Best Product Roadmap Free Template In October 2021
It's simple to capture and share your product plans with the help of roadmap templates. They let you to rapidly visualize product goals and initiatives, as well as planned work that supports your product strategy and a timeframe for when the work will be completed.
A product roadmap is a visual representation of your product's plans, how it will achieve a certain set of business goals. The roadmap shows where your product is going and how much work it will take to get there.
Internal teams and external stakeholders, such as partners or customers, use roadmaps to communicate product direction and progress. Product teams can also use roadmaps to compare fresh requests for functionality to the strategic direction and work that has previously been planned.
10 Most Common Free Templates For Product Roadmap
Every roadmap shows work groups and link points. Some roadmaps are designed to support high-level goals by focusing on product initiatives or large-scale undertakings. Others focus on the status of upcoming epics or feature films. It's crucial to evaluate who the roadmap is for, what you want to communicate, and what information you'll include when deciding which template to employ.
Portfolio Roadmap Templates
Do you have a lot of items to manage? Portfolio roadmaps are ideal for presenting all of your upcoming product releases in one place. They're especially important when you need to give leadership or advisory boards a strategic overview of your plan. They also assist internal teams in understanding how their plans interact with those of other teams.
The template below depicts the release schedule for each product. To show how releases relate to key product initiatives, enlarge each swimlane.
Goals Roadmap Templates
Use an objectives roadmap to visualize your high-level company or product goals. It's perfect for giving a single-view summary of strategic goals and when they'll be achieved. It comes in handy when you need to get executives on board with your product plan and deliver status updates. You may also utilize an objectives roadmap to convey with internal teams the large picture context of what needs to be completed.
The schedule for working on and finishing your goals is shown in the template below. By altering the color of the bar, you can keep track of the progress of each target.
Initiatives Roadmap Templates
Your strategic product initiatives are represented by your initiative roadmaps. You can show the high-level efforts you'll need to make to meet your objectives. When you need to showcase planned efforts or provide progress updates to executives and other stakeholders, use these roadmaps. Internal teams can use these roadmaps to understand how releases fit into the larger company strategy and how to move the product forward.
The timeframe for completing initiatives and how each connects to high-level goals are shown in the template below. By altering the color of the bar, you can keep track of the status of each initiative.
Releases Roadmap Templates
Release roadmaps aid in the planning of product launches. They're useful for highlighting critical actions, such as phases and tasks, that must take place in order to bring your product to market. These roadmaps can also be used to communicate the major features that will be provided. When you need to coordinate release operations with other teams like marketing, sales, and customer service, use them. They bring everyone's attention to what's coming up, what needs to be done, and when it has to be done.
The major phases and tasks that make up the overall release plan are depicted using a Gantt chart in this template. By altering the color of the bar, you can keep track of the status of each assignment.
Epics Roadmap Templates
Epics are used in this roadmap to signify major projects or essential features that can't usually be delivered in a single release. When you need to explain critical areas of attention to executives and other stakeholders, this roadmap comes in handy. Because you can clearly identify how incoming features (or user stories) relate to overarching epics, you can utilize an epics roadmap to drive backlog prioritizing decisions.
The timescale for deploying planned epics is depicted in this roadmap template. By altering the color of the bar, you can keep track of the state of each epic. You may also overlay releases on top of each epic to see how it will be distributed in stages.
Features Roadmap Templates
With a features roadmap, you can show the timeline for providing new features. This is ideal for displaying strategic features that will be completed in the next three to four months. It's also useful when you need to give internal teams like marketing, sales, and customer service more information about what's coming. A features roadmap is useful for discussing near-term product plans for teams that use a continuous deployment approach.
This template depicts the three-month timeline for implementing features. By altering the color of the bar, you can keep track of the state of each function.
Agile Roadmap Template
Agile roadmaps are used by agile teams who need to express a high-level product strategy. To unify leaders and stakeholders around the product's direction, use swimlanes to highlight how epics match with strategic themes. Agile roadmaps with swimlanes also assist the technical team in understanding how their day-to-day work relates to the overall strategy
Scrum Roadmap Template
This roadmap is intended for scrum-methodology-based engineering teams. It depicts how user stories will be used in future sprints or iterations. This is useful for updating internal teams on progress or establishing a timeline for when new working software will be demonstrated in sprint demos.
Kanban Roadmap Template
This is the roadmap you should use if your team uses the kanban process. It displays features that have been completed, are now in development, will be released soon, or will be released in the future. When you need to set expectations with executives, stakeholders, and internal teams but don't want to commit to a precise timeline, this is the tool to use. The color of the features can be changed to classify them by initiative or strategic theme.
