The biggest challenges for project managers are competing for business goals, lack of time, an insufficient definition of their role and the lack of product management processes.
For this reason, the creation of product roadmaps is an essential part of the job of product managers. A product roadmap outlines a product’s vision, direction, priorities, and progress over time. It also sets the strategic direction for the product offering.
Because product managers are often faced with multiple projects at once, product roadmaps can also help execute key initiatives to ensure they bring the greatest success and impact to your organization.
Product managers often use various tools to develop product roadmaps. This also includes text-heavy applications such as spreadsheets or online documents, which are not always easy to understand and therefore make communication gaps, delays and other inefficiencies more likely.
Fortunately, there’s a better way to create product roadmaps: using a solution like SAASFE, a visual productivity and mind-mapping tool that makes it easy to create visual product roadmaps for any use case and adapt them to your needs to let.
In mind maps, concepts and ideas can be represented graphically and in a structured manner. They make it easier to recognize, structure and analyze the information as it is broken down into individual elements or tasks.
4 benefits of visual product roadmaps
When it comes to product roadmaps, mind maps help you brainstorm and identify potential roadblocks, create risk mitigation plans, find solutions, and ultimately create roadmaps that you and your team can view and update at any time.
1. Better strategic alignment
Strategic alignment is achieved when both product and customer goals are in line with corporate goals. One way to do this is by listing goals with their associated initiatives in your product roadmap.
A visual product roadmap can show how the company’s goals and customers’ needs are related while ensuring that your most valuable resources—your team members—are working together toward key strategic outcomes.
For example, you could use a status-based roadmap to bring together your goals and related initiatives. Status-related roadmaps show which tasks are currently being completed, what is to come and what is planned for a later point in time. These roadmaps are often presented in the form of Kanban diagrams for their clarity and simplicity.
2. Greater Clarity
Throughout the creation and distribution process, visual tools can help clarify the product vision and intended goals, making it easier for all stakeholders to understand your vision and strategy.
A visual roadmap lets you create a customizable chart that shows everything you need to know, from key tasks and accomplishments to due dates, assigned resources, and their status or priority level.
You can also create separate product roadmaps for individual teams. In this way, stakeholders who simply want an overview are not overwhelmed; at the same time, all team members receive the detailed insight they need into their respective tasks.
A product portfolio roadmap is useful for this purpose. Roadmaps of this type go beyond a single product vision and show all planned releases for a product portfolio at a glance. This broader perspective provides stakeholders with a strategic view of your plan and helps internal teams understand how their specific project compares to other competing and dependent initiatives.
Also Read – Free Product Roadmap Tool
3. Targeted work
Goal- and results-oriented visual roadmaps promote a shared understanding among all stakeholders of desired outcomes for customers and the business. Visualizing with a roadmap can also be a great way to motivate teams to pay attention and prioritize the tasks that matter most to the business.
Outcome-related roadmaps are ideal for this. These roadmaps focus on the problems and outcomes that your team hopes to solve or achieve with the product.
For example, an outcome could be to increase sales, improve product usage and adoption, save users time in completing tasks, or provide cost reductions.
4. Improved collaboration
Saasfe collaboration features open up a whole world of new possibilities. With their help, users can conveniently share roadmaps with team members so that everyone is working from the same up-to-date version.
For example, teams can use the newly designed co-editing, which allows multiple users to edit and update a roadmap at the same time. All changes are adopted and saved in real-time.
You can also create tasks in a product roadmap and assign them directly to team members. In this way, your roadmap essentially acts as a project and task management tool, bringing all the information together in a single, central location.
