization is key when it comes to building a roadmap. 

Implementing ruthless prioritization — a data-based mindset that will keep you

and your team aligned around a clear strategy and course of action — will keep
you oriented around impactful initiatives and showcase the way behind your
product decisions.

10
Prioritization Tip #1
Start with a clear vision
A clear vision orients your entire organization around where your product is headed and why.
Yet according to our 2022 Product Excellence Report, a whopping 48% of product
professionals report experiencing challenges with setting a clear product vision and strategy. 

To help you define a clear product vision,

consider the “3P” framework:
People — Who are the people that will become your customers?

Problems — What needs/problems are you going to solve for them?

Products — What products or services are you going to offer to satisfy their needs?

An effective product strategy needs to contain a clear vision, outcomes you want to

achieve, and the problems you want to solve for customers so that you can make the right
prioritization decisions.

Prioritization Tip #2
Integrate the voice of the customer
Richard Banfield wrote that “prioritization is personal,” meaning that different people in your
organization have their own product priorities. Unfortunately, you can’t always drop everything
to pursue a stakeholder’s latest and greatest idea. That’s why you must establish a streamlined
process for gathering and organizing customer feedback.

Here is a starting point for collecting user inputs:

Organize feature ideas in one place. A good product management system, like
Productboard, is a great source of truth for all incoming insights, feedback, and requests.
Productboard even allows you to view Insights Trends, so you can quickly analyze
customer feedback at scale

Require customer context and data to back up all incoming feature ideas. Data, fuelled
by customer insights, is key to product prioritization. So next time someone pushes an
idea, ask them for data that demonstrates why it’s a priority, and how it will address
critical customer needs.

Create a scalable culture of gathering insights. Folks across the organization must
develop a "product mindset" and understand the specific role they play in the product
development process. They must be trained to recognize good feedback and learn to
tease out important patterns.

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Prioritization Tip #3
Stop saying yes to everything
While saying “no” is hard, it is a crucial skill that must be mastered by every great product
manager. Making decisions based on the loudest (or highest-paid) person in the room, rather
than data, could lead to costly detours that don’t align with your product vision.

To get better at saying no, follow these 3 simple steps:

Understand why your stakeholders are making a feature request, then review the
data-backed reasons they’re requesting it.

See if it aligns with your product vision. If any of those steps raise red flags, say no and
be transparent with the stakeholder so they understand your decision.

Let your stakeholders know what’s being built instead and why.

“Some of the things we want to achieve in a roadmap–in addition to

saying here’s what we’re working on–is to be able to justify why we’re
working on those things.”

— Nils Davis
Author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook

Prioritization Tip #4
Don’t reinvent the wheel
As a product manager, your time is extremely valuable — and often limited. That's why we
suggest leveraging existing frameworks in your prioritization process, especially if you’re new to
product management.

The value vs. complexity quadrant, for

example, is a prioritization framework
that takes the form of a simple matrix.
This graph charts your feature ideas
based on how much value they deliver
vs. how complex they will be to build.

Another framework you can use is the RICE method, which helps turn subjective decisions into
objective, data-driven ones by assigning a score to each feature idea.

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With Productboard, you can prioritize in multiple ways – using segmentation, user impact scores,
product objectives, and more – so you can be confident that what you’re building next drives
real business outcomes, and standardize a prioritization process across all teams, so that
everyone is on the same page. 

Remember, there’s no such thing as the ‘best’ prioritization framework, and no framework is the
end-all-be-all. Instead, use it as a starting point for your prioritization conversations.

Prioritization Tip #5
Back your priorities with data
Regardless of what framework you end up choosing, you need to support all of your priorities
with data. 

Here is a starting point for collecting data:

Tap into customer feedback. Identify trends in your feedback and dig deeply into the
context. This is another thing that a good product management system can help you with

Surveys are a great way to gather data about feature ideas. You can survey your
customers, company stakeholders, your target audience, and more. Using a feedback
platform like SatisMeter–which integrates with Productboard–will allow you to keep a
pulse on customer satisfaction.

Fake door testing involves adding a button to your product that looks like a new feature.
When a user clicks on that button, they’ll get a message telling them it’s in development.
You want to track how many people click that button to gauge your users’ interest in that
particular feature.

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 Prioritization Tip #6

Work closely with your EPD counterparts

When you don’t have consistent prioritization discussions with your engineer and design
teams, you risk creating a world where your primary counterparts do not feel bought in on what
you decide to build.  

To ensure that you and your EPD colleagues feel like they are part of the process you need to
engage early in the prioritization process and ask them to help your prioritize.

Follow this quick 2-step model:

As a product team, you’ll first want to set up prioritization criteria (e.g. user
impact score, expansion potential of feature, acquisition potential of feature), as
well as weights (e.g. 20%, 60%, 20%)

Then, run an exercise with your engineering and design counterparts, where
each team determines the strength of each prioritization criteria on a scale from
1-5 for each feature in your backlog that relates back to your product strategy.

If you’re not already doing so, it’s important to have a recurring EPD meeting — to review
quarterly plans across all teams at the start of each quarter, then review progress mid-quarter.
This is not only a great way to facilitate prioritization discussions, but a great opportunity to
keep EPD aligned on what your team should be building next.

Roadmap Prioritization:

A
Get the Product Survival Kit: A Product Survival Kit

C
The tactics you need to build a product roadmap to success

Roadmap Prioritization 

and reduce the risk of prioritizing at your own peril.

to learn more essential

prioritization tactics.