Scaled Agile Framework® (Safe) Roadmap
If your company is implementing SAFe, use this roadmap. This six-month roadmap will help you visualize your Program Increment (PI) milestones and objectives. It's ideal for providing executives with visibility into the current PI's deliverables and forecasting future PIs. It also ensures that near-term strategies are in line with overall corporate priorities before committing to PIs.
Free Template For Product Roadmap In PowerPoint
Free templatesfor product roadmaps are useful visual aids for communicating your business vision to clients and executives. However, as useful as they are, building them is a time-consuming and difficult task. You can spend less time writing your roadmap and more time managing your project using our pre-built templates.
On those sites, you'll discover the most frequent roadmap templates for your next stakeholder meeting, each of which has been produced in two versions for usage with your standard MS Office tools:
Officetimeline
Slideteam
Aha.io
Fppt.com
Best Free Template For Product Roadmap To Download
A product roadmap is a tool for forecasting the development, milestones, budget, and timetable of a product, as well as aligning stakeholder expectations. You can start with a product roadmap template to save time and ensure you include all of the necessary information.
In Smartsheet, a work execution platform that helps you to better plan and manage product development with real-time collaboration and task automation, we've also supplied free, customizable product roadmap templates.
Smartsheet
Roadmunk
Nira
Template
Hubspot
Venngage
How Do I Create A Product Roadmap Template?
Every product manager's job includes developing a product roadmap.
Roadmaps are critical for keeping the product development process on track. They make sure that your day-to-day responsibilities are in line with your overall business plan and contribute to it.
A product roadmap is structured similarly to a Gantt chart, which is a horizontal bar chart that shows the duration and scheduling of multiple projects or initiatives in one spot.
Because roadmaps should be flexible, ever-evolving documents, it's ideal to create them with strategic roadmap templates and revise them in a product roadmapping tool with more flexibility (so they're easier to alter and update when priorities shift). Your product roadmap should include a clear timeline, projects within that timeline, and the departments responsible for each project.
The tasks in this product roadmap template are divided into releases, and the tasks inside each release are ordered. Let's have a look at how to create a product roadmap.
Planning A Product Roadmap
You'll need to figure out two essential factors before moving on to the visualization stage of roadmapping: who you're building the roadmap for and how far into the future you want to plan.
This product launch roadmap template acts as a countdown to launch, with phase one containing the majority of the planning. Its one-of-a-kind gradient design is most likely for the creative industry.
Because different audiences will have very varied demands, the content and presentation of your plan must be adjusted to them.
External stakeholders, for example, will almost certainly desire a high-level overview of strategic initiatives, which should be planned out across several quarters to a few years. They may be more interested in broad time horizons, such as near term, midterm, and long term, as seen in this product plan template.
Internal product team members, on the other hand, will require a more detailed picture of certain features and tasks. Instead of years, it's usually better to plan these out over a few weeks or months.
The timescale must be fair in addition to aligning with the needs of your audience. It must be long enough to achieve major project developments while yet being short enough to estimate accurate timelines.
Creating product roadmaps by year, quarter, month, or sprint is normal procedure. The quarters are divided in this project roadmap template.
You may begin putting the remaining pieces of the product development puzzle together once you've identified your target customer and set an acceptable deadline. This includes the following:
- Goals and initiatives at a high level
- Tasks at a low level and their time requirements
- Prioritize your tasks
- Important dates to remember
- Dependencies between tasks
You're ready to start constructing your product roadmap once you've listed all of those critical components.
Creating A Product Roadmap
A product plan is normally in the form of a Gantt chart, as I indicated earlier.
Gantt charts are horizontal bar charts that show activities, tasks, or goals on the y-axis and dates on the x-axis. Each bar in the graph represents a task, and it spans from the task start date to the task end date (from left to right) to show the task's duration and timing.
In four simple steps, you can design a professional product roadmap from scratch:
Add a bar for each task or activity:
Begin by laying down your timetable from left to right, dividing it into days, weeks, months, and quarters. Then, for each planned task, add a bar. Begin each bar at the task's scheduled start date and extend it to the task's expected deadline.Later on, I'll discuss a situation where you might want to modify bar height, but in most circumstances, you'll want to keep the height of each bar consistent between activities.
Group bars by team or initiative:
Then, within your assignments, make some visual categories. Task groupings, often known as "swimlanes," are used to add hierarchy and increase readability to Gantt charts and roadmaps.
The task groupings you use will be determined by your company's needs and objectives.Tasks should be grouped by team if you're trying to coordinate the actions of numerous teams in one roadmap. Tasks can be categorized by initiative if the roadmap is focused on higher-level product goals.Add whitespace between groups, regardless of the grouping criterion, to make them apparent at a glance.
