Simon Sinek’s rise to fame is marked by his unwavering determination to challenge conventional thinking.
He consistently questions corporate practices and fearlessly presents bold opinions that disrupt the status quo.
In his book “Start with Why”, Simon Sinek boldly claims that the ‘Why’ behind your actions matters more than the ‘What’. This principle isn’t limited to leadership or personal motivation; it extends to every facet of the business, including product roadmaps.
Product roadmaps transcend mere slides or visuals; they serve as the linchpin for strategically aligning internal teams and external stakeholders with the product vision and strategy.
They act as the bridge that connects the visionary ‘Why’ with the practical ‘What’, bringing the envisioned goals within the realm of execution.
So how to create and present roadmaps effectively?
In this article, we’ll reveal the art of creating roadmap presentations that don’t just align internal teams and external users but also set the stage for a successful execution.
Limitations of relying on PowerPoint
During my early days in Product Management, I was introduced to PowerPoint for building roadmaps.
Our former product manager shared a bunch of Powerpoint templates with us and we loved the flexibility and versatility the tool provided.
However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that it had a number of limitations that we couldn’t ignore.
While it is a versatile tool for various presentation needs, it may not be the best fit for roadmap presentations.
Please look at the PowerPoint template above that I have frequently used to present roadmaps during the early days.
Maintenance challenges
Roadmaps often evolve with changing business priorities and require a more dynamic platform that can reflect real-time changes and updates.
Anyone who has used PowerPoint would know how easy it is to become disoriented by the misalignments of the visual elements and how hard it can get to maintain and update.
Moreover, given that the Powerpoint roadmaps always sit in their own silos, away from the tools used by the product development teams, any updates in the roadmap have to be manually translated into the development plans each time to ensure consistency.
Presentation challenges
Modern roadmaps are not just about displaying information but also about engaging the audience.
Powerpoint’s lack of interactive elements can make a roadmap feel one-dimensional, missing out on the depth and engagement that interactive platforms offer.
Consider you are presenting your product’s roadmap at your annual town hall. You might want to resort to multiple views of the visual product roadmap, starting with a bucketized view, then a timeline view, and maybe a private/public view for different types of audience. With Powerpoint, it would mean duplicating all the effort to create each view you need.
Unlike specialized roadmapping tools, Powerpoint presentations lacks the capability to prioritize items on the go, making it challenging to convey behind-the-scenes efforts for choosing certain work items to stakeholders.
Collaboration challenges
Most product teams share roadmaps with stakeholders and external users to get their feedback and input. But sharing a Powerpoint roadmap presentation is like sending a message in a bottle. You have no way of knowing who accessed it, how they interacted with it, or what parts caught their attention.
It also doesn’t allow users to provide qualitative feedback or upvote features directly on the roadmap.
This missed opportunity for engagement can be a significant blind spot and may lead to a disconnect between the product team and its users.
Relying solely on Powerpoint can be akin to using a compass in the age of GPS.
Recognizing these limitations and exploring specialized roadmapping tools can lead to more effective, engaging, and insightful presentations.
The dynamic, interactive, and collaborative nature of roadmaps demands a platform that can keep pace.
6 templates for product roadmap presentations
Each style and methodology of roadmapping guides the product’s voyage, ensuring that every stakeholder, internal and external, is privy to the course ahead, its landmarks, and its destinations.
Crafting your roadmap to echo both the intricacies your sales team and the broad strokes of your product’s journey ensures an informed, engaged, and collaborative voyage toward product success.
1. Kanban view
Netflix Roadmap, as taken from Gibson Hiddle’s blog
The Kanban View, with its intuitive design and inherent flexibility, serves as a potent tool for product roadmap presentation, ensuring tasks and initiatives are succinctly organized under buckets of time (monthly, quarterly or yearly), allowing stakeholders to clearly see where the development is headed in the future.
However, with a Kanban view, there is a risk of oversimplifying complex details as intrinsic dependencies and specific timelines may be underrepresented.
