One of the key responsibilities of a Product Manager is communication.  Not only being the voice of the customer within the business but helping shape the overall solution from the product to the wrap around services.  Product Managers also need to be able to communicate to the market on behalf of the company as to the direction the Product is travelling in.

One tool for doing this is the Product Roadmap; traditionally this has been a high level visual representation outlining all the features that you want to deliver and by when. Your confidence levels were dependent on how close in time the release was, which meant any features due in 1-2 years time did not inspire the same confidence.

Here are a couple of suggested ways to build your Roadmap and give you and your customers more confidence:

1. Focus on objectives – An alternative way of communicating a roadmap is rather than focusing on features, set out the objective of what the features you are delivering are going to meet, along with how you are going to measure these objectives. This is a good way to communicate to your customers what your goal for each release is, yet at the same time giving you the flexibility to change the best way to meet the objective. One of the positives of working in an agile environment is that you can learn as you go along and change direction quickly, with little impact on the overall delivery of the solution needed by customers. It doesn’t make sense to promise a feature 1-2 years in advance market needs may change but the objective should stay consistent, whatever the solution is. If you are confident of some of the features you are developing you can use these in your roadmap to offer examples of how you are going to meet the objective.
2. Product Strategy and Vision – Before building the Roadmap, make sure you can describe your Product Strategy and that this meets the overall Product/Business vision.  Another reason to use objectives is it should be easier to describe goals from the strategy, rather than just communicating features. When communicating the Roadmap, each individual strategy should be a coherent story, each objective should be building on the previous objective and so on until it fulfils the overall vision. Otherwise ask yourself why you are developing an objective if it doesn’t meet the overall Product Vision for a solution?
3. Keep it simple – It will be easier for your customers to understand if you keep it simple and focus on objectives rather than a long list of features plus also it is easier to update in response to market demands or changes in the overall business vision.  If you have low confidence on the timeframes, then express this in your roadmap, you do not want to be known for not delivering on time.

Do not forget the roadmap is an opportunity to excite your customers, so be imaginative on the design.