Stack bars by feature:
Sequential tasks from the same initiative should be listed in the same order. This helps to save space while also indicating task interdependence.
Sort bars by start date or priority:
It's up to you to arrange your bars once they're stacked. Because we read from left to right and top to bottom, it's a good idea to put the most recent projects (or prioritized initiatives) at the top.
Designing A Product Roadmap
Use color to categorize tasks by status, or priority.
Color is best used in a product roadmap to represent crucial information about each task, such as its status or priority level.
Use color to categorize jobs into groupings that aren't already stated elsewhere for optimum information density. Color is used to help divide the project phases in this product roadmap template.
Our jobs, for example, are already grouped by team in the example chart above. We may add another level of information by categorizing jobs by status using color (e.g. planned, approved, in development, or completed).
Use Bar Fill Level To Indicate Task Progress
Treating each bar as a tiny progress bar is another approach to add extra information. Each bar's percent fill can be used to reflect the task's level of completion.
Use Arrows To Indicate Dependencies
In a similar way to a flow chart, lines and arrows occur in roadmaps to highlight links between related tasks.
They're most commonly used to show task interdependence. That is, an arrow begins with a task that must be done before the task on which it will end begins.
Use Diamonds To Represent Milestones
The diamond is another common Gantt chart symbol, and it's used to signify important project milestones like release, review, and sign-off dates. Any event with no duration (that is, any event that cannot be represented by a bar on the roadmap) can be considered a milestone.
Milestones are significant project checkpoints that should be prominently displayed against the task bars. To make them stand out, style them in bright colors like red, black, or dark grey:
Use A Dotted Line To Indicate The Current Date
A visual indicator of the current date can be useful as a comparator for task start and end dates.
It's simple to compare dates across all activities by using a light dotted line that runs from top to bottom.
Use Bold Outlines To Highlight Critical Tasks Or Paths
A critical route is a set of actions that have a direct impact on the completion date of your project.
Use a single highlight color to delineate activities and accentuate dependency arrows if you want to bring more attention to a vital path in your roadmap.
Eliminate Unnecessary Detail
My final piece of advice for creating a product roadmap is to leave out any small details or tasks. The most effective roadmaps emphasize broad ideas rather than task-specific information.
How Do You Structure A Free Template For Product Roadmap?
Before you start working on your product roadmap, you need to figure out what business goals your efforts will support and what projects you'll invest in to achieve those goals. You can decide which releases and features are best aligned after you have a high-level product plan, then visualize everything on a timetable.
The five main steps to creating a roadmap are as follows:
Define The Strategy
The "why" of what you'll construct is strategy. Set your product's vision, goals, and initiatives, as well as how they will assist your company's broader aims. A good product vision captures the critical information that the team needs to know in order to establish and retain a competitive edge. This section contains information about who your customers are, what they require, and how you plan to sell your product.
Review And Manage Ideas
The easiest way to think about consumer demands is to prioritize them. This can be accomplished by scoring ideas based on metrics that are relevant to your approach. Scoring removes bias from the idea review process and allows the most impactful ideas to be prioritized higher.
Define Features And Requirements
If strategy is the "why," features are the "what," with your development team determining the "how." Determine which features are most beneficial to your strategy. Create user stories and detailed requirements to provide engineering teams with the information they need to implement the best solution.
Organize Into Releases
Now it's time to group those features into themes. Epics can also be used by agile teams to organize large projects. After you've sorted everything out, you may schedule releases. These might be categorized based on a particular launch or your development capacity.
How Do I Create A Roadmap For A Product In Excel?
Create a new sheet.
Set the printable area to an A4.
Set the timeline alon the top.
Setup your swim lanes in alternating shades of light grey
Draw rectangles for your project items, within each swim lane.
Set the colour of your project items to Red, Amber or Green depending on risk status.
Add comments where you want to draw items to attention.
Add a legend.
How Do I Create A Roadmap In Word?
In Word, select the App launcher > All apps > Project to open Project Home.
Select Create new > Roadmap.
Click and name your roadmap.
Final Words
It's simple to capture and share your product plans with the help of roadmap templates. They let you to rapidly visualize product goals and initiatives, as well as planned work that supports your product strategy and a timeframe for when the work will be completed.
About The Authors
Steve Martins- I am a certified graphic designer and I earned my bachelor’s degree in Communication Design. I worked with many brands like Uniqlo and Huawei but also independent smaller Barcelonian brands like Caravelle and Madrid’s Hola Coffee and I have completed over 2000 projects in the last 5 years.