Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a plan of action for how a product or solution will evolve over time. Product owners use roadmaps to outline future product functionality and when new features will be released. When used in agile development, a roadmap provides crucial context for the team’s everyday work and should be responsive to shifts in the competitive landscape.
A product roadmap is essential to communicating how short-term efforts match long-term business goals. Understanding the role of a roadmap—and how to create a great one—is key for keeping everyone on your team headed in the same direction.
Who are roadmaps for?
Roadmaps come in several different forms and serve a variety of audiences:
Internal roadmap for the development team: These roadmaps can be created in several ways, depending on how your team likes to work. Some common versions include the detail about the prioritised customer value to be delivered, target release dates and milestones. Since many development teams use agile methodologies, these roadmaps are often organized by sprints and show specific pieces of work and problem areas plotted on a timeline. 
Internal roadmap for executives: These roadmaps emphasize how teams' work supports high-level company goals and metrics. They are often organized by month or by quarter to show progress over time towards these goals, and generally include less detail about detailed development stories and tasks.
Internal roadmap for sales: These roadmaps focus on new features and customer benefits in order to support sales conversations. An important note: avoid including hard dates in sales roadmaps to avoid tying internal teams to potentially unrealistic dates.
External roadmap: These roadmaps should excite customers about what’s coming next. Make sure they are visually appealing and easy to read. They should provide a high-level, generalized view of new features and prioritized problem areas to get customers interested in the future direction of the product.
Why should I create a product roadmap?
The biggest benefit of the product roadmap is the strategic vision it illustrates to all stakeholders. The roadmap matches the broader product and company goals with development efforts, which align the teams around common goals to create great products.
For organizational leadership, the roadmap provides updates on the status of work and “translates” developer tasks in Jira into non-technical terms and a format that’s easily understood.
For product owners and managers, roadmaps unify teams working on high impact product enhancements and allow them to communicate priorities effectively with adjacent teams.
For the developers themselves, roadmaps provide a better understanding of the “big picture,” which allows team members to focus on the most important tasks, avoid scope creep, and make fast, autonomous decisions.
