Product management glossary
Product roadmap
Definition: A product roadmap is a shared plan that shows what a product team intends to build, roughly when, and why. It links the product strategy to the work the team will deliver.
A roadmap is a communication tool as much as a plan. It tells engineering what is coming, tells sales and customer success what they can talk about, and tells leadership how the product supports the business goals.
Roadmaps come in several shapes. Timeline roadmaps place work against dates or quarters. Now, Next, Later roadmaps group work by horizon instead of date. Release roadmaps group work by the release it ships in. Many teams keep an internal version with full detail and an external version that is safe to share with customers.
The hardest part of running a roadmap is not creating it. It is keeping it current as plans change, and explaining to everyone why things moved.