What’s more intense than planning a trip to Disney?
Building a product roadmap is a lot like planning a day at a theme park. You think through your strategy and get your crew on board. You create a precise plan: Grab churros before the parade (dependencies), decide which rides go on first (priorities), and time your fireworks viewing perfectly (feature launch).
Just like at the park, product teams need to stay flexible. If it starts to rain (stakeholder approvals get delayed), you can quickly pivot to keep everything moving forward. With the right product roadmap, you’ll keep everyone aligned, energized, and ready to adapt.
Key highlights
- Roadmaps improve prioritization, communication, and team alignment, helping everyone understand what’s next and why.
- Creating a roadmap involves five key steps, from defining your vision and aligning with business goals to identifying features, prioritizing impact, and regularly updating.
- Best practices include staying flexible, using visual elements, and choosing collaborative tools to keep roadmaps dynamic and stakeholder-friendly.
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a single source of truth that visualizes the direction and priorities for a product over time. It helps teams align efforts, activities, and progress toward achieving product goals, connecting your big-picture vision to concrete steps over weeks, months, or years.
Your product roadmap will help your team prioritize work, rally around shared goals, and communicate clearly with stakeholders. It’s both your north star and an action plan. Whether you’re working with an agile product roadmap or a more traditional approach, this process requires clear thinking and adaptability.
Related: The 5 Steps to Creating a Resilient Product Roadmap
What is the purpose of a product roadmap?
The purpose of a product roadmap is to align teams around your product’s strategic direction. Abstract goals become actionable steps, so everyone, from engineers to executives, understands what’s next and why.
Ryan Nee is the Product Manager and Principal Designer for Templates at Mural. He says roadmaps help him visualize something that otherwise would only be in his head.
“When you view a project or task in isolation, it's easy to think: This seems important; we should do this now. When you turn all of those ideas and tasks into physical objects that you move around on a timeline, your priorities become much more clear.”
He explains that product roadmaps help you decide what to do now or later in terms of tasks’ relative importance to each other. Ryan says it’s especially useful when there are task dependencies, because you can plan how they can get done over time.
Who uses product roadmapping?
Product roadmapping isn’t limited to product managers. Here are some core teams that rely on product roadmapping:
- Product management: Owns and updates the product development roadmap
- Design and UX: Plans research and design initiatives in sync with the roadmap
- Engineering: Uses the roadmap to organize delivery and track progress
- Marketing and sales: Times campaigns and messaging with upcoming launches
- Customer Success and support: Prepares for changes and new features
- Executives and leadership: Ensures alignment with overall business goals
Bringing your go-to-market team together around a shared product roadmap creates alignment and increases transparency, an important habit especially for remote or hybrid teams.
Benefits of a product roadmap
I was surprised to read 60% of businesses don’t have a plan to improve their product management process. A product management process gives you structure; a product roadmap brings that structure to life. Without a process, teams lack direction. Without a roadmap, teams lack focus. Together, they help you prioritize, align, and deliver real results. Here’s how a product roadmap makes the difference:
Clear direction
A product roadmap shows your team exactly what’s coming up, and why each step matters. It connects the strategy to day-to-day work so everyone understands the bigger picture. To add clarity to your roadmap, link each item back to a business goal or OKR. Share updates in your main team channel, like Slack or Teams, whenever things change.
Easier prioritization
Roadmaps help you prioritize by focusing on what brings the most value to customers and makes the best use of your resources. Turn decision-making into a structured, intentional process with a prioritization matrix template. Note scores on your product roadmap items, and hold regular meetings to keep your priorities up to date.
Improved communication
Fourty percent of surveyed product managers say stakeholders are their primary audience for roadmaps. A visual roadmap makes it easy to share milestones and progress with leaders and other stakeholders. Everyone can see where things stand when you mark each item’s status clearly and encourage others to leave comments.
Aligned teams
When all teams follows the same product roadmap, everyone moves together toward shared goals. Hold quarterly check-ins with your core teams to identify dependencies and adjust as needed.
How to create a product roadmap in Mural in 5 steps
Building a product roadmap can be broken down into five manageable steps, whether you’re launching a new product roadmap or refining an existing one. Here’s how Ryan starts his product roadmap planning: with the one quarter roadmap or one year roadmap template. From there, he makes adjustments:
“I add categories for the different types of work my team does in each row: strategy, design, engineering, content creation, product launches, etc.
