Product roadmap: examples, tips, and formats to consider

Building best-in-class products requires juggling short and long-term business needs with existing and planned resources effectively.

This juggling exercise can be incredibly complex when you’re dealing with several stakeholders, managing multiple product lines, and serving several types of customers. And this only gets exacerbated when you factor in competitive pressures, economic trends, and more.

To help you navigate this as effectively as possible, you can build a flexible, comprehensive product roadmap that your cross-functional teams and customers are aware of and bought into.

We’ll break down how you can build one by highlighting several noteworthy examples and by sharing tips for building your own. 

But first, let’s align on the definition of a product roadmap.

What is a product roadmap?

It’s a visual summary that outlines the products, features, and functionality you plan to build or improve on in your platform. The roadmap can also be filterable by key themes, such as AI or security, to make it easy to skim and analyze.

A great product roadmap should be accessible for go-to-market and technical teams and be steeped in a strong understanding of the business goals, customer needs, and technical realities (e.g., available engineering resources).

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

Real product roadmap examples

Here are just a few real-world examples of product roadmaps that are worth taking inspiration from.

GitHub

The developer platform offers a public product roadmap that—unsurprisingly—uses their own platform.

Some areas worth highlighting:

• Their roadmap items are broken down by product focus areas—”Accelerate with AI”, “Secure at every step”, “Platform for collaboration at scale”—so that you can quickly discover what’s being worked on and the status of a given initiative
  

• Each roadmap item includes a brief description on why the item is being worked on (“Value Prop”) and the expected benefits from working on it (“Expected Outcome”) to give you more context on the reasons why it’s important

• Roadmap items are segmented by quarters and certain items are also featured in the “Future” column. This includes initiatives that are still being scoped 

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Atlassian

Atlassian, which offers a suite of solutions to help employees manage projects, find information, collaborate with one another, and more, offers a comprehensive product roadmap across their cloud applications and data center solutions.

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Some areas worth highlighting:

• Atlassian promotes a quarterly newsletter that shares what they’ve released, what’s coming up, etc.

• You can access advanced search functionality to find specific roadmap items quickly, whether that’s by using their search bar, filtering for a certain application (e.g., Jira), or selecting a certain status

Since Atlassian offers so many applications, their “Apps” dropdown can be essential for customers that only use a specific solution

• If you click into a specific roadmap item, you can find a link to share it. This lets customers and prospects share the context, timeline, and status of a given initiative

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

Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 includes several widely-used productivity applications (e.g., Microsoft Word) and cloud services (e.g., OneDrive) and security features.

Like Atlassian, their product roadmap offers advanced search capabilities to help customers and prospects find relevant updates, quickly.

Some areas worth highlighting:

• Each roadmap item includes two types of dates to clarify their level of availability—”Preview Available” and “Rollout Start”

• You can download the entire roadmap in a CSV file—which includes feature names, their details, their statuses, and more—to easily share specific items with colleagues

• You can click into a roadmap item to get a comprehensive breakdown of what’s being built or improved

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

HubSpot

The company, which offers customer service, marketing, and sales software, offers product roadmaps for each product offering via slides. They include a “Currently In Development” section alongside a “Being Planned” section.

Some areas worth highlighting:

• HubSpot offers a “Share your ideas” CTA that leads you to a landing page where you can both view product ideas for certain HubSpot products and submit your own

• You can easily find previous product updates (their product roadmap only shows future enhancements or builds) by clicking into their release notes or product updates deck

Ahrefs

The SEO software’s roadmap uses 3 stages for each initiative: “Planned”, “In Progress”, and “Complete”. 

Some areas worth highlighting:

• Ahrefs lets you upvote the roadmap items you’re most interested in—giving the Ahrefs team a better understanding of what customers want most

• Anyone can comment on the roadmap items, which can lead to helpful context from customers on why a product ask is important

Types of product roadmaps (and when to use each)

As our examples showed, product roadmaps can use several formats. 

Here are some of the most common types of roadmaps you’ll want to evaluate.

Timeline-based roadmap

This type of roadmap clearly shows when roadmap items are started, worked on, and finished.

GitHub’s product roadmap is just one of many examples. (they present timeframes by quarters).

Time-based roadmaps are popular for good reason: They help cross-functional teams, customers, and prospects quickly understand the timelines for different initiatives, which is one of the main reasons why a product roadmap exists to begin with. 

