10 Tips for Creating an Agile Product Roadmap

3 min readJul 20, 2016

A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. This post shares ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.

1 Focus on Goals and Benefits

Whenever you are faced with an agile, dynamic environment — be it that your product is young and is experiencing significant change or that the market is dynamic with new competitors or technologies introducing change, you should work with a goal-oriented product roadmap, sometimes also referred to as theme-based. Goal-oriented roadmaps focus on goals or objectives like acquiring customers, increasing engagement, and removing technical debt. Features still exist, but they are viewed as second-class citizens; they are derived from the goals and used sparingly.

To help you develop your agile product roadmap, I have created a goal-oriented roadmap template called the GO Product Roadmap. It is built on the idea that goals are more important than features, and it consists of five elements: date, name, goal, features, and metrics, as the picture below shows. You can download the template for free from romanpichler.com/tools, and you can find more information on how to use it in my post The GO Product Roadmap.

2 Do the Necessary Prep Work

Describe and validate the product strategy — the path to realise your vision — before you create your roadmap and decide how the strategy is best implemented, as the following picture illustrates.

I like to use my Product Vision Board to develop a valid product strategy. The board captures the vision, the target group, the problem to be solved or the benefit to be provided, the key features of the product, and the business goals. You can download the Product Vision Board template from romanpichler.com/tools/ for free.

3 Tell a Coherent Story

Your product roadmap should tell a coherent story about the likely growth of your product. Each release should build on the previous one and move you closer towards your vision. Be clear who your audience is: An internal product roadmap talks to development, marketing, sales, service, and the other groups involved in making your product a success; and external roadmap is aimed at existing and prospective customers. Keep your roadmap realistic: Don’t speculate and don’t oversell your product.

4 Keep it Simple

Be careful not to add too many details to your product roadmap. Keep your roadmap simple and easy to understand. Capture what really matters and leave out the rest by focusing on the goals. Keep the features on your roadmap coarse-grained and derive them from the goals. Do not show epics or user stories on your product roadmap but keep them in the product backlog. Use the product roadmap as a strategic product plan and the product backlog as a detailed one that facilitates execution, as the picture below shows.