Product Roadmap Creation

Why product roadmaps should be outcome based not feature-driven We do sprints to ship features, and they don’t always work out. Why? Because features alone don’t move the needle -outcomes do. A practice that I usually follow is to ask myself: What problem are we solving, and how will we measure success?” And that’s how we pivot from feature factories to outcome-driven roadmaps with actionable steps to make it stick. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 > 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 Outcome-based roadmaps focus on measurable results (e.g., “Increase free-to-paid conversion by 15%” vs. “Build a pricing calculator”). This shift: - Aligns teams around business goals, not just deliverables. - Empowers creativity (solve the problem, don’t just check a box). - Reduces waste by killing initiatives that don’t drive impact. But how do you actually make this work? Here’s My Practical Playbook 👇🏻 1️⃣ 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 “𝗪𝗵𝘆” - Define outcomes tied to business goals: Partner with leadership to align on 1-2 KPIs per quarter (e.g., “Reduce churn by 10%”). - Ask this question: “If we deliver X feature, what outcome does it enable?”. If there’s no clear answer, rethink it. 2️⃣ 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 Outcomes are broad—break them into testable hypotheses. - Example: To “Increase user engagement by 20%,” run:   - A/B test push notification timing.   - Pilot a gamified onboarding flow.   - Measure DAU/WAU ratios weekly. 3️⃣ 𝗔𝗱𝗼𝗽𝘁 𝗙𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 - OKRs: Link Objectives (outcomes) to Key Results (metrics). - Impact Mapping: Visualize how features connect to goals. - RICE Scoring: Prioritize initiatives by Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. 4️⃣ 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝘂𝘆-𝗜𝗻 - Frame outcomes as ROI: Show how “Reduce support tickets by 25%” cuts costs. - Prototype outcomes first: Share a mock roadmap with leadership, highlighting gaps in current feature-centric plans. 5️⃣ 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻, 𝗜𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 - Track leading indicators (e.g., user behavior changes) alongside lagging metrics (e.g., revenue). - Celebrate “failures”: Killing a feature that didn’t drive outcomes is a win. 𝟯 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗱 - - Vague outcomes: “Improve UX” → ❌ | “Reduce checkout abandonment by 20%” → ✅. - Overloading the roadmap: Focus on 1-2 outcomes per quarter. - Ignoring feedback loops: Revisit outcomes bi-weekly—adapt as data comes in. This week, try this: Audit your roadmap. For every feature, ask: “What outcome does this serve?” If it’s unclear, reframe it, or cut it. I believe outcome-based roadmaps is a survival tactic. Let’s build products that matter. 👉 How are you bridging the gap between features and impact? Would love to know your process.

I used to believe Customer Success should drive the product roadmap. Here’s what I know now. The roadmap should be a collaborative design, built by Sales, CS, Support, Product, Marketing, and Leadership together. No one team sees the full picture. ▶️ Marketing sees market shifts. ▶️ Sales hears why deals are lost. ▶️ Leadership ties it all to strategy. ▶️ Product builds scalable solutions. ▶️ Support sees recurring pain points. ▶️ CS sees where customers struggle. When we isolate roadmap ownership, we build for one team. When we collaborate, we build for the entire business. Want true collaboration? Set it up intentionally: 1️⃣ Monthly cross-functional planning meetings: Bring leaders together to align on customer feedback, market signals, and business priorities. 2️⃣ Voice of Customer (VoC) programs: Collect real user feedback consistently — surveys, interviews, success metrics. 3️⃣ Closed-lost analysis with Sales: Review why deals are lost and what patterns could inform the roadmap. 4️⃣ Support ticket and escalation reviews: Identify top friction points that need attention. 5️⃣ Market research and trend studies: Analyze competitor moves and emerging trends quarterly. 6️⃣ Executive alignment sessions: Validate that roadmap priorities map directly to company strategy. The roadmap shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a shared vision. One that every team feels connected to — and proud of. How does your company approach roadmap collaboration today? Because if you're only building with one team's input, you're only solving one piece of the puzzle. ____________________ 📣 If you liked my post, you’ll love my newsletter. Every week I share learnings, advice and strategies from my experience going from CSM to CCO. Join 12k+ subscribers of The Journey and turn insights into action. Sign up on my profile.

