ARTICLE SUMMARY
After going through parts 1 and 2 of the process of creating a product roadmap, we’ll finally bring you to the conclusion of this process. You’ve already went through the basic steps of listing improvements, dividing them in smaller batches, reordered them according to your priorities and estimated resources.
After going through parts 1 and 2 of the process of creating a product roadmap, we’ll finally bring you to the conclusion of this process. You’ve already went through the basic steps of listing improvements, dividing them in smaller batches, reordered them according to your priorities and estimated resources.
Then, we went from generic to specific by adding details and flexibility to your roadmap and gave you a few tips on how you’d like to go when managing it. So, all we have left is going through the last practical steps and seeing the results from creating a product roadmap.
Develop additional services:
This is not about whether you’re commercialising services or products, this is about how creating a product roadmap can be useful on building more options to cater to your customer’s needs.
You have to look at your services as offering a package deal of benefits other than just selling a product. Think in terms of results: what are you really offering your customers?
Most of your customers will already be thinking according to this point of view, they don’t look directly at the actual work you’re doing, they focus on the end results they get out of working with you.
Your ultimate goal when creating a product roadmap and planning for the future, therefore, must envision ways to improve the results you’ll be offering your customers while also considering more options to add on to them.
Adding a new feature, on a product-based business, is of the upmost importance – and so are adding new services or finding improved ways to handle the work you deliver your customers.
When exploring your future development options, keep an open mind when it comes to building new internal products – here speaking both of information-based and actual tools – to help in your business. You may get surprised on how much internal development can improve the end results you present your customers with.
Learn about the new and how to do it:
Adding new features to your product roadmap – especially when dealing with service-based businesses – can require a little game upgrade and give you a few new skills to add to your set. If you’re planning on offering a new service to your customers, you may as well be prepared to learn how to do it.
Thorough researching of market tendencies, customer service surveys and almost any other source of information will be essential when learning how to offer something new. The “how to service” factor is very, very important and you might want to emphasise it when creating a detailed product roadmap.
Enough with the planning, it’s show time!
The whole process of creating a product roadmap – even though it may seem a little complicated – is actually the easy part of evolving and adding new features to the products and services you sell to your customers.
One very important thing you have to always keep in mind is keeping your product roadmap a living document: it was build based on the information you could get today, tomorrow may be an entirely different day and, when circumstances change, you’ll need to be able to adjust your roadmap and stay active in the game.
Make it a habit of constantly coming back to your product roadmap and checking if it’s still valid according to the situation you’re in right now. If something changed and the assumptions you built it on are no longer accurate, don’t be afraid to change it.
Having a very good plan will do you no good if you don’t follow it, therefore you’ll actually have to get the work done to make a product roadmap a useful tool. So, it’s action time, stick to what you planned and get down to building those improvements.
Free Product Roadmap Template!
Try Pipefy! We help companies keep organised and more productive by running their processes and day-by-day routines on an easy and intuitive tool, making them leave in the past inefficient manual forms, spreadsheets and e-mail threads.
Our product roadmap template was developed to help you learn how to prioritise your features by following the best practices of product management – from defining the type of improvement to advanced measurement of impact on your goals.