Additionally, the straightforward visual layout may also pose challenges when it comes to prioritization within each bucket, especially in larger and more complex product scenarios.
👉 Real-world Examples: Github Roadmap, Trello Roadmap, Netflix Roadmap
2. Now, Next, Later
The Now, Next, Later framework is an adaptation of the Kanban view and brings a high-level perspective to product roadmaps, distinctly categorizing items into immediate (Now), short-term (Next), and future (Later) buckets.
It acts as a telescope scanning horizons, providing insights and maintaining a focus that spans from present tasks to future endeavors without committing to exact timelines. It does so without binding itself to precise timelines. This flexibility is especially vital for startups, where the ability to adapt to rapid shifts in priority is essential. Now, Next, Later roadmap can server as a effective product roadmap presentation.
👉 Real-world Examples: Lasso Roadmap, ProductBoard Template
3. Calendar or Timeline-Based roadmap
The Timeline view of a product roadmap (or some people’s saying timeline roadmaps) provides a clear, logical outline of the product’s development cycle, aiding transparent communication and efficient resource management.
It effectively conveys the product’s chronological progression, presenting start and end dates and facilitating stakeholder understanding and anticipating project phases. It also captures task dependencies, offering a realistic view of the project’s progression and helping teams avoid bottlenecks and delays.
👉 Real-world Examples: Notion Template
4. Private and Public roadmap views
Private roadmaps function as the organizational blueprint, keeping detailed strategies, technical specs, and precise timelines shielded from external view. It ensures all internal teams are aligned with the developmental, marketing, and deployment strategy, offering a detailed, confidential space for open internal discussions and strategic planning.
On the flip side, Public roadmaps invite and incorporate user feedback, encouraging a community-driven development approach. They enable users to interact directly with the roadmap, voicing their preferences through upvotes and comments. This transparent strategy provides tangible data on user preferences and desires, aiding teams in prioritizing and refining features based on actual user input and demand.
Together, they facilitate a balanced development approach, harmonizing user involvement with technical teams and internal strategic alignment to navigate through the intricate path of product development.
👉 Real-world Examples: Usersnap Public Roadmap, Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap, Google Classroom Public Roadmap, Loom Public Roadmap, Airtable Public Roadmap
5. Roadmap swimlanes
Multifaceted organizations often employ multiple swimlanes to visualize parallel developments across different products or departments.
A Portfolio Roadmap brings together product development trajectories of varied, albeit interconnected products such as Google Search, Maps, Gmail and Drive.
This panoramic view enables business stakeholders and product managers to quickly apprehend the status, progress, and future plans for an entire portfolio, facilitating informed strategic decisions and efficient resource allocation across varied products.
Simultaneously, Department specific roadmap roadmaps carve out a dedicated lane for each department, such as Marketing team or Development team, to detail their particular journey, milestones, and activities. While providing a detailed breakdown of activities, they also offer a lens to visualize how each team’s efforts contribute to the overall product and organizational objectives.
👉 Real-world Examples: Aha! Template, Jenkins Roadmap
6. Goals-based roadmaps
Goals or outcome-based roadmaps adeptly center the strategic narrative on overarching objectives, minimizing the explicit focus on granular details.
This abstraction allows stakeholders to grasp the overarching strategy and direction without getting mired in the specifics of features, which may evolve over time.
By focusing primarily on outcomes, these roadmaps inherently embed resilience against the tides of technological changes and varying feedback, as they’re not tied to specific features or solutions that may need to shift in response to evolving contexts or insights.
👉 Real-world Examples: GO template, Airfocus Template, Miro template
Best practices and ideas for roadmap presentation
In the grand theater of business, a roadmap presentation is your spotlight moment.
It’s where visions are shared, strategies are unveiled, and futures are shaped.
Here are some tips on how to craft a roadmap presentation that’s both an informative guide and a work of art.
