I have seen a lot of overcomplicated roadmaps. And often, they are symptoms of unclear strategies.

But a product roadmap shouldn’t be overly complicated.

At its heart, it is a strategy document that:

• sets out the near and medium-term objectives for your product (/customer experience),
• defines milestones that show that you are on track to meet your objective(s),
• provides estimates for the effort required to meet the milestones, and
• prioritises workstreams that get you to your milestones (and objectives).

That’s your roadmap.

9 Steps to a Solid Roadmap

So how do you make one?

Open a Notion or Google doc and answer the following questions:

1. Who do we serve? (Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Ideal User Profile)
2. What problems are we trying to solve for customers?
3. What user experience do we need to provide, to solve those problems better than alternatives?
4. How do we measure customer value to ensure we have delivered customer success?
5. What does our product need to do (features) to deliver that customer success/value?
6. Of all the features we can build, which next 3-5 features will deliver the most value for my ICP?
7. Roughly how much effort do I expect it will take to deliver those 3-5 features?
8. What is the rank of the features based on value/effort?
9. What do we need to learn to validate our hypotheses?

The answer to step 8 is your roadmap. Put it as bullets on a page or as a colourful Gantt chart. And make sure to include it in your company and board updates.

As your product matures, more questions and complexity will arise. But it is always helpful to keep things as simple as you can. Direction and priority – that’s what you are looking for.

What are the steps?

Steps 1 and 2

Your company’s identity is at the heart of everything you do. Your mission, vision and purpose. Who you serve and why you exist.

There is a process to figure this out, which I cover elsewhere. Assuming you have mapped this out, the next step is to craft your sales playbook and your product roadmap. These exist in sweet harmony. And in fact, the two first questions are the foundation for both your sales playbook and your roadmap.

If you already have the playbook, grab them from there. If not, get writing.

Steps 3-6

At this point, you have hopefully already done lots of customer discovery. If not, you need to talk to customers. They will tell you what you need to know. Synthesize their insights to find answers to steps 3-6.

Steps 7

Estimating how long it will take to build features can be tricky. And it is impossible to get 100% accurate. But a ballpark estimate beats not having any idea. So make the best estimate you can. And Let everyone know that they are subject to change.

Besides, timeboxing is important. You could arguably spend either three months or nine months on a feature. But if you are at the seed stage, you probably want to think “MVP, MVP, MVP”).

Step 8

Now you rank value vs effort. This effectively prioritises your development.

That’s it. v0 of your roadmap is ready.

Step 9

As you go along, write a list of open questions and hypotheses still to be tested (that’s step 9). And make sure to share these with your sales and CS teams. They are your eyes and ears on the ground (at least until you have a full-time product function).

As you start growing a scaling, you’ll hire a head of Product and scale out the product organisation. But for now, you have an important tool to help you prioritise and communicate.