What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a map for your product journey that outlines the vision, goals, and steps for product development, all mapped out over a specific timeline.
Think of it as your North Star—guiding your team, stakeholders, and customers, ensuring everyone knows where the product is headed and why.
Why is a product roadmap essential?
A product roadmap ensures your team is moving in the right direction to achieve your product goals. This could include different types of clearly defined roadmaps, including strategic and feature roadmaps, which help avoid unnecessary confusion.
While smaller teams might start by drafting product roadmaps in documents and spreadsheets, it can get difficult to keep track of items as your product scales. If you drill down into a product roadmap, it’s essentially comprised of two components—timelines and tasks. These can be meticulous, with proper ETAs and deadlines, or just a general categorization in terms of broader timeframes, such as quarters or milestones without rigid deadlines.
What should a product roadmap look like?
A great product roadmap isn’t just a list of tasks; it’s a strategic narrative that provides clarity and direction. To serve its purpose well, a product roadmap should answer key questions like:
What are we building?
Why are we building it?
Who is it for?
When will it be delivered?
How will we achieve it?
Who is responsible?
How do we measure success?
By addressing these questions, a product roadmap becomes more than just a planning tool—it evolves into a robust framework that keeps teams aligned, stakeholders informed, and priorities clear.
How to use the product roadmap template in Zoho Tables
To make the most of this template, follow these simple steps:
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Step 1: Start with the big picture
Start with a shared understanding of your goals and the big picture by outlining it to your team. Talk about what the overarching mission you’re working towards is. Include links to important documentation, current priorities, and any processes your team needs to follow (like where to log feature requests or feedback) in a Zoho Tables base using Grid View.
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Step 2: Break down each quarter
Divide your product journey into manageable timelines, like quarters in a year. Add priorities, milestones, resource allocation, release dates, and ownership. You can additionally add supporting documents if any, like design prototypes, dependencies, and notes.
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Step 3: View your progress
Once you've mapped out the details, get started and track your progress. You can use Kanban View to track your work items across milestones and identify bottlenecks in your process.
Quarter Specific Kanban View
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Step 4: Make room for change
Flexibility is the key to success, which is why the most thriving companies are ones that joyfully adapt to new challenges. Sometimes this means making unexpected changes to your product strategy or tweaking your initial plans.
This approach not only encourages growth but also opens up exciting new avenues along the way. The work management tool that you choose should accommodate this flexibility.
Who can use this product roadmap template?
Whether you’re leading the charge or contributing to specific milestones, a product roadmap template is essential not just for product managers but anyone involved in the product lifecycle and the customer journey. This includes:
Product managers
Project managers
Product developers
Product marketers
Product designers
Customer success managers
Sales managers
Why Zoho Tables?
With Zoho Tables, your roadmap becomes a hub where everyone—developers, designers, marketers, and leadership—can collaborate and work.
It’s flexible work management software that adapts to the way your team works instead of the other way around. It allows you to switch perspectives based on your needs, automate mundane tasks to save time, and grow with your team to expand the roadmap to accommodate new projects or goals.