Sometimes I add an extra row in a lighter shade of the same color for secondary work. Like in the Engineering row, I added “bug fixes and upgrading our behind-the-scenes architecture”. That helps me remember the smaller ‘must dos’ along the way.”
1. Define your product vision and goals
Start with a clear vision and specific goals. This step is foundational for both agile product roadmap creation and traditional product roadmap planning.
Run a kickoff meeting with stakeholders to co-create your vision and goals. Start with a vision statement to clarify your product’s purpose and who it serves. Next, break down your vision into SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Keep everything, including vision, goals, and key metrics, in one mural so it’s accessible to stakeholders, for an aligned team from day one.
Related: How to create a meaningful product vision
2. Align product roadmap planning with business objectives
Make sure your product roadmaps are closely aligned with broader business goals. If you’re following an agile framework, your product roadmap should remain flexible as priorities evolve. Double-check your product strategy and company goals quarterly to keep them aligned, setting up regular check-ins with leaders to confirm priorities. A stakeholder interview template can help you lead a structured conversation.
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3. Identify key initiatives and features
Decide which features or improvements will help you achieve your goals. Run workshops with your team to brainstorm, prioritize, and group key initiatives before adding them to the roadmap. Try Mural’s Voting feature for your team to vote on high-impact features, so everyone’s input is considered.
4. Prioritize based on business impact
Ryan uses a prioritization matrix to identify which initiatives are likely to drive the most business value.
“Generally, I try to keep the team focused on parts of the product that affect a lot of people or that have a high frequency of use. If something will be rarely used by few people, it might not be important enough to do, even if it's a good idea.”
To better understand internal stakeholders, Ryan recommends the What’s On Your Radar template. He says it’s fantastic for getting people to share their opinions about a given topic or project.
“When you have stakeholders thinking in different directions, they can hear each other's points of view with a radar. It's handy to see what's at the center of each person's radar versus on the periphery, so you can gut-check against your roadmap.”
Ryan encourages you to ask yourself: Does my roadmap take into account the things that key stakeholders believe are the most important? Why or why not? Do I need to make any adjustments? Learn more about someone's perspective? Try to make a persuasive argument? Use these reflective questions to determine which initiatives are most pressing for your stakeholders.
5. Share, iterate, and update regularly
More than 50% of large product teams say keeping roadmaps standardized is a major challenge, according to ProductPlan. Constant maintenance and management is your final step, as a product roadmap should never be static. Use collaborative product roadmap tools to share updates and gather feedback in real time, ensuring your plan keeps pace with the team’s needs.
Examples of product roadmaps
Looking for inspiration? Here are two additional product roadmap examples made with Mural:
Feature development roadmap
This is a straightforward example of a product roadmap that tracks key deliverables, timelines, and milestones. Each quarter and month is listed across the top, and project categories are on the left.
Customer-centric roadmap
This example is used by a customer success manager (CSM). It’s a snapshot of the product roadmap, and allows the CSM to place customer priorities at the forefront, and highlights upcoming product features. Interactive features in Mural like stickies, commenting, and drawing make it easy for stakeholders to provide real-time feedback.
Product roadmap best practices
A product roadmap guides your team and helps you execute your strategy. But to be effective, your team needs to:
- Stay flexible. Build adaptability into your product roadmap so you’re ready to react as markets shift or customer needs change. This means regularly revisiting and updating your roadmap as new information emerges.
- Be visual. A visual product roadmap makes complex plans easy to understand at a glance. Use color-coding for priorities, timelines, or dependencies, and use icons and symbols for different workstreams. This helps every stakeholder quickly grasp what’s happening and what’s coming next at a glance.
- Pick the right tools. Effective product roadmapping relies on intuitive product roadmap tools that support transparency and teamwork. Use Mural for your roadmap design and real-time collaboration, so your discussions and updates are engaging.
Related: How to align and engage your distributed product team with Mural
Design your product roadmap with Mural
Building a product roadmap is far easier with visual collaboration tools. Mural empowers you to create product roadmaps to foster collaboration and alignment, regardless of your team’s location or work style.
Chat with our sales team to discover how to take your product roadmap document from a static file to an ever-evolving, interactive canvas.
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