The path to results: Designing your product development roadmap

Without a product development roadmap to take you from concept to launch, it’s all too easy to get stuck in a never-ending loop of ‘coming soon’. Features get missed in the development shuffle, deadlines become distant, and frustration fractures the team.

With a product development roadmap, on the other hand, you hit each milestone en route to launch, delivering a product your team is proud of and your users love. A clear roadmap transforms your brilliant idea from a jumbled concept to a market-ready success story.

This guide shows you how to build a roadmap that keeps your team focused, your stakeholders happy, and your launch on-track for success. We’ll also share three example product development roadmaps to get you started straight away.

A product development roadmap outlines the ‘why’ and details the ‘how’—transforming ideas into well-defined, actionable steps.

It’s the blueprint for your SaaS product’s development. A visual, prioritized plan that outlines the features, updates, and overall direction of your product development projects.

Let's say you're building a project management SaaS tool. Your initial roadmap might focus on core functionalities like task creation, assignment, and tracking. Later phases could introduce features like team collaboration tools, advanced reporting, and integrations with other popular apps. The roadmap ensures a logical flow of development, prioritizing features that deliver the most value to users at each stage.

A product development roadmap helps you:

While the terms sound similar, there's a key difference:

A product development roadmap focuses on the creation and evolution of a specific product, detailing the phases of its development from concept to launch and updates. The time frame is short-term (quarters) with iterative cycles (sprints).

A product roadmap is broader. It outlines the product strategy and timelines of multiple releases (new product or features) under a company’s portfolio, including their development and market introduction. The time frame includes long-term goals (12+ months).

Here’s a quick overview:

A product development roadmap typically includes several key components that guide the development process from conception to launch and help with stakeholder buy-in.

Here's what it should include:

Your product development roadmap is a powerful tool, but there's no one-size-fits-all approach. The best format depends on your development style and goals.
Here are three types of roadmaps you can use for your product development project to help keep everything on track.

An agile product development roadmap prioritizes themes (big-picture goals) and initiatives (projects within themes) that align with your product vision. It focuses on flexibility, incremental progress, and continuous feedback.

For example, if you’re developing a new customer relationship management (CRM) feature, an agile roadmap for this product would list phases like:

Upcoming features, like product analytics or integration capabilities
Allocating time for revising these features based on user feedback
Iterative testing

Each roadmap phase would be broken down into sprints—short, manageable periods during which specific tasks are completed and reviewed.

The waterfall product development roadmap is linear. The project progresses through well-defined, orderly stages. It starts with requirement analysis, followed by design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Each phase must be completed before the next begins, and there's no overlap.

The waterfall model's structured nature suits projects where changes are costly or where regulatory and compliance requirements demand strict adherence to the process.

A hybrid product development roadmap blends the structured planning of the waterfall methodology with the flexibility and iterative approach of agile.

In a hybrid approach, you might use waterfall for defining the product development project’s broad scope and major milestones, which are less likely to change. This helps in setting clear deadlines and resource allocation.

Agile practices can then be employed to handle more dynamic aspects of the project, like updates and refinements based on user testing and feedback.

The hybrid method boosts collaboration across different teams, accommodates various workflow preferences, and maintains overall project alignment with strategic goals.

Having a clear vision for your product's immediate future is essential—and translating that vision into actionable steps requires a product development roadmap.

Here are six steps to create a roadmap that guides your development team toward success.

By the time you get to creating a product development roadmap, you’ll likely have an idea of the project you’ll be working on. You may not have the specific initiatives (they’ll come with your product discovery, but you’ve got your overarching product development focus.

For example, you could be creating a product development roadmap following some less-than-satisfactory product experience survey results. Defining your product development strategy involves outlining the phases of your project and the research methodologies you’ll use to hit your goal—in this case, improving your product’s usability.

Second, you need to define the roles and responsibilities for all team members involved in the project. Consider setting swimlanes—a horizontal band that visually represents a specific team, department, or even a stage in the development process.

