PRIORITIZING YOUR PRODUCT

ROADMAPA Step-by-Step Guide

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Why We Wrote This Guide

You can find plenty of white papers and eBooks discussing the many prioritization frameworks

to help your team build products. We, at ProductPlan, have written one ourselves: The Product

Manager’s Complete Guide to Prioritization.

The same is true for developing your first roadmap. Plenty of guides are out there that can help

you with this essential strategic step in the product development process. In fact, we’ve written

one of these, too: Building Your First Visual Product Roadmap.

But to our knowledge, there aren’t many step-by-step guides to walk you through the entire

process of applying your team’s strategic priorities to the roadmap you’re creating. That process

includes:

1. Breaking down your product vision into specific business goals

2. Weighing those priorities to determine which to address first

3. Translating the highest priorities into strategic steps on your roadmap

4. Gaining alignment with stakeholders to ensure everyone is working toward

the same goal

5. Staying on track with your prioritization plan, even as other needs

and issues come up

That’s what you’ll find here: a step-by-step walkthrough for prioritizing your

product roadmap.

Introduction

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Roadmap prioritization is a big challenge.What compelled us to write this guide were our own large-scale report results: ProductPlan’s

2021 State of Product Management report. That report, in which more than 2,000 product

professionals participated, revealed a clear need for more guidance on prioritizing roadmaps.

Just a couple of examples of the insights we learned:

25%

23%

18%

14%

10%

6%

5%

Getting consensus on product direction

Setting roadmap priorities without customer feedback

Planning and prioritizing initiatives

Working with other departments

Communicating product strategy

Managing the product backlog

Other

What is your biggest product management challenge?

22%

18%

17%

14%

13%

11%

5%

Prioritization skills

Communication skills

People management skills

Organizational skills

Technical skills

Design skills

Other

What skill do your product peers at your organization lack most?

Product professionals were telling us both that they found prioritization one of their biggest

challenges and that they found this skill most lacking among their peers.

We’re hoping that if you face a similar challenge in your role, you’ll find these suggestions and

best practices in this guide to be helpful.

How this guide worksTo walk you through each of the roadmap-prioritization steps above, we will follow a

hypothetical organization: A travel-industry SaaS company trying to come up with its next

software product. We’ll call the company GlobeTrotter.

Along the way, we’ll use screenshots from our product roadmap platform to illustrate

our points.

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STEP 1

Let’s assume GlobeTrotter’s team has established its broad vision for the new product:

To be the one-stop app for people to arrange their travel plans.

This is a long-term goal, one that will take years to achieve, if they can reach it at all. But a

roadmap is, by nature, incremental. It represents the organization’s strategic goals and plans

for a specific time—maybe six months or a year—or to reach a particular milestone in a

product’s development.

This is the first challenge a business faces in setting priorities for a new roadmap. The company

can’t include actionable steps for its entire vision on this early version of the product roadmap.

The team will first need to review its long-term plan for the product and translate that into

specific business or functional goals, which the team can then prioritize.

Turn Your Product Vision into Specific Goals

Product Vision

Product GoalsProduct Roadmap

Release Plan& Backlog

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GlobeTrotter’s product team translated the vision into a high-level goal:

To accomplish this first step, the team reviewed various possible business metrics for

their new product’s rollout. Some of the most common and useful metrics for a new product

include:

1. Revenue

2. Market share

3. Adoption

4. Churn

5. Customer Reviews

First business goal for the roadmap: User adoption rates

After some heated discussions, the team decided on user adoption rates as their top priority

business goal.

Even if the product were free to users at first and did not generate any revenue, the company

would be able to monetize a large user base later. This could be through charging directly

for the app over time or by allowing advertisers to target the app’s users. It could also be by

offering additional paid services in the app, even while keeping access to the app itself free.

The GlobeTrotter team could have chosen several business goals for their first iteration of the

product roadmap. In fact, the team was also very interested in focusing on churn rates (the

number of users who stop engaging with the product) monthly and customer reviews online.

But they decided to limit their early roadmap to a single measure of success: how many users

the app will attract and whether or not that rate goes up with time.

Let’s briefly review how they reached their decision.

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STEP 2

The GlobeTrotter product team conducted a thorough review of possible early-stage

success metrics, and they narrowed their list to three: adoption, churn rate, and online

customer reviews.

Then, they discussed each one’s value relative to the costs of tracking it, analyzing it, and using

it as a measurement of the product’s success.

As for online reviews, they determined that this would be a great source of early-adopter

feedback. The team decided they would devote some resources to monitoring reviews. But

they agreed that customer feedback would at best serve as a proxy metric.

The star ratings and online comments of enthusiastic users (or serial complainers) could

provide useful business intelligence and maybe even some good additional functionality ideas.

But it would not be the best way of learning whether or not the product was resonating with its

market. The true metric for this would be adoption rates.

They reached the same conclusion while evaluating the churn rate as a success metric. Yes, it

was essential to know if a significant percentage of new users were abandoning the product

each month. The team decided to pay attention to those trends.

