Your startup product roadmap is the heart and soul of your business—it’s your reason for existing. But developing a product is about more than just having an idea and creating a slate of features; it’s about solving a problem.
Take a high-level view of your niche to better understand your startup product roadmap. By taking a 30,000-foot view of the problem you are trying to solve, you can get the lay of the land and draw your roadmap to success more easily. Ask yourself and your team a few questions to get to the root of the problem and understand where your product fits in.
- What are the large industry forces that make my startup relevant?
- Where can I capture a substantial total addressable market (TAM)?
- Why is now the perfect time for my startup to launch?
- What can I do better when compared to prominent players in the industry?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s time to return to the drawing table and better understand your product and its market fit. However, once you have hammered out these more extensive details, you can move on to mapping your way to launch.
A ‘startup’ is a company confused about 1. What its product is. 2. Who its customers are. 3. How to make money.” Dave McClure, co-founder, 500Startups
The Power of a Startup Product Roadmap
You may have noticed a theme emerging: building a successful startup product is mainly about planning ahead. Your startup product roadmap epitomizes this need.
The ultimate purpose of your startup product roadmap is to provide clarity. Clarity of purpose, responsibilities, goals, and timelines. It’s not about diving into such deep detail that you inadvertently put up roadblocks to getting the job done; it’s about having an outline that guides you and your team. Roadmaps are so helpful you may even need a few — one for your company, product, and tech.
In a case study about becoming more product-focused, Travel tech company Almundo said, “Our focus was on clarity and simplicity. After trying complex Gantt charts and even product backlog software, we opted for a single slide on a Google presentation to show the roadmap and execution. This approach helped us to communicate to upper management that the roadmap was fluid, and the ‘lack of formality’ gave teams the confidence to commit to defining what projects to tackle each quarter.”
Having a great template will be helpful for years to come. Each new project or feature update may require a roadmap, and having an effective template to start from will help each new project proceed efficiently and effectively.
Your Startup Product Roadmap Templates
There are many great resources to provide you with templates for your startup product roadmap, but they can differ wildly depending on your product or industry. I have put together a general template that should give you the broad strokes needed to ensure you’re asking and answering the right questions.
- Why: Define the need for a roadmap and what you hope to achieve.
- Goals: Clearly explain the vision and goals of your product or service.
- Timeline: Having realistic deadlines to work toward is essential to keeping your project on track.
- Tasks: Clearly define the significant tasks so your team knows what needs to be accomplished. The key here is to edit and avoid going too deep into detail.
- Roles & Responsibilities: Once you have defined the tasks you must complete, it’s time to assign your stakeholders and employees responsibility for tasks and milestones.
While you develop your initial roadmap, remember that this can serve as the template for future releases, feature updates, and any significant project your company undertakes.
Once you have a plan, you should over-communicate your roadmap at each quarterly strategy meeting. Make it clear to every employee that you have a plan and their role. But don’t be afraid to add refinements and learnings along the way. Startups are all about flexibility, and while a roadmap is a great guide, it can’t be written in stone.
Tracking the Progress of your Startup Product Roadmap
Your startup product roadmap is in place, but tracking your progress throughout your journey is essential to making it truly impactful. That means regularly reviewing the ground you have already covered to understand your progress and identify any bumps you may have hit in the road.
“Anything that is measured and watched improves.” – Bob Parsons, founder, GoDaddy
Define your goals and metrics to track progress regularly for successful project completion..
- Status: In the simplest terms, you want to determine whether your project is still on track. If there have been unexpected delays, you need to account for them and ascertain whether or not these have put your progress at risk. You should also address timelines that may be running concurrently in different departments.
- Dependencies: It can be easy to get tunnel vision and see only your project piece. However, keeping track of dependencies is essential to understanding who awaits their work and how it impacts the more extensive timeline.
- Roadblocks — Things will not always run smoothly, so you will want to address the challenges impeding your progress. It’s also essential to bring these impediments to the attention of the stakeholders, who can address them quickly.
- Success: Celebrate your completed work! Tracking your accomplishments is as important as looking at the work ahead and the roadblocks on your journey.
Tools like Trello, Linear, or Asana can help you keep track of goals, set deadlines, and track progress, but product owners will be integral to ensuring your team is successful. They can help nudge people when tasks get mired in a backlog or help clear roadblocks when they appear. Have your CTO, CPO, and PO list inter-team dependencies for better cross-team communication.
When developing your progress reports, consider who you report to. Tracking progress is essential for your team, but the rest of the company may also be interested. Your leadership team will likely be interested in high-level goals and strategy. Engineering will want to know how the implementation is progressing. Marketing must know about upcoming releases and timelines to plan their launch. Sales may be curious about whether customer feedback has been incorporated, which new features they should plan to push, and much more.
Your product owner can also help you cultivate a culture celebrating small victories. It’s a long road to a full release, and the cycle of improvement and additions will continue long after your initial launch. So, your team must know how important alpha and beta releases are to your progress and celebrate them accordingly.
Beta Test!
Don’t underestimate the importance of beta testing! Beta users are crucial for tech companies to gather feedback and identify issues before broader product launches. But you don’t need millions of users to test your product. You can use internal stakeholders, colleagues, or even your family and friends to put your product to the test. Anyone who replicates your target customer base will do.
“Companies should care who their beta testers are. To generalize beta-testing outcomes, the population of testers must be as representative of the target users as possible,” according to research from Communications of the ACM.
Solicit tough feedback from testers to improve your startup product and identify any glitches. Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Bold Claims
- Trust your intuition, but back it up. Don’t build feature after feature based on your gut alone; validate an MVP version with user feedback.
- Less is more. Focus on quality over quantity when it comes to building product features.
- Know when to say no. You can’t be all things to everyone, so resist the urge to add unnecessary features.
Pro Tips
- Track your competition’s every move and learn from them every step of the way.
- Turn to external advisors, board members, and investors to get feedback on your roadmap and progress.
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