Product roadmap tools are the backbone for any company looking to develop a product. You can use these tools to create, communicate, and update your product roadmap in a centralized location with stakeholders across departments. Are you planning to develop a product but don’t know how to start? Don’t fret! Because today, we will talk about product roadmap tools and we will also bring up some best examples and resources.
If you want your company to take advantage of these tools so that they can have an organized way of managing their development process, keep reading on!
A product roadmap is a plan that includes what you want to create and when. But, product roadmap tools are an important part of any business. As they help to organize, prioritize and plan the future features for your product! The best tools are those that help you create a vision for the future and communicate it to your team.
The key is to find the tool that works for you and your business needs. It can be visual boards, interactive software, or even simple word documents.
It is the vision of what you want and the potential it has. This initial vision doesn’t have to be the final one, but it starts the process of creating a product roadmap so that further planning can continue. This will determine what your product should be at the end of the project
This is the case you create for your product. You want internal and external stakeholders to know the overall business objective of the project. Explain how this product benefits the company and how it fits with the vision outlined above. Once these things are aligned, the roadmap will be used to drive this strategy forward and maintain consistency.
You will need the information to describe your needs. Talk to your sales team and customer service group. You know how your end-users think about current products, what they are looking for, and what functionality they want. This will help you determine which features should be prioritized in future product releases. Reach those who already use your products by communicating with user experts. After these two groups, use your personal experiences.
This is the strategy that describes how your company will ensure that the product vision is met. It is the way the plan is carried out as the project progresses. Prioritize and set specific goals on this timeline. It has to be broad so that you still have innovation and flexibility, but some general time goes for to be set. Schedule quarterly or monthly initiatives on achievable timelines. The general facts are helpful, but they are not set in stone.
These are important to keep everyone updated on the weather. Even if you may not have exact dates, knowing where the markers are is important to keep track of work progress to move forward. Markers can be adjusted as needed, but viewing their position allows users to check timelines if necessary.
Make sure all teams know the metrics and that they all measure things the same way. Everyone should speak the same language so that there is no doubt about what is being measured.
A public roadmap is usually a public web page where a company shares what they’re working on and what they’ve recently posted, accessible to everyone. SaaS roadmaps generally fall into two different compartments, based on timeline or time horizon.
A timeline roadmap serves several strategic purposes. It communicates the priority order of a team’s initiatives based on when they plan to begin working on each one. It also communicates how long the team expects to spend on each project. A timeline roadmap’s job is to give a signal to the company about when to expect each initiative to be completed.
Effective mapping efforts require an understanding of the correct time horizon. If the horizon is too short, the company can jeopardize alignment and the ability to communicate new features and future capabilities. Too long, and the company makes assumptions and commitments about an uncertain future.
The external levels of the planning horizon are longer-term, describing less defined and less engaged behaviors, while the internal levels are shorter term, defining better understood and more engaged solution behaviors.
1. You Will Excel at Providing Customer Service
Transparency is the key when you want to maintain a healthy relationship with your customers and that’s what public roadmaps do! Once you share what you are working on, your customers will be more inclined to let you know what they are thinking and interact with you directly.
2. It Helps You Attract New Customers
Website visitors looking around and considering registering for your product will appreciate the transparency of a public roadmap. They’ll have a better idea of ​​what they’re signing up for and what’s to come, especially for early-stage SaaS businesses. Use a public roadmap as a differentiator that helps you stand out!
3. It’s Good for Stakeholder Alignment
By openly sharing your plans and roadmap, you will ensure that your team has considered what is included in the roadmap and hold them more accountable for its implementation. Buffer says that he encourages the team to think longer-term and be more aware of what they are building.
As discussed above, there’s no doubt that Product roadmaps are a vital part of any company, but they don’t have to be expensive. What are the best free product roadmap tools? Let’s dive in and see.
