What is Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap is a sequenced plan of what a product will do next and why, grouped by outcome rather than by feature list. A useful roadmap names the problem each release solves and states what is deliberately not being built yet, because an unwritten "not now" tends to be heard as "soon".
- Category
- Product & Delivery
- Also called
- Roadmap
- In our work
- Product strategyProduct growth
The useful distinction is between a roadmap and a release schedule. Precision about dates is honest for the next few weeks and increasingly fictional beyond that, which is why many teams group work into now, next and later instead of pinning quarters to features. Committing to a date twelve months out mostly commits a future team to a decision made without the information they will have by then.
A roadmap earns its place as a record of prioritisation rather than as a list of promises. The valuable part is the reasoning: why the reporting module comes before the mobile app, what evidence put it there, and what would move it back. A roadmap written once at kickoff and never revisited becomes a wish list the team quietly stops consulting — worse than having none, because it still shapes expectations.
Where it comes up.
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Related terms.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Product & DeliveryA minimum viable product is the smallest version of a product that delivers real value to a real user and returns evidence about whether the idea works.
Sprint
Product & DeliveryA sprint is a fixed working period, commonly one or two weeks, in which a development team commits to a defined set of work and ends with something demonstrable.
Scope Creep
Product & DeliveryScope creep is the gradual expansion of a project’s requirements after the scope is agreed, usually through small additions that each seem too minor to renegotiate.
Minimum Scalable Product (MSP)
Product & DeliveryA minimum scalable product is a first release built narrow in features but sound in architecture, so the same codebase carries the product from launch through growth without a rewrite.
Scoping a project?
Reading definitions because you are scoping a project? Skip ahead and just ask.