The
The ABCs
ABCs ofof

Product
Product
Management
Management
Chapter 3

How to Become a Master

Roadmap Storyteller
Roadmaps can’t always speak for themselves, especially if you work cross-
functionally with teammates who don’t have an extensive product background.
A strong roadmap narrative is then exactly what you need – done right, it better
aligns your team, improves organizational efficiency, and reduces the risk of
overpromising and under-delivering features.

Stories are a perfect design tool because:

Everyone has the ability to create one

It’s easy to iterate on a story
They provide more clarity about what you’re trying to achieve

Follow these easy-to-follow steps to learn how to both strategize and craft
effective roadmap narratives for multiple audiences, and the do’s and don’ts of
roadmap storytelling from experienced product leaders and practitioners.

15
Step #1
Where to begin with roadmap storytelling
When you pair the visual impact of a roadmap with a strong narrative, it can be downright
magical. Visualizations build shared understanding while stories foster emotional connections,
and tailored stories take that power even further. 

So where do you start? We suggest:

Take cues from your product vision: everything on a roadmap should go

back to your company’s product vision, as the ultimate “why” for what you’re
building, when
Focus on impact and value: clearly define and communicate these when
you share your roadmap
Leverage personas and customer segments, to stay aligned around who you
are building for and why
Context is key: consider who your audience is and how much background
and technical information they need (or even want) when sharing a roadmap

To help get your audience excited about your idea, your story needs to include certain key
elements. Petra Wille, Author of STRONG Product People, suggests asking yourself the
following questions:

Have I painted a picture of a desirable future?

Is it clear why the listener should be part of this future?
Does the story acknowledge the current situation while describing the
potential difficulties that may arise and why it’s worth overcoming them?
Does it suggest a common goal, while providing enough clarity
on the next steps?

Next, you need to craft different versions of the story–so you can effectively deliver your
message, whatever the occasion:

Your elevator pitch should be no more than approximately 150

SHORT
words and take about 75 seconds to deliver.

This version can be about 900 words and take 6 minutes to deliver,
MEDIUM
but don’t assume you’ll have everyone’s full attention throughout.

You may have the room booked for an hour, but resist the
LONG
temptation to make your story longer than 18 minutes.

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Step #2
Understand how to tell the best roadmap story
Remember that as a product professional you have a deeper knowledge of the products and
features that you’re building that not everyone else has. Especially when working with cross-
functional teams, consider using simplistic terms instead of technical jargon and keep the
focus on the positive impact for customers. 

Be sure your roadmap story follows a narrative arc with a clear beginning that sets up
customer pain points, as well as an end that shows how planned products and features
solve these problems.

The narrative arc should outline what’s happening without getting too specific; consider a
“now, next, later” framing to avoid overpromising and under-delivering. Want a real-world
example? Check out Prospecta’s roadmap to telling a compelling product story. 

“The best innovation stories do a good job at giving specific

problems in the set up, and then solve for them in the solution.”

— David Riemer
UC Berkeley Haas School of Business’
Executive-in-Residence

17
Step #3
Learn from the experts with the dos and
don’ts of roadmap storytelling
Need a quick breakdown to get you started? Try these tips and tricks from experienced
product leaders and practitioners.

Do: Don’t:
Showcase your progress as well as Put specific dates on your roadmap
your plans

Focus on outcomes and business Have too many versions of your

impact roadmap floating around
Recognize the relationship between
timeline and accuracy Expect all stakeholders to receive the
Focus on the benefit to specific roadmap the same way
personas or customer segments

Tell a story that aligns with your Treat your roadmap like a to-do list
overall vision

“What would happen if a company didn’t have a product strategy or

roadmap? I think they would still deliver some features, but they would
never contribute to a higher goal. They would never go in the same
direction. It would be chaotic.”

— Adam Krbusek
Senior Product Manager at GoodData

18
 Step #4
Practice makes perfect
Becoming a great roadmap storyteller doesn’t happen overnight – your skills will
improve and evolve over time and with practice. Here are a few ways to continue to
build your storytelling skills:

1. Practice in a low-stakes setting:

You don’t have to start with the boardroom or your biggest customer. Start with smaller
audiences who can offer constructive feedback.

2. Gather feedback and iterate:

Parts of your roadmap story that seemed clear to you might not have come across that way to
a particular audience. Incorporate that feedback into the next version of your roadmap story!

3. Go retro (when it makes sense to do so):

Hold a retrospective to gather formal feedback from important stakeholders once you do
share with them, to ensure your roadmap aligns with your product vision when it really counts.

It doesn’t matter if your roadmap is for a feature at your startup or a new product at your more
established company, the principles for great product storytelling are broadly the same. Use the
principles above to up-level your roadmap storytelling and make products that matter.

“Telling great stories about a product creates evangelists: people who

believe in your idea or product and promote its value to others.”

— Petra Wille
Author of STRONG Product People

Roadmap Storytelling:
A
Check out the Product Survival Kit: A Product Survival Kit

C
Bring your product vision to life by telling

Roadmap Storytelling to learn

the best roadmap story possible.

more tips for crafting a stronger You have Arrived

at an Excellent
roadmap narrative. Roadmap

The ABCs of
12
Product
Management
 Start a free trial

of Productboard to start scaling

your roadmapping process today!

20
Productboard is the customer-centric product management platform that helps organizations
get the right products to market, faster. Over 6,000 companies, including Toyota, Microsoft, Zoom,
1-800-Contacts, and UiPath, use Productboard to understand what customers need, prioritize
what to build next, and align everyone around their roadmap. With offices in San Francisco,
Prague, and Vancouver, Productboard is backed by leading investors like Dragoneer Investment
Group, Tiger Global Management, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer
Venture Partners, and Credo Ventures. Learn more at www.productboard.com.

For more information, visit www.productboard.com.

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