The team also recognized that in the early stages after launching a travel-industry app, the

data might suggest a higher churn rate than was, in fact, the case. The average traveler will use

such an app only once in a while. If a consumer downloads GlobeTrotter’s new app, uses it to

manage an upcoming trip, and then does not engage with the app again for several months,

this would register as user churn. But in reality, that user might have every intention of coming

back to the app for their next trip.

Define Specific Business Goals for Your Product Vision

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Again, the team returned to their original thinking: Even if many users were cutting ties with

the app, the most important statistics for the product’s early stages were whether or not the

overall adoption rate was healthy and growing.

Now that they had their business priority for the new product—generating significant user

adoption—the team’s next step was to turn this objective into strategic steps for the

product roadmap.

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To achieve strong early user adoption for the first iteration of their product, the GlobeTrotter

team brainstormed possible features to develop.

The team wisely set several strategic criteria for this stage of planning:

• Focus on only one feature for rollout

• Choose a feature that can be developed relatively quickly and inexpensively

• Make sure the feature solves a real market need

• Make sure the feature allows the company to tell a compelling story quickly

• Remember: the goal is user adoption (not market share, not revenue, not profitability)

STEP 3

Translate Your Business Goals into Steps for the Roadmap

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Use weighted scoring to help with prioritization.

After gathering all of the proposed ideas for this single rollout feature, the team placed them

into the Planning Board within the ProductPlan roadmap app. This allowed the team to create

a consistent set of criteria—value to the business, cost of implementation, etc.—to objectively

measure all competing ideas’ pros and cons.

BENEFIT COST

Customer Business Increase Development Value Value Conversions Effort Risk Factor SCORE RANK

20 15 15 40 10 100

Lane 1 4 3 4 2 1 79 1

Lane 2 4 3 4 4 2 61 2

Lane 2 3 3 3 3 3 60 3

Lane 2 2 2 1 2 2 57 4

LANE

WEIGHT

After conducting this weighted-scoring exercise, the team had two feature ideas tied for

first place:

FEATURE IDEA:

Side-by-side comparison of travel prices

This feature would gather all available prices for a user in real-time—for example, all flights with

an identical itinerary—and present them side by side.

But when they reviewed this feature against their original criteria, the team realized it violated

several of those guidelines:

X Choose a feature that can be developed relatively quickly and inexpensively

This feature was going to require a great deal of development work. For example,

it would require building APIs into all of the travel industry’s key providers: airlines,

hotel chains, car rental companies, entertainment ticketing agencies, etc.

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X Make sure the feature solves a real market need

Upon reflection, the team also realized that many businesses offered real-time

pricing comparisons for travel services. Several of those companies’ apps were

excellent, in fact. This meant the team’s app was likely to become a me-too

product—and not fill a true market void.

FEATURE IDEA:

Email-driven itinerary-builder

This feature solved a real market need. Travelers have long complained about having all of

their travel confirmations in various emails and not having an easy way to view them all on a

single screen.

The idea behind this feature was to let users create a unique email address on the app and then

forward all of their confirmation notices—for their flight, hotel, car rental, etc.—to that address.

The app would then automatically create a single-view itinerary with all of the relevant details.

No more searching through emails for every detail of an upcoming trip.

And in terms of achieving the company’s main goal for the new product—driving user

adoption—this feature also had another advantage over the price-comparison idea. Checking

prices for plane tickets or hotels was something a user would do only a couple of times early in

a trip’s planning stages.

But a traveler might check this single-screen itinerary many times in the lead-up to a trip and

while on the trip itself. Moreover, because users would, in many cases, forward their itinerary to

colleagues or family members, this could increase adoption rates as well. More people would

discover this clever itinerary-building app as their relatives sent them their itineraries before

leaving for a business trip.

Now that they had their flagship feature for the first iteration of the product, the team’s

next order of business was to place that theme—and a series of epics that roll up to it—onto

the roadmap.

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Here was their first iteration of that set of strategic steps, which they dropped into their

ProductPlan roadmap platform.

Why go-to-market with just one feature? Before we move on to the next step, it’s worth reviewing why the GlobeTrotter product team

decided to launch its product with only a single feature. Their reasoning was simple: It allowed

them to release a product sooner. This, the team decided, created several advantages over

waiting until they had a more feature-rich product to release:

1. It would help them begin building their user base faster.

2. It would create more user feedback sooner, the feedback they could then use to

improve the product.

3. It would allow them to solve one real problem for their market right away,

instead of waiting to solve that problem until they had built a more full-featured

product that addressed other market needs.

The banking industry provides an excellent example of this strategy. The earliest iterations

of mobile apps for several major banks offered only a very few features—such as the ability to

check your account balance.

The app teams at these banks understood that pushing out some useful functionality for their

customers—functionality compelling enough to get these users to download their apps—was

better than waiting until they had more features before releasing anything. These early, simple

apps trained customers to interact with their bank via their mobile devices, provided valuable

usage data, and helped these banks stay top-of-mind with their customers.