Craft.io is a product management platform built for product managers. It lets you create a strategy, ideas and feedback, roadmaps, prioritization, progress tracking, and team collaboration in one simple platform. It gives you a comprehensive, streamlined, intuitive platform for planning and managing your products.
Roadmap Planner uses a visual and interactive timeline system based on the Gantt chart, the most widely recognized project planning method. It enables you to precisely prioritize, plan, track progress, and organize your projects into easily manageable units, which means more refined control.
Productific is a SaaS roadmap feedback tool. They help you choose the best ideas for their customer’s roadmap. Productific identifies the top priorities in your product roadmap by analyzing customer sentiment data from surveys or user interviews. You will then be able to use this information to prioritize features that are most likely to increase revenue or decrease churn rates.
ProductPlan is a roadmap platform that aligns your team in making informed decisions. It’s an intuitive, web-based tool with collaborative features to help you make better plans faster. With ProductPlan, you can create custom roadmaps for different departments or teams and share them securely.
Draft.io is a visual and living document with the power of a flexible and collaborative blackboard. It’s ideal for exploring problems creatively, making decisions efficiently, manage projects visually.
It’s hard to know which product roadmap software is best for your company. There are many options available, and they vary in price from free to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Learn about the best-paid product roadmap tools and how they can benefit you, as well as some things you should consider before purchasing a tool that could change the way you manage your product roadmap.
Trello is a free collaboration tool that organizes all of your tasks into boards. You can create different boards for different things like personal life, work-life, etc., And then create lists on each board. Lists are what will actually hold the information about the task or project you need to complete. Each list has a card that contains a short description of the to-do list or task to complete the project.
Wrike creates custom dashboards and workflows: they allow you to set up different views, which will only show the metrics and KPIs relevant to your specific business needs. This allows you to separate tasks among team members so no one has too many responsibilities on their plate. Furthermore, with our automation features, you can make sure things happen automatically without any human intervention needed!
Aha! is a tool that will help you organize your projects by showing them as a list or as a timeline. You’ll also be able to create milestones and tasks associated with each project, assign resources, estimate costs, monitor progress on any one task at a time, collaborate with important dates or deadlines, all from within the application! It also gives the team members from anywhere in the world the option to communicate using the chat features.
ProductBoard helps you to create a roadmap that aligns resources with strategy, communicates priorities effectively, and ensures your team is working on the right things at the right time.
LoopedIn is product roadmap software that helps businesses collect feedback, manage ideas, announce updates, and more from one unified platform. Employees can white-label public idea boards so customers, website visitors, and other interested parties can submit and vote on ideas.
It doesn’t matter if you are a small business or large enterprise, a SaaS roadmap template can help you visualize your strategy and identify what projects to take on. Read on as we go over the SaaS Roadmaps templates that can benefit you in several ways:
Asana is a helpful tool that lets you keep track of deadlines, build project plans, coordinate tasks and create marketing campaigns without any hassle! It has gained a lot of fame and positive reviews in a very short while. Today, thousands of users rely on this tool to build, scale and streamline processes to improve efficiency and Build, scale and streamline processes to improve efficiency.
Notion allows you to connect your team, projects, and documents so you never lose hold of the context. It is a customizable tool that lets you drag and drop to craft the dashboard, website, doc, or system you need.
Airtable is a product roadmap that has helped over 200,000 organizations. These organizations have built applications on Airtable to modernize their workflows and deliver better business outcomes. They provide creative templates and let you streamline your workflow with powerful integrations.
The public roadmap tool for SaaS companies is a simple, free way to create and share your company’s product development timeline with the world. With this tool, you can publish your roadmap on a blog post or social media platform, as well as embed it on a website.
We hope that by now you have understood that developing an effective roadmap takes time but tools can help speed up this process. It can be done by providing templates for different types of roadmaps depending on your company type or industry, as well as creating beautiful visual representations of the content in one centralized location.
Stay tuned with Rockethub for more detailed articles that provide insights to entrepreneurs on a deep level!
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