Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

How do items get onto a product roadmap?

I’m often asked, what’s the mechanism or framework I should use to triage items onto the product roadmap?

This is essentially around what questions to ask and what gating is used to approve an item onto the roadmap. You can’t just add items to the roadmap because you want to; everything needs to be justified.

Anyone and everyone in your business could and should be bringing items for consideration, from internal stakeholders to partners and, of course, customers and prospects.

Your job as a product manager is to apply a gating process to all these requests.

The gating process hinges around some simple questions — for example:

• Will it contribute to achieving our business goals? What evidence do you have that it will?
• Will it help us retain one or more customers (and help us achieve our business goals)?
• Do we see significant value in it such that it will grow the business (and help us achieve our business goals)?
• Will it win us a strategic client (and help us achieve our business goals)?
• Is it simply a great idea from a customer (that will help us achieve our business goals)?

Do you see a theme here?

The roadmap has to be aligned to business goals and has to be evidence-based.

It’s not rocket science, but it is the way to do it if you want to be successful.