How often should roadmap planning happen?
Last updated: June 2024
Product plans are dynamic. Product managers have to continually plan for and adapt to organizational changes, shifts in the market, and evolving customer needs. The best product managers see these evolutions as opportunities to build a better product for customers.
A roadmap is a visual timeline for creating that future. Roadmaps illustrate how you will achieve the product vision and meet business goals: why you are building the product, when you will deliver releases, and what features will be included. The "why" should be fairly static. But the "when" and the "what" could shift. That means your roadmap needs to be flexible enough to allow for ongoing changes.
The frequency of your updates will depend on the type of roadmap you are building. For example, most product managers update a features roadmap on a weekly basis to see continual progress on new features and functionality. You might update a strategic roadmap just as often — so stakeholders can see how high-level efforts and initiatives contribute to achieving the product goals.
Roadmap adjustments might also happen to accommodate any unforeseen shifts in market trends, customer feedback, and team priorities. How wide-ranging those changes are could mean rethinking your future plans.
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Keep on reading for more insights into the "when" behind roadmap planning, or use the following links to jump ahead to a specific section:
When to plan your roadmap
In general, you can expect product teams to engage in roadmap planning at least once a year. At Aha! we subscribe to a half-year cadence, but both options work. Your team's frequency might be more or less often, and that is OK. It really depends on the industry you are in, the maturity of your product, and your preferred workflow.
For example, companies in highly competitive and dynamic industries (such as tech) or organizations with younger products need to evaluate and adjust their product plans more often. But companies in traditional or highly regulated industries (such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing) often plan their roadmaps years in advance.
Outside of these scheduled updates, there are other times product managers adjust the roadmap. Any major organizational change — a strategy shift or new business investment, for example — will require you to reconsider product plans. Below, we will take a look at some of the biggest changes that drive roadmap planning.
Strategy shifts
Product managers typically align product goals with one or more business-level goals — think: revenue growth or market expansion. This is because changes at the business level will impact goals and initiatives at the product level.
For example, business leaders might choose to expand into a new market. Or you might introduce an initiative based on competitor analysis or a newly discovered customer need. Ideally, shifts in business strategy occur somewhat predictably and in advance. If business plans are well communicated within the organization, you are better positioned to adjust the product strategy and roadmap accordingly.
Of course, changes in strategy might precipitate fairly considerable changes to your roadmap. With this, it is wise to communicate the impact broadly. The engineering team needs to understand the bigger picture so the shifts in work make sense. And customer-facing teams might need to help reset customer expectations on upcoming priorities. Strategy shifts can be some of the most demanding changes for the product team, so communication is key to keeping everyone informed and in sync.
This Gantt chart created in Aha! Roadmaps maps out a team's strategic initiatives over the course of a year. It also includes goals associated with each initiative.
Related:
4 templates for better stakeholder alignment on product plans
Harvard Business Review: Strategic Planning Should Be a Strategic Exercise
Failing KPIs
Product managers track lots of data to report on progress against business goals. If you monitor KPIs on a product dashboard or within specific reports, you will likely spot trends, spikes, or drops in data that affect ongoing plans.
These kinds of discoveries require you to make trade-off decisions about which features will have the most significant and immediate impact. You might need to reprioritize your roadmap to deliver new or updated features. But do not get so boxed in to product data that you lose sight of the product vision. Fluctuations in metrics can be normal — they should not be the reason you revamp the entire product direction.
A dashboard like this one helps teams keep an eye on their KPIs in a single view. Create your own dashboard views in Aha! software.
Trends in customer feedback
Customer feedback also influences roadmap planning. After all, your customers are the people you build for. As you collect and review customer requests — hopefully in one centralized area — you will likely identify new initiatives, features, and enhancements that you want to add to your roadmap. Evaluate these new ideas against product strategy and identify the requests that will deliver real value.
As customer feedback impacts product plans, your release plans will change as well. This typically happens at the feature level rather than the initiative level. For example, you might need to deprioritize a feature set that the engineering team is planning or add a new set of functionality to the product backlog.
Use a dedicated ideas portal to organize and keep a close eye on customer feedback. This makes it easy to add popular ideas to your backlog and identify trending themes.
Related:
Best practices for stakeholder alignment: Review customer feedback
Best practices for stakeholder alignment: Prioritize the best ideas
Major changes in resource planning and capacity
No matter how well considered your plans, you cannot always anticipate cross-team challenges. Perhaps you share resources with another product manager and a group of engineers is pulled over to a new project of immediate importance. Or maybe an upcoming feature set gets delayed due to an unforeseen cost or technical issue.
Updating the roadmap in these cases takes more than shifting dates and pushing back deliverables. Considerable changes in resources and capacity typically require you to change direction or rescope plans. As with any change to the roadmap, it is important to inform cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
Dependency lines help you highlight connected work items. This makes it easier to identify potential cross-team challenges.
A roadmap is simply a visualization of your strategic plans. When circumstances change, adjust plans according to what you know now. Big shifts in strategy, data, customer feedback, and resources require deep consideration. Look at product plans holistically and take a thoughtful approach to build the new direction.
Of course, planning and updating your roadmap can be onerous if you create it in a spreadsheet or static document. As you shift product plans, your roadmap stays a step (or more) behind. Simplify roadmapping by using a purpose-built roadmap planning tool that automatically integrates strategic planning with roadmapping.
FAQs about roadmap planning
How do you create a high-level roadmap based on your strategic plan?
Collect what you need: Start with a set of goals and initiatives based on your product vision. You will also want to reflect on what went well — or poorly — during your last strategic plan.
Identify themes: Determine the large themes of work to prioritize based on your goals, initiatives, and customer feedback. Many teams use the jobs-to-be-done framework here, but you might prefer a different approach.
Formalize the plan: Map out goals, initiatives, release themes, and features on the appropriate timeline. Review your work with stakeholders to get sign-off, then share the finalized roadmap with the whole team. And remember to iterate when plans change.
Check out our stakeholder alignment series, annual roadmapping guide, and ultimate guide to roadmapping for more on roadmap planning. (We also have a variety of roadmap planning templates available.)
How do you successfully conduct a brainstorming session for a product roadmap?
Set a time for the brainstorming session, create a meeting agenda, and send it to participants a couple of days in advance. You should clarify your overarching objective and provide a rough sketch of what you plan to discuss.
During the brainstorming session, provide plenty of opportunities for everyone to contribute. Collaborative whiteboard software can facilitate this with features such as timed voting, sticky notes, and emojis. At the end of the session, group ideas by theme and then prioritize items that align with the overall strategy on your product roadmap.
Who should participate in product roadmap planning?
Product managers need to speak with executives, key stakeholders (including leaders from engineering, marketing, sales, and customer success), and even customers when creating a roadmap plan. Doing this ensures that all future work lines up with the organization's goals and solves customers' problems in a meaningful way. If you do not have a centralized spot where customers can share thoughts, consider launching a dedicated ideas portal for them. And if you are looking for a comprehensive way to track input, we have a few templates specific to securing stakeholder alignment.