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STEP 4

Another important component of prioritizing items on the roadmap is to include your strategic

thinking behind each item. This will help in two ways. First, it will allow your team to make a

more straightforward and more persuasive case when presenting the roadmap to stakeholders.

Second, it will give the team itself a reference point to keep themselves on track throughout

the development process. It is easier to make sure you are still working toward your strategic

objectives if you can easily remind yourself of your objectives.

So, the GlobeTrotter product team held meetings to share their roadmap with relevant

stakeholders: the development team, the executive staff, sales and marketing, and customer

success.

Share the Roadmap with Stakeholders to Gain Alignment

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For example, the team prepared for the executive meeting to show their strategic reasoning

behind the single feature they chose to launch. Because ProductPlan’s roadmap app allows

users to switch between varying levels of detail easily, the team can present a clean view of the

theme and epics to kick off the meeting.

When the discussion moved to the team’s strategic thinking, they popped open the theme and

each of the epics, which contained a summary of their reasoning for prioritization.

When the executives asked about the decision-making process and other possible features

they could have prioritized, the team could switch over to their prioritize flow quickly. That

allowed the executives to view side-by-side comparisons of several other feature ideas and

how the team measured each on a weighted-scoring basis.

When they met to share their roadmap with Customer Success, the product team had other

items to discuss. For example, they needed to know if the CS team’s mandate was to devote its

support resources to existing, paying customers. If so, the product team would need to discuss

how they could receive help managing the product launch. Would they need to outsource live

support to a third-party company? Or would the CS team help?

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During this meeting, the product team highlighted its strategic thinking behind the epic to

prepare Customer Success to support the launch. Specifically, they pointed out that the main

goal with the new product was to drive adoption—and part of that would require a support

team ready to help new users with questions.

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STEP 5

By this stage, GlobeTrotter had set out a clear set of strategic goals, prioritized development

steps, earned stakeholder buy-in, and built the first-generation version of its

itinerary-builder app.

The company then released the product to the market and began closely monitoring its user

adoption rates. The news was great: Adoption rates were high right out of the gate, and they

grew at a steady rate for several months in a row.

But at this point, the product team also had to deal with a whole new set of challenges that

they hadn’t faced before launching the product. For example:

• What to do with feedback and complaints from users?

• Where to prioritize bug fixes and other defects discovered either by users or the

in-house team?

• How to handle requests, suggestions, and ideas from internal stakeholders, such

as the executive staff or sales?

Once you’ve released a product into the market, the best-case scenario will be that you are

receiving a lot of feedback—even if much of that feedback is negative.

We’ll assume that the majority of GlobeTrotter’s early feedback was positive. But the challenge

remains: The product team had taken such a deliberate, strategic approach to setting priorities

for the roadmap. Now that the product is out there, the team is dealing with many new

potential priorities that could compete with its original plan.

Stick to Your Roadmap Priorities, Even as Other Issues Surface

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What’s the best strategy for incorporating all of these new ideas and requests into the

team’s already-busy product development schedule? There are several steps they can and

should take.

1. Continue to prioritize the original strategic plan.

The requests and suggestions coming in after the product has been launched can be

very informative. They can provide useful business intelligence the product team couldn’t

have derived without an actual product in actual users’ hands.

But unless those ideas and requests contradict the team’s original priorities for the

product, and the evidence is clear they should take precedence, the GlobeTrotter team

should stay on its strategic path. They should address these new suggestions when the

team has time.

2. Continuously revisit the roadmap to make sure the plan is still valid.

It is possible that the product team’s original plan for the product, or some aspect of

its first feature, missed the mark with the market. It’s also possible that early user

feedback can reveal this fact—and maybe even guide the team toward the right way

to course-correct.

For this reason, it’s important that GlobeTrotter’s team regularly review its product

roadmap. The team should study its early priorities, and make sure that plan still

represents the most strategically beneficial path forward. A roadmap is not a set-it-and-

forget-it plan. It needs to be continuously reevaluated in light of new realities—including

feedback from early adopters.

3. Build product updates, including addressing user requests into the roadmap plan itself.

Another strategy the team can implement is to set aside regular time and resources for

the inevitable updates, fixes, and enhancements. This will help the team keep the product

from accruing too many defects and too much technical debt.

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Additionally, suppose the team has already budgeted some development time regularly

to address customer requests. In that case, that will allow the team some flexibility in

adjusting its priorities when great ideas come in from the market.

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Conclusion

Prioritizing your roadmap is going to be a challenging undertaking, particularly for a new

product. You’ll be weighing many competing ideas, and working with imperfect information.

You’ll likely have fewer resources and time than you’d prefer. Yet, you’ll be held accountable

if the strategic decisions you make in developing your roadmap don’t translate into

product success.

You can mitigate many of these risks and build team alignment by following the steps we’ve

outlined in this guide. Taking a methodical, strategic approach to prioritizing your roadmap—

and obtaining stakeholder buy-in early in the process—is a great way to increase the chances

that the items you choose to prioritize on your product do lead to a product that finds a

ready market.

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