05/22/2022 Product Roadmap Flow Example

Product roadmaps are a statement of a product vision and strategy, and the prioritized list of features that will be delivered to achieve that vision. A product roadmap is a document that is shared with the entire product team and stakeholders, or customers, and it should be updated on a regular basis.

Should you publish your product roadmap?

It’s more a question of what type of roadmap you need to maintain - and not should you maintain it. You definitely should.

Internal Roadmaps

Internal product roadmaps help team stay in sync by providing a clear and concise view of the product development process. By outlining the development process and timeline, internal product roadmaps keep everyone on the same page and ensure that everyone is aware of the current status of the product. This helps to avoid confusion and delays, and keeps the team focused on the ultimate goal.

Teams benefiting the most are actually sales teams. Once they see the clear roadmap, they can build a predictable machine and close deals that are dependent on certain features in development.

Public Roadmaps

These are a huge deal breaker. Trust us! Once you start publishing public roadmaps, you give customers a glimpse into the future of your product.

We’ve seen a lot of cases where number of support tickets went drastically down. People love to ask what’s the state of the feature they’ve requested. When customers see that their feedback is being taken into account and that the company is transparent about its plans, they are more likely to be satisfied with the product as well.

That’s cool, but how to I create the roadmap and sync it with customer feedback?

If the number of your customers is small enough, you can get by creating a simple roadmap in the Google Sheets and sharing it with your audience - read only of course!

Here is the example:

Your customer feedback form can be created simply by using Google Forms, Typeform or SurveyMonkey.

This process would look like this:

1. Send the form link to your customers to collect feedback
2. Receive it, check with your team how to position it in the roadmap
3. Update your Google sheets roadmap and share the link with the same customers again
4. If you want to make it public, just expose the link in your navigation!

Some companies have produced insanely good roadmaps with this approach.

That’s a lot of work! Is there something to make it faster and produce the same (or better) results?

Cons with solution above are obvious. It is hard and time consuming to do these things manually - especially today when roadmap is supposed to be just one out of million things to do.

While you are dependent only on Google Sheets and Google Form, the process is manual and it’s really hard to keep it up over long period of time.

The main power of our tool is the fact that the feedback from your customers, upcoming features, announcements, and roadmaps all live in the same place - Product Hoop. It’s easy to inform your customers and team about the upcoming changes, publish roadmap, authenticate guests (and actually associate new features with them).