Tip #1 – Start with the ‘Why’
Apple, under the visionary leadership of Steve Jobs, always began with the ‘why’. Before diving into the intricacies of a product, they delved into its purpose.
Similarly, start your roadmap presentation by addressing the ‘why’. Why this product? Why now? This sets the stage for a compelling, memorable, and meaningful narrative itself.
For internal presentations, I have also found that starting a product roadmap presentation off with a refresher of the product’s strategy can help make your next couple of hours much more peaceful.
Tip #2 – Unveil the BTS work
Akin to the BTS episodes of any show on Netflix, sharing all the effort that went into production (the direction, the schedules, the travelling, the equipment, the retakes etc) makes the audience appreciate the end result more.
Therefore, it is always helpful to demonstrate the discovery process you followed for conducting your market research, brainstorming and validating ideas, generating usability reports, conducting focus groups, surveys etc. This adds credibility.
And never be shy to show the hiccups and the wrong turns during your journey. Because you never know, just like a Friend’s blooper reel, the retakes might find more traction with your audience than the actual episodes.
Tip #3 – Stay away from the sharks
Whether you are presenting to internal stakeholders or external users, both would be interesting to know your product’s positioning through your roadmap.
I recently attended a product fair where a CEO introduced his product roadmap with “think of it as AWS Cloud”, without differentiating it in any way. I spent the next 30 mins of the presentation connecting all their features with AWS Cloud features.
It is crucial to establish a differentiating factor against your competition and build your presentation around that. Tesla entered the automotive space several decades later than its competitors like Toyota, Ford, Ferrari and others. However, by differentiating itself as a leader in the EV space, it created a new market landscape for itself.
Tip #4 – Focus on the outcomes
The roadmap features you spent weeks fine-tuning all the details are great. However, the audience is mostly only interested in what it really means for them.
Therefore, in your presentation, it is critical to shift the focus from features to outcomes.
If it is the external users of the product, you need to focus on how the roadmap aligns with their needs. How does the roadmap solve their pain points? For example, adding the social login capability will allow you the flexibility of SSO, where you don’t have to remember an extra set of login credentials.
On the other side, if it is the executive stakeholders or the investors, the focus should be to present how each roadmap item would help achieve the key business metrics and goals. Using the same example, adding the social login will help reduce the drop-offs during registration and increase our user acquisition rate by 15%.
This perspective resonates more with stakeholders than merely going over the buy in the features list.
Tip #5 – The ending
Once again, I am a big Steve Jobs fan. The master of marketing that he was, leaving an impression on the audience was his forte.
He would always save the big picture and the biggest announcement for the end. His famous “One more thing…” technique has since been copied by many leaders across the industry to conclude their presentation on a high-note.
Leveraging feedback for roadmap presentation and varied board views of Usersnap
Feedback is the lifeblood of any product. Integrating feedback into your roadmap presentations ensures they remain relevant and aligned with user needs.
The importance of internal and external board views cannot be overstated.
While a public board view with upvoting engages customers and end-users, a limited board view ensures stakeholders are aligned, setting the stage for successful project execution. With the right tools, practices, and request feedback mechanisms, they can be the difference between product success and obscurity.
Usersnap’s varied board views offer a versatile way to present and gather feedback. Whether it’s the public portal for guest users or the limited board view for stakeholders, you can use the power of advanced filters to present different views of your roadmap to different users.
Conclusion
The variety of roadmap presentation styles is tailored to address specific product development needs and audience types. However, leveraging tools like Usersnap, which offer dynamic multiple views and capture customer feedback, can be instrumental in effectively presenting and adapting these roadmaps to various scenarios and stakeholder preferences.
Resolve issues faster with visual bug reporting.
Simplify and reduce issue & bug reporting efforts with screen recordings, screenshots, and annotations.
And if you’re ready to try out a visual bug tracking and feedback solution, Usersnap offers a free trial. Sign up today or book a demo with our feedback specialists.