Roadmaps are not one-size-fits-all. They should be tailored to each team. Why? Because roadmaps aren’t just timelines, they’re communication tools. And what you communicate depends on your audience. Consider these examples: - Product Development Teams need detailed, execution-focused roadmaps. Think engineering commitments by quarter, discovery vs. delivery status, and alignment on what’s coming next. - Sales Teams are looking for big-picture stories. They need to know which features will excite customers and when they might expect them. These roadmaps focus on value propositions rather than granular details. - Leadership needs a strategic view. Roadmaps for them focus on initiatives and capacity planning, linking back to the company's broader vision and goals. To create all these roadmap versions effectively, we need collaboration between product operations and product teams. That way, each roadmap serves its specific purpose and audience. Take Rebecca’s example from my Product Operations book with Denise Tilles. By keeping these roadmaps aligned with business rationale, she was able to bridge the gap between sales expectations and product realities, building trust and transparency across the organization. She also introduced a clear framework for sharing feature status across teams. This included stages like Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and GA. Understanding these phases ensures that everyone, from sales to engineering, knows the real status of a product feature and can communicate that clearly to customers. The magic happens when product operations steps up to support these efforts. By providing tools and frameworks, ProductOps help teams to align their roadmaps with strategic intents and prevent the kind of overselling that happens when teams aren’t on the same page. In short, roadmaps aren't just plans, they’re how you build alignment. How are you tailoring roadmaps for different departments in your organization? Let me know in the comments!

Your product roadmap is not a plan. It’s a set of bets. Every feature you ship is a wager: -> A bet that users will care -> A bet that it will move the metric -> A bet that the timing is right But most roadmaps are treated like checklists—linear, rigid, and disconnected from risk. That’s where product leaders need to step up. Here’s how to turn your roadmap into a real decision-making tool: Frame initiatives as bets with expected upside and confidence level -> Define success with a measurable outcome -> Add a confidence score based on evidence -> State what would make the bet succeed—or fail Use themes to group related bets—so you’re not optimizing in isolation -> Organize around problems or goals, not features -> Bundle experiments that reinforce each other -> Review bets as a portfolio, not in silos Call out high-risk items explicitly—and track how they perform -> Label high-risk/high-reward bets on the roadmap -> Don’t hide risky work behind neutral names -> Track outcome, not just delivery Revisit assumptions post-launch: Did the bet pay off? -> Run quick post-mortems 2–4 weeks post-release -> Compare predicted vs. actual impact -> Feed learnings into future bets Shift the conversation with leadership. Don’t debate features—align on risk vs. reward. Final thought: Great product strategy isn’t about building more. It’s about placing smarter bets. -- 👋 I’m Ron Yang, a product leader and advisor. Follow me for insights on product leadership & strategy.

A product only scales when its strategy is tied directly to business goals. Otherwise, features become noise, and teams burn months on “nice to have” work that doesn’t move revenue, retention, or efficiency. Business alignment means: ✓ Every feature connects to metrics that matter ✓ Every design decision supports growth or cost optimization ✓ The roadmap speaks the same language as the leadership team. ⸻ Example: Healthcare Case I worked with a medical SaaS platform that had a backlog of 120+ features. Developers pushed new releases every two weeks, but churn was growing and revenue wasn’t scaling. I ran a UX–Business audit: — Mapped every feature to a business KPI — Cut 40% of backlog items that had zero business impact. — Rebuilt the roadmap so that every quarter focused on one clear business lever . Result after 3 months: ✓ Customer support tickets dropped by 22% ✓ Retention improved by 15% because patients were guided better through their journey. ✓ Leadership got visibility: for the first time, the roadmap was linked directly to revenue forecasts. ⸻ Example: Fintech Case In a fintech startup, leadership struggled to raise the next round because their pitch deck showed features, not impact. I restructured the product narrative: — Aligned UX flows with financial metrics: fewer failed transactions, faster onboarding, higher account activation. — Designed a demo around money saved and money earned, not UI screenshots. — Synced the product roadmap with the CFO’s model, so investors could see cause–effect clearly. The outcome: They closed a $7M round. Investors saw a product tied to growth levers, not just design polish. ⸻ My takeaway Business alignment is not paperwork. It’s the discipline of turning UX work into financial outcomes. When I step in, I translate design into numbers the boardroom understands — retention, efficiency, growth. That’s how design stops being a cost center and becomes a driver of business decisions. ⸻ I’ve spent over 8 years in UX and 7 years in branding, marketing, and PR. What I do is not just design — I architect clarity between product and business goals. That’s why my work stabilizes teams, speeds up decision-making, and helps products grow in markets under pressure. 

