Any time we talk about product development, we inevitably end up talking about two main terms: product strategy and roadmaps.
At first, these terms can be confusing—they both are used in planning and guiding the development of a product. Sometimes, people use the terms interchangeably, which only adds to the confusion.
But, these terms do have a difference, which will help you more effectively manage your project.
In this article, we’ll look at product strategy and roadmapping to illustrate how the two work hand-in-hand to make your product development a success.
Defining Product Strategy and Roadmap
Your product strategy and your product roadmap are two central components in the process of developing any product or service. Although they may at first appear to be similar, they function differently. Let’s take a closer look at what these terms mean.
Product Strategy
Just like it sounds, your product strategy is the overarching plan for your product development. It specifies your long-term goals.
It also clearly lays out the direction of your work efforts toward achieving your vision.
An effective product strategy often answers additional questions, including:
- What is your target market?
- What is your value proposition?
- How can you differentiate your product from competitors?
- How do your goals align with market trends?
- What is the completion date for the entire project?
Most importantly, the strategy serves as a central facilitator for decision-making. Once you have an overall direction and method for developing your product, it’s much easier to decide whether or not an individual task contradicts your strategy.
Many brands and firms choose to collaborate with a product development and design agency to develop their SaaS product strategy in a workshop setting. This ensures that their written strategy truly reflects their vision and goals.
Product Roadmap
On the other hand, a SaaS roadmap is a visualization of your plan for product development. Rather than focusing on the long-term goals, the roadmap highlights individual product features, updates, and tangible tasks that you’ll need to execute your product strategy.
A roadmap helps you and your team with:
- Taking Action: The roadmap clearly outlines the sequence of tasks needed to accomplish the goal. Typically, you break these into small, actionable items, each clearly assigned to a team member or group.
- Timelines: Rather than detailing the timeline of the entire project, roadmaps typically treat each step individually with its deadline.
- Management: Roadmaps are frequently updated to show the status of planned, in-progress, or completed work. This increases productivity and accountability during product development.
- Communication: Roadmaps often serve primarily as communication tools. When you store roadmaps in an easily accessible place, such as a shared network or hosted through a service, it’s easy for all stakeholders to stay updated.
As you can see, the product strategy sets the direction of the project, while the roadmap irons out the details. Although they serve different purposes, aligning the two is an essential part of the product development process.
The Role of Product Strategy in Developing Product Roadmaps
Before you can construct an effective product roadmap, you must first develop a product strategy.
The process of creating a product strategy requires you to engage deeply with the market landscape. In other words, you must understand your customers’ needs, trends, and competitors in order to articulate your vision effectively.
This takes extensive research and perhaps even consultation with a product development agency. But don’t let this research go to waste!
The insights from the process of developing the product strategy can help shape your product roadmap in multiple ways:
- Identifying needs: Your product strategy will likely identify key aspects of your customers’ experiences—their needs, desires, and pain points. The roadmap transforms this information into ideas for specific features that alleviate or anticipate their problems and create a satisfying experience.
- Differentiation: Having a keen understanding of the market helps you to identify and develop possible features and updates that make your brand stand out. For example, suppose you notice a larger percentage of your customer base are student users and decide to create an education edition of your application. In that case, you may develop a quotation/citation feature.
- Scaling: Timing the growth and reach of your product is an essential aspect of product development. Using the insights from market analysis, you can understand how to prioritize the development of features and updates related to latency, user capacity, and platform compatibility.
While this initial market research certainly plays a dominant role in shaping your roadmap, the product strategy guides it in other ways. In the following sections, we’ll look at how the product strategy helps you prioritize roadmap items and navigate potential changes.
Prioritizing Roadmap Items: The Strategy-First Approach
When first creating your roadmap, you might feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks needed to accomplish your goals. How can you know for sure which tasks you should prioritize and which tasks you can put on the back burner for a while?
Although there exist multiple frameworks for project management prioritization, such as MoSCoW (Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have) or RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), it’s best to start with your product strategy first.
Consider which roadmap items directly contribute to achieving the goals that you outlined in your product strategy—these you should accomplish first.
Other high-priority roadmap items include:
- Differentiation: What will result in making your product stand out against the competition?
- Market Opportunity: How can you take advantage of windows of opportunity in the market?
- Customer Impact: What can help generate revenue by fostering customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty?
- Compliance: Which items ensure your products meet all industry, local, national, and international regulations?
Say you want to develop a shopping app that allows users to take pictures of objects in real life and then identify where they can buy them online. This would give you affiliate profits. Your highest priority would be developing the image-recognition software.
You’ve identified that certain companies offer image searching for use in their shops.
For example, the Chinese company TaoBao allows you to take a picture or upload a screenshot and direct it to that item in their store.
So, to differentiate, your app must work across multiple platforms. You may end up using MoSCoW or RICE to understand which platforms to develop at which times.
According to your overall strategy, features like product recommendations, integration with social media, and price comparisons would be lower on the priority list.
Navigating Changes: Agile Product Roadmap
Even with the most clearly articulated strategy and the most thorough roadmap, every product needs to prepare for the unexpected.
Here are just a few hurdles that are difficult to anticipate:
- Laws and regulations change suddenly
- National/global events that change consumer habits (pandemic, natural disaster, etc).
- Logistical challenges in securing supplies/cloud storage
- Competitors launch similar projects
- Operating System or platform makes substantial updates
- A vital team member resigns
An inevitable challenge all brands face when developing products is navigating these changes and cultivating adaptability in their strategy and roadmap. Companies like Microsoft, Aware, and Buffer have great examples of adaptable strategies and roadmaps.
For example, Microsoft offers a cloud-based subscription to their full suite of software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) via Microsoft 365. Rather than users needing to download new versions of their software, Microsoft allows users to request features and continuously updates the software.
They are able to accomplish this using a public-facing roadmap. Customers and team members can search for a specific feature or problem and quickly assess where (and if) Microsoft is in the process of addressing it.
Methods to Remain Flexible in Your Strategy
It’s essential to build flexibility right into your strategy from the start. Rather than assessing customer needs and market conditions once at the start of your project, you can anticipate that the markets and customers will change and build continuous monitoring into your plan.
Here are some methods of accomplishing this:
- Iteration: Rather than trying to plan or predict every possible feature of your product before its launch, you can base your strategy on creating basic and smaller-scale prototypes. These prototypes can then be beta-tested and updated to reflect consumers’ changing needs.
- Scenario Planning: Try to imagine some of these possible events and situations. For example, what would happen should you suffer an internet outage or a server crash? What would it take for you to offer an offline mode for your customers? Building contingency plans helps you shift and adapt to many situations.
- Engaging stakeholders: Welcome feedback from your customers, team members, partners, management, and anyone else in your community. This will guarantee that you are made aware of a potential issue during its earliest stages.
- Building flexible schedules: At a minimum, ensure some buffer time before and after projects to allow for unexpected delays. Overplanned projects leave no room for experimentation and discovery. Incorporating brainstorming sessions, work retreats, and other creative, collaborative activities can help you develop a culture of innovation.
Final Thoughts
Rather than seeing one as more important than the other, it’s best to see product strategy and roadmapping as part of a symbiotic relationship.
In other words, the product strategy helps you to itemize your steps and tasks in your roadmap, and the roadmap creates a feedback loop that helps you refine your strategy.
The two work together to make sure that your strategic objectives manifest into tangible, actionable roadmap items and that those items remain relevant and adaptable to a constantly changing market.
Book a free call with a digital product design agency today for guidance in developing your product strategy and roadmap.
