The Advantages Of Expanding Your Product Roadmap's Viewers
As product leaders, you would want easy accessibility to any available information regarding your product. You need a centralised location that will hold all their product efforts and updates. Sometimes you will spend hours updating spreadsheets or PowerPoint decks, yet they still cannot represent your product plan.
Go beyond the limitations set by these outdated tools through a product roadmap designed specifically for adding roadmap viewers.
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap is a tool that communicates your product's vision and a plan for executing your product strategy. Your product roadmap is a reliable source of information and your single source of truth. It enables you to provide a high-level visual summary that maps out your product's vision and strategic direction.
Use the product roadmap to your advantage and break down ingrained silos among your team. Each stakeholder will bring a different viewpoint as your product roadmap gains viewers.
It requires balance to share a product strategy that is understandable to all audiences. Avoid isolating one department from the rest or overwhelming them with information by giving them a personalised perspective of your product roadmap.
This article will discuss with your the benefits of using product roadmaps.
Benefits of Adding More Viewers to Your Roadmap
Not all product leaders prioritise transparency when communicating their product initiatives to executive stakeholders. You may believe that a rise in viewers results in more opinions and veer away from your initial product vision. However, if done correctly, increasing the number of viewers can guide your team through the launch.
There are various ways that you can benefit from adding more viewers to your roadmap:
Alignment of company goals
Every member of your product team must move towards achieving a common goal. From your roadmap, you give each department an overview of the work of other contributors.
Regardless of the different tasks assigned to each department, team members can align their visions and objectives with the company. They are visualising the product strategy as a component of your product roadmap to aid the team in focusing on the same objective.
Encourage Collaboration and Communication
How can you promote transparency during a product launch and provide the appropriate stakeholder with correct information? As the single source of truth in your product, your roadmap helps promote openness and get the support of your stakeholders.
Let your stakeholders view your roadmap to achieve positive results and empower them. Grant them direct access to your product roadmap and inform your stakeholders about the launch procedure.
Continuity of purpose
Product roadmaps encourage and support cross-functional collaboration and provide a continuity of purpose. You can outline the responsibilities of each member and identify potential dependencies and opportunities across departments, assisting the teams in aligning during execution.
Self-service tool
As we live in a busy world, it seems like 24 hours is not enough to accomplish all our tasks. A self-service tool provides users with various administrative and development functionality for managing and overseeing company operations.
To maximise time, product teams utilised asynchronous communication to update stakeholders on changes to their product roadmap. If you are working in a remote set-up, asynchronous is essential.
You can add unlimited viewers to your roadmap; stakeholders can access this product information in their free time. It is a self-serving tool that offers a fast and straightforward fix to customers' issues.
Free-up time
Product leaders are busy individuals; they serve as the middle-man between the company and executive stakeholders and advocate for the customer's needs. Sometimes, it is best to free up some time and spend it on urgent matters or other essential tasks.
Roadmaps can help you communicate with your team and executive stakeholders without facilitating meetings. The same can also create an environment that encourages two-way communication.
It helps keep you on track.
Your product roadmap serves as a guide that will stir you in the right direction and keep you on track. The product management team can share the desired outcome and generate key themes to put team members on the same page. Your product roadmap outlines different milestones to achieve throughout the production, and your team can examine the backlogs and see which ones best correspond to these key themes.
Check this similar article out: What is Product Design and How Does it Work?
A product backlog is a tactical tool that keeps track of the tasks at the task level to carry out the roadmap's strategic plan. It's a tool made to make sure you complete your tasks. Product backlog includes epics and user stories, workflow diagrams, user-interface design sketches, and mock-ups.
The strategic and tactical facets of product planning come together when the same team handles the product roadmap and backlog management.
As a result, the backlog can now concentrate on tactical work, such as implementing epics and user stories necessary to produce one or more releases.
The product roadmap will serve as a guide for you and your team to keep you on track. It is also a self-serving tool that provides your stakeholders with information regarding their product plans. Improve your team's productivity and encourage better collaboration by aligning your goals into one location that is immediately accessible to everyone.
About Pro-Dev
Pro-Dev is an industrial, product design, and manufacturing consultancy in Wellington, New Zealand. Among the services they offer is Project Management which promotes transparency and encourages collaboration and communication to implement processes effectively.