Product roadmaps shouldn't be treated like a to-do list. They're living documents that tell the story of your product's evolution and adapt with customer needs. 🌱 I learned this lesson the hard way. Early in my career, like many founders and product folks, I viewed roadmaps as rigid plans to execute against - plugging items into project management tools and checking off boxes each quarter. While this felt satisfying, this output-based approach missed the point entirely. 😬 Here’s the roadmap philosophy I live by today: The art of roadmapping isn't about the output - it's about the process. 🏗️ Or, as Winston Churchill offers, "Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential." When viewed through this lens, startup roadmaps are a tool that helps you: 🗣️ Articulate your vision clearly to different stakeholders 🎯 Prioritize work that moves you toward that vision 🛞 Adjust quickly based on customer feedback 🤝 Unite teams around shared goals For early-stage companies, I’ve found the best way to do this is to create and maintain three versions of the roadmap, each for a distinct audience: 1️⃣ Annual roadmaps for investors: Focus on major milestones and market opportunities 6-12 months out. This shows your strategic thinking and excites investors about long-term potential. 2️⃣ Quarterly roadmaps for customers: Share concrete value coming in the next 3-4 months. This builds excitement while maintaining flexibility to pivot based on feedback. 3️⃣ Internal roadmaps for teams - Break down the work into specific problems and experiments to tackle this quarter. This connects daily tasks to bigger goals (which we manage in Linear). For each version, the key is focusing on the problems you're solving rather than features you're building. This shift in mindset leads to better products, more engaged customers, and teams that understand the "why" behind their work. ❤️ The best roadmaps aren't about checking off feature boxes - they're about delivering value by aligning your team, customers, and investors around a shared vision for the future. If you’d like to dive deeper into my thoughts around this topic, I’ve written up a post on creating your first roadmaps as a startup founder on the Clarify blog. I’ll drop the link in the comments 👇

How do you *actually* create a product roadmap? Try this. Any product leader knows that deciding what to build, and when to build it, is an art form. How do you balance the needs of customers with the resources of your engineers? How do you coordinate what your sales team wants with what YOU - as a business - need? It's not easy. But it starts with ... The Four Lists List 1: What your customers want Start by listing out the kinds of customers who already use your product and what's important for them. As new users become power users over time, they start finding gaps in the product and begin asking for different capabilities. If you don’t listen and demonstrate an ability to offer those features that they need, those customers become dissatisfied and are less likely to renew. List 2: What your sales team want Are you losing deals because you're missing a feature that a competitor has? At Harness, we call these "opportunity gaps." This list enables you to close those gaps and helps sales win new customers.  List 3: What your engineers want Every startup will accumulate "technical debt" as they scale. If you don’t take care of it and only focus on building more features, eventually your product architecture gets so unwieldy that product quality suffers and it creates more serious problems in the long run. This list is all about taking the needs of your engineers into consideration.  List 4: What the vision of your product is This list rises above the nuts and bolts of the company and forces you to think about the bigger picture. What do you need to build to hit revenue goals? How do innovate in a way that expands your total addressable market?  One more note: it's critical that someone keeps track of all these lists. For example: at Harness, sales has a list of feature gaps, account managers keep track of customer requests, while engineers maintain their lists of technical debt, etc. Ultimately, these factors decide what you focus your resources on. A good product leader is constantly balancing the four lists and making conscious decisions to prioritize certain aspects depending on what the company needs. #PMF #ProductRoadmap #ProductManagement #Startup

This is your friendly planning season reminder that if you are ONLY using some sort of effort/outcome score to prioritize your roadmap, you’re only part way there. Effort/outcome scores are a great way to identify the most efficient things to do – but they don’t account for: ❌ % of goals met ❌ Goal distribution across your portfolio ❌ Key foundational levers ❌ R&D/Innovation ❌ Run the Engine / Care and Feeding ❌ Timing factors ❌ Competitive threats ❌ Changes in the market ❌ Changes in technology Almost invariably (YMMV), your outcomes will suffer BUT it won’t be clear why since you prioritized your roadmap! Better is to: ✅ Create a goal-oriented roadmap so that every effort is aligned with a strategic goal (this is the O from your OKRs, if you use those) ✅ Develop clear success metrics and manage to those metrics, not just perception ✅ Determine what % of your team’s efforts should be applied to each objective across your portfolio, including things like Innovation (fun!) and Care and Feeding (oft forgotten) ✅ Use MOAR - Metrics Over Available Resources - as your scoring tool, as this will help you align efforts with those goals and account for outcomes in addition to monetization (I know, but leading indicators, trust me) ✅  Implement Responsive Product Portfolio Management, where you align, allocate/re-allocate, and adjust in an iterative cycle based on the metrics you’re seeing, and changes in the market/tech/competition. We all end up in annual planning, and the New Year can be a great time to kick off excellent new product habits. See if you can get your team aligned around these and watch the magic happen 🪄 ______ I’m Lisa Schneider. As a fractional CPO, I help founders and CEOs identify the right things to build to align with business goals, provide frameworks for prioritization and cross-functional alignment, build outcome-based roadmaps, and streamline teams and processes to deliver faster. Reach out any time if you’d like to learn more or just brainstorm. 🔔 Follow me and ring the bell on my profile to get notified of new posts. #startup #fractionalcpo #roadmap #productmanagement #strategicplanning

