A guide to planning products successfully in 2025

Building software that truly hits the mark starts with solid product planning. 

But what exactly does that mean, especially now when product managers need to incorporate AI as much as possible? 

We’ll break down how product planning works in 2025 to ensure you’re able to perform it successfully. 

What is product planning?

It’s the process of defining your product's strategy over a certain time horizon and then executing against it.

For example, you can set a product plan for a given quarter that defines the AI features you want to build, the integrations you want to implement, the security capabilities you want to develop, and more for a specific solution.

https://www.merge.dev/blog/product-objectives?blog-related=image

Key components of product planning

Strong product planning requires you to take the following measures successfully.

Let’s take a look at each.

Market research and analysis: understand your landscape

This step involves digging into what your potential and existing customers are doing, what they truly need, where the gaps are in what’s currently available, and testing your own initial ideas before you pour too many resources into them.

This involves the classic methods: 

• Run market research studies through tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics 
• Host focus groups to gather more in-depth, qualitative feedback
• Analyze call recordings in tools like Gong to pick up on key, trending topics (these tools now let you easily track the topics that keep coming up in conversations)

But it's not just about listening to what people say; it’s also about watching what they do. 

For example, you can use a product analytics tool like Amplitude to pinpoint how users interact with your product—where they get stuck, which features they ignore, etc.—to reveal hidden needs and opportunities. If many users abandon a task at a particular point, that’s a strong indicator that something in that workflow needs significant improvement. 

For example, Acctual, a stablecoin billing and invoicing software, found that users weren’t creating invoices at the rate they expected. By analyzing their user behavior, they ended up discovering that users didn’t know they had to create a contact first. They’d then receive error messages when trying to create the invoice and they couldn’t figure out why.

The team at Acctual was then able to add this to their product plan and heavily prioritized addressing it—see how they did so here.

The real magic happens when you can combine these approaches. Knowing that customers ask for a feature is one thing; knowing that and seeing from your data that a high percentage of users churned because you didn’t provide that feature makes the case for building it undeniable.

Related: A guide to the product development lifecycle

Product vision and strategy: your guiding light

Based on all the research you perform, you’ll likely have a solid understanding of the direction you need to take your product both in the short and long term.

You can use these insights to create a product vision, which explains why your product exists and where it's headed. The product strategy is then your plan to get there—detailing your key initiatives, who you're targeting, and how you'll stand out.

For example, if you offer a B2B payments platform, like Ramp or Brex, your product vision can be something like “To simplify and automate the entire accounts payable process for mid-market finance teams.” Your product strategy can then include targeting finance teams at companies with 50–500 employees, launching initiatives like integrating with popular accounting systems for mid-market companies, and more.

Roadmapping

Your product roadmap should be more than just a schedule of features; it should explain why you're building certain things. This gets everyone on the same page and gives you a clear way to decide what to work on.

Different types of product roadmaps exist:

• Timeline-based roadmaps: Show features planned over time. This is useful for coordinating, but it can also create pressure to execute on certain dates—regardless of whether the feature is fully ready

• Theme-based roadmaps (or Goal-oriented roadmaps): Focus on broader goals or customer problems (like "Improve User Onboarding" or "Enhance Reporting Capabilities") instead of just features. This gives more freedom to find the best solutions
  
  
• Outcome-based roadmaps: Target specific changes in user behavior or business results (e.g., "Increase user engagement by 15%")
  
  
• Feature-driven roadmaps: List the specific features you plan to build, often grouped by release

Whatever method you choose, you’ll want to adapt as you learn more from customers either directly or indirectly (i.e., how they use your product). 

Prioritization frameworks

Once you have a list of potential features, improvements, and ideas, how do you decide what to build first? 

That’s where prioritization frameworks help. They give you a structured way to weigh your options so you can focus on what will make the biggest impact.

Here are a couple of popular ones:

MoSCoW 

This simple method sorts features into four groups:

• Must-have: Your product won't work or be viable without this 
• Should-have: Important to have but not critical 
• Could-have: Nice-to-haves that improve the experience but aren't essential
• Won't-have (this time): Things you’re intentionally not building right now

For example, for a new software release, building a user login is a "Must-have," an analytics dashboard might be a "Should-have," a minor UI tweak could be a "Could-have," and a total redesign is a "Won't-have" for this quarter.

RICE Scoring

This framework uses numbers to help you compare features:

• Reach: How many people will this affect? (e.g., users per month)
• Impact: How much will it help them or your business? (e.g., a score from 0.25 for minimal to 3 for massive)
• Confidence: How sure are you about your Reach and Impact estimates? (as a percentage)
• Effort: How much work will it take? (e.g., developer-weeks)

Once you have numbers, you can calculate your score with the following formula: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort. A higher scores means it should be a higher priority.

For example: Say you’re building a new reporting feature that’d reach 500 customers, have a high impact (score: 2), you're 80% confident, and it takes 4 developer-months. 

Your score would then be (500 * 2 * 0.80) / 4 = 200. You can then compare this score to other potential feature builds/improvements to prioritize what your team works on.

There are countless other methods to choose from. Whatever you decide to use, the main goal should be to pick a method and use it consistently so that your decisions are clear and based on your product strategy. 

Product planning examples

To help you implement product planning processes successfully, let’s take a look at how real-world companies put this into practice.

Gong

The revenue AI platform has “Pods” that focus on a specific persona or use case for the platform. Each pod consists of a product manager, a team lead, a developer(s), and a product designer.

To help the pods plan new features and enhance existing ones over time, the PM in each will fill out a doc in advance of a recurring quarterly meeting with management. The PMs will outline what their pod plans to build, why they plan to build it (using customer evidence, like snippets of conversations that are recorded and analyzed in Gong), and how they plan to do so. 

These PMs will go on to present their sections of the doc to management during these quarterly meetings and get live feedback. 

The PMs will iterate on their plans quickly after the meeting and resend it to management in the hopes of getting their plans fully approved before the start of the coming quarter.

https://www.merge.dev/blog/product-profiles-rahm-fehr?blog-related=image

CUES

The finserv platform offers a fully-integrated suite of recognition products.

Since their company is notably smaller than Gong and their product is less mature, they have a less formal product planning process and it’s baked into their two week sprint cycles.

Essentially, their product manager meets with their CTO every 2 weeks to chat about the company’s product priorities. From there, the PM can create tickets for their engineering team. He’ll then have several conversations with engineers to talk through the tasks, get their feedback, align on how they’ll get executed, and potentially uncover other tasks that are even more important.

Here’s more from Noah Sclar, a former Senior Product Development Manager at CUES:

“The product manager’s calls with engineers are super collaborative. Developer feedback is an essential part of outlining and executing on our product plans.”

Note: As you can tell from our examples, every company approaches product planning differently. Your approach will depend on your team’s and product’s maturity, customers’ and prospects’ needs and wants, competitive pressures, and more.

You also don’t need to adopt all the components we shared for planning your products. But having some structure and process should help your team think deeply about what needs to be built and improved on, when different items need to be executed, and how to prioritize different initiatives when necessary.

https://www.merge.dev/blog/product-profiles-noah-sclar?blog-related=image

Implement any integration in your product plan with ease via Merge

Merge, the leading unified API platform, lets you add hundreds of integrations through a single integration build. Merge also fully maintains the integrations and offers observability features to help your customer-facing teams manage integrations independently . 

Taken together, you can not only add all the integrations in your product plans with ease but also avoid having integration issues bottleneck your other product roadmap items.

Learn more about how Merge can help you make product integrations your competitive advantage by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.