I will argue that visual product roadmaps are one of the best ways to share your product vision with your stakeholders and get their alignment.
There are a million ways to represent your plan on paper—plain text, spreadsheets, and more. Visual roadmaps, however, take advantage of human biology's ability to comprehend visual information faster to ensure that everyone who has read your roadmap clearly understands what’s in your mind.
So, let’s understand the specifics of this type of roadmap and learn how to build one using your product roadmap software.
What Is a Visual Roadmap?
As the name implies, a visual roadmap is a form of product roadmap (or, in simpler terms, a product or project management plan) that relies on visual elements to communicate its content.
Unlike other types of roadmaps (e.g., spreadsheets), visual roadmaps are much lighter in terms of content quantity and rely on visual tricks (e.g., swimlanes, workflows) to show information that would otherwise be explained using long and hard-to-comprehend textual descriptions.
Visual Roadmap vs Other Roadmap Styles
Visual roadmaps are not the only way to represent your plan; there are also other formats that you can use for this purpose. Let us look at a couple of them and understand how they differ from the visual one.
- Text Roadmaps: As the name implies, these roadmaps rely heavily on written content to explain the details of your plan. There are rarely any visual elements in such a roadmap.
- Tabular Roadmaps: This is probably the second most popular type of roadmap after the visual one. In this case, you’re using spreadsheets and tables to show what’s planned.
- Timeline Roadmaps: They are technically visual roadmaps, too. However, their main focus is on representing the upcoming work chronologically.
Depending on the situation, you might prefer using one of these types instead of a visual one. Text roadmaps, for instance, are great for early-stage priority discussions in your messaging platform (e.g., a post in Slack). Timeline roadmaps, on the other hand, are valuable when your activities are time and deadline-sensitive (e.g., releasing before Black Friday).
Why Visual Roadmaps Are Important
Although different types of roadmaps can be used in different situations, I think the visual roadmap format is the most valuable.
Several key benefits make this format a must-have, including:
- Superior readability: Humans perceive visual information much better. So, the chances of people misinterpreting your plans are significantly lower when using a visual roadmap.
- Simplicity: Visual roadmaps, especially the agile ones, are usually lightweight regarding the information they contain. You will have the major features' names and a high-level timeline for them. This makes it easier for people to understand and remember what’s written in your roadmap.
- Accessibility: Thanks to its simplicity, more of your teammates are likely to read it in full and get aligned with your vision. After all, who wants to spend 30 minutes reading the 2,000-word text plan of yours? They are, however, very likely to spend 1-2 minutes reviewing the visual roadmap and understanding the direction their team is taking.
So, even if the other roadmap formats are great for certain situations, I still recommend creating a visual roadmap as the final deliverable of your planning process.
How to Create a Visual Roadmap
Creating a visual roadmap is fairly simple. There are only 5 key steps that you need to take to have one ready for your product:
- Understand your business goals and product vision: The functionality listed in your roadmap needs to help you reach these goals and move toward your vision. That’s why it’s important to define them first before proceeding with the roadmap.
- List key features: Your next step is gathering a list of features that will help you achieve your goals. They can be in the form of epics, user stories, or even feature ideas you still need to validate before starting the development process.
- Prioritize these features: There are two criteria for prioritization—user value and product strategy alignment. To understand the value, you can use the information you gather from user interviews, surveys, and analytics to decide the user value of each feature. For strategic alignment, review your long-term strategy to understand if each feature on your list is aligned with it.
- Get buy-in: Share your roadmap draft with your management, development teams, and other relevant people to get their feedback. After you incorporate this feedback, communicate the changes with everyone again to ensure that all of your stakeholders are aligned with your plan.
- Make the roadmap: Use either Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Jira, or one of the specialized product roadmap tools to build the visual representation of your roadmap.
This is the process in broad strokes, but we've also developed a guide on how to create a product roadmap that goes a bit more into detail. I also recommend you make the process easy on yourself by using specialized tools, which include interactive timeframes, product roadmap templates, integrations with task management tools, sprint visualizations, bottleneck analysis, and more.
Types Of Visual Roadmaps
A visual roadmap is not a single standard document that everyone uses. Instead, it is a generalized group of roadmap planning documents that heavily rely on visuals to communicate product goals.
There are, however, common categories of visual roadmaps that you might use in certain cases. Here are a couple of them.
- Gantt Chart: This is a more classical format that focuses on showing even the smallest tasks and defining the dependencies between each one of them.
- Kanban Board: A board with columns representing different development phases or timeframes (e.g., quarters).
- Infographics: A more visually-heavy variant of the roadmap that is popular for public roadmap presentations.
- Timelines: A visual roadmap shown on an X/Y axis where the X axis is the list of prioritized items and the Y axis is a timeline in weeks, months, or quarters.
Depending on the use case, you might want to pick a Gantt chart (lots of task dependencies), a Kanban board (lightweight agile development), infographics