This kind of roadmap may not, however, answer high-level questions, like what specific roadmap items aim to accomplish or how a given item fits within the broader product strategy. So if you’re looking to use a product roadmap as a way to drive internal and/or external discussion and buy-in, this may not be the best approach. 

Now-next-later roadmap

This roadmap format is relatively new and more niche. The way it works is simple: You’d categorize roadmap items into one of three buckets: now, next, or later. 

For each item, you can also include relevant tags to help people find them faster, the overarching business goals they support, and whether an item is internal and/or external-facing.

Here’s an example of how it can look according to the CEO and co-founder of ProdPad:

One of the benefits of this approach is its simplicity: Readers can immediately tell what’s being worked on and why. 

But it invites open-ended questions, like “When is a project in ‘Next’ going to be worked on?”, and “What does later mean?” So if you’re looking to provide a roadmap that doesn’t require additional context or follow ups, this may not be the approach to take.

Theme-based roadmap

This type of roadmap breaks down roadmap items by themes.

Going back to our GitHub example, they adopt a theme-based roadmap by bucketing their roadmap items into the following filterable themes: AI, security, and collaboration.

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This approach lets your readers easily analyze roadmap items within a certain theme. It also provides a high-level understanding of the product’s strategic goals. 

That said, themes, in and of themselves, aren’t enough. You’ll likely also want to specify when certain roadmap items are being worked on, the specific goals each item supports, etc.

Best practices for creating and managing your roadmap

Even if you adopt a proven product roadmap format and follow successful examples, your roadmap might not be effective if you don’t follow the best practices below.

 Collaborate with engineering early and often

Your engineering team has the insights you need to develop and continually refine your roadmap. This includes:

• How long and how many resources certain roadmap items will take to execute 
• Whether a given roadmap item is more complex and time-intensive than expected
• If a certain roadmap item has dependencies that require you to add additional items and/or reprioritize your roadmap

To stay on top of your engineering team’s experiences and ensure you’re leveraging their expertise consistently, you’ll need to consistently ask for feedback during your recurring sprint syncs, retrospectives, backlog refinement sessions, and other meetings with them. 

You can make your partnership with engineering even more consistent and structured by setting up a bot in an app like Slack that asks for status updates on specific roadmap items, along with open-ended questions on how things are going to get their candid feedback.

Build in flexibility

As the quick and fast rise of large language models (LLMs) showed, innovation can be quick, aggressive, and in many cases, affect your business and/or customers.

To help your team be agile and opportunistic when trends—like LLMs—impact your product, you should set the expectation with all of your stakeholders that the product roadmap isn’t fixed but a living, breathing resource that should adapt to your customers’ and prospects’ needs over time. 

Tie initiatives to strategic goals

Nearly all of our product roadmap examples did a great job of tying initiatives to broader business goals.

That isn’t by accident.

Most employees and customers who review your roadmap won’t be familiar with individual roadmap items but they'll probably understand your broader product goals. As a result, making this connection helps your colleagues and customers better understand why something is being done and why it is or is not a priority. 

Surface external dependencies clearly

Many roadmap items require external parties to follow through on a commitment.

For example, if you plan to integrate your product with a certain API provider’s endpoint when they plan to make it available, you’re depending on that API provider to actually make it available when they said they would.

Whenever you depend on an external party to help execute a roadmap initiative, you should make explicit note of it. That way, if the 3rd-party does fail to deliver on time, your customers and colleagues can easily learn why and won’t be quick to blame you.   

Review and revise often

As mentioned earlier, your product roadmap can and should evolve alongside your business’ and customers’ needs.

To keep your roadmap relevant and effective, you should review it on a cadence that lets you make timely adjustments. For larger companies in relatviely stable markets, this can be once per quarter; while smaller companies in faster-changing markets may want to revisit it as often as every month.

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

Clear the roadblocks from your roadmap with Merge

Merge offers a single Unified API that lets you add hundreds of integrations to your product. 

Merge also lets you avoid maintaining any of the integrations afterwards and provides integration observability features to help your customer-facing teams manage integrations themselves.

Taken together, your engineers can avoid any integration-specific roadmap initiatives and reallocate those time savings to other core initiatives in your roadmap.

Learn more about Merge and how it can help you accelerate your product roadmap by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.