Some common use cases for swimlanes in product roadmaps include:

User research is a crucial part of product development. Without UX research, you’re basing big decisions on assumptions—when you could be basing them on data.

You’ll turn to users for their product feedback throughout the product development process, but this first research study is to help identify the most pressing issues among your users. It’s exploratory research to dig deeper into user issues to identify and prioritize specific product development initiatives.

For example, let’s go back to our example of poor product experience survey results. You know there’s an issue, but you’re not certain exactly what with. Some qualitative research data from the survey points towards some issues, but you really need to find out more.

To help identify and prioritize issues, you conduct user interviews. These interviews uncover specific problems that users face within your product. One user complains about the native automations, others complain about the font size, and one complaint pops up again and again: the product’s navigation doesn’t make sense to users.

With this information, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Now that you know what issues are affecting users, you can start populating your roadmap with initiatives. You want to prioritize these initiatives based on:

You then want to consider these three aspects to prioritize projects. High impact and low effort? Sounds like a winner. Low impact but high effort? Steer clear. Low impact but low effort? It can wait until you’ve addressed critical issues.

Once you’ve prioritized initiatives, you can get even more granular and start setting milestones and timeframes. Each initiative is its own mini-project—complete with UX research objectives, methodologies, and success criteria.

You want your product development roadmap to clearly map out your goals and how you’ll get there—completing this step puts a check in both of those boxes.

Now you’ve filled out your product development roadmap with project-specific information, you’re ready to consider the functionality of your roadmap.

This step helps simplify your product development workflow. It reduces manual effort and ensures consistency. Start by identifying repetitive and time-consuming tasks within your development cycle. This might include code deployments, testing, data entry, or report generation. For example, if your team frequently runs the same set of tests after each code change, this is a prime candidate for automation.

Next, select appropriate tools to automate these tasks. Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools can automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code. For UX research reports, you can opt for a research platform that pulls results and key user insights together automatically, like Maze.

In addition to automation, you can create templates for repeatable processes. For example, develop standardized templates for project documentation, user stories, and test cases.

These templates reduce the time spent on creating these documents from scratch, and also ensures all team members follow the same format and include necessary information every time.

Congrats! You’ve now successfully created a product development roadmap. The final step in this project is to follow the process and timelines you’ve just laid out. This looks different for everyone involved, as different team members have different roles in the product development process.

Remember that your roadmap is a guide. It’s not set in stone—you can update it if necessary, and revisit it after projects to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s the source of truth for all teams involved in the product development process—so make sure it’s an accurate reflection of where each initiative is.

Many roadmapping tools offer pre-built templates to jumpstart your planning. Let’s look at some inspiring examples to help you visualize your product's journey:

Jira's agile roadmap template prioritizes adaptability within the agile framework. You can visualize your product's strategic direction with clear timelines and sprints. Collaboratively prioritize features, manage tasks, and track progress. Your team can also adjust plans as needed, ensuring transparency and stakeholder alignment throughout the product development process.

The Aha! Kanban board template lets you see your workflow in a flash. Just customize the columns for your process, then add cards for each task. Set limits to avoid overload and keep work moving. And if you’re stuck on something, the board highlights roadblocks for quick fixes. It's all about collaboration, so your team stays focused on delivering value, one task at a time.

ClickUp's Simple Gantt Chart template makes project planning easy. Tasks from your ClickUp list automatically sync with the chart. You can see what's open, what's in progress, and what's done—all with a quick glance at the color-coded bars. This template works for all sorts of projects, no matter your style. ClickUp’s template is great for newbies and helps you spot roadblocks before they slow you down.

A product development roadmap takes your product from a disorganized scribble on a whiteboard to a go-to-market-ready product.

Remember, a roadmap is all about:

And if you’re feeling stuck on how to collect user feedback to inform your roadmap, Maze can help. With a user testing platform like Maze, you can upload prototypes, recruit testing participants, and download customizable actionable insights for stakeholder buy-in—all within a single platform.