Your roadmap can be more than a fancy to-do list. Imagine that. It’s actually can be an expression of your strategy, a set of outcomes instead of outputs. This is hard, especially for leaders, as putting some vague outcome onto a roadmap requires giving up a lot of perceived control. And I think it is important to see that struggle. Empowering teams to focus on strategy-informed outcome roadmaps is a bold step. And one every PM and Product Team can make a lot easier for product leadership. By being very transparent, structured and over-communicating. 1. transparent Outcome based roadmaps are less deterministic. They allow the team more degrees of freedom. This is where the perceived relinquishing of control comes from. Being extra transparent in what you are working on is a great start to get a leader to trust your team. 2. structured Same thing, it's all about mutual trust. Outcome based roadmaps require trust. Showing that you take this vague outcome and move towards structuring the problem & solution space is essential to reassure leadership you deserve their trust. This is where Opportunity Solution Trees, Assumption Mapping, Impact Mapping etc. can really help. They provide easy-to-understand artifacts. 3. over-communicating Your structure and hypothetical transparency is great. But a Miro board without a password won't cut it. You cannot expect leadership to PULL information from somewhere deep down your documentation stack. PUSH it. In a regular, condensed way. Executive summaries, short status report emails can do wonders in avoiding a erosion of trust. A well-crafted roadmap is your proof of strategy in action, where every item links back to your bigger vision. It’s where the ‘why’ meets the ‘what’ and ‘how’. So, before you add another feature to your roadmap, ask yourself: does this align with our strategic goals, or is it just another shiny object? Let’s shift our mindset from creating feature factories to building strategic roadmaps that drive real value. -------- I post 5x a week here in an attempt to get 1000 companies to iterate weekly. I'm at 11/1000. Which is one more than a two weeks ago. Follow along to see if I make it before turning 90 - and shoot me a message if you need a little help to get your Discovery rolling. #productmanagement #productdiscovery #uxresearch

How To Create Your First Product Development Roadmap in 6 Easy Steps? This guide will help you save your team countless hours and unnecessary meetings. Recently, we welcomed 5 new developers and analysts to our Open Source Project, Break Into Data. 😍 It became apparent that our only points of reference were the GitHub repository and our Discord channel, showing a clear need for a more centralized roadmap as our team of contributors is growing rapidly. 🎯 So we decided to consolidate everything into our Product Roadmap. 📜 Here is how we approached it: 1. 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐞: Begin with a clear vision. What problem does your software solve? Who is it for? Define the scope to focus your efforts. 2. 𝐒𝐞𝐭 𝐎𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬: Break your vision into achievable objectives. What are the critical milestones for your project? E.g., Establishing higher level system design, Deciding where to host your core infrastructure, etc. 3. 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬: Identify and prioritize the features that are crucial for your MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Focus on what delivers the most value to your users. We identified 3 core features: Onboarding, LLM-driven submissions, and Personal & Global Analytics. 4. 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬: Draft a realistic timeline. Outline the phases of development, from initial design to testing, and set deadlines for each phase. I like to refer to the Software Release Life Cycle. (SRLC) 5. 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐬: Clearly define team roles and responsibilities. Everyone needs to have a sense of ownership and accountability for the quality of their deliverables. 6. 𝐈𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐝𝐚𝐩𝐭: Embrace agility. Regularly review your roadmap and be ready to adapt based on feedback and new insights. Have weekly meetings to go through the results of the past week and goals for the next. How do you approach your product development life cycle? P.S. Attached picture is for example reference. It is not our roadmap. If you want to learn more about our progress, look out for our next article - https://lnkd.in/gEMeG9GV 🤗 #softwareengineering #productroadmap #datascience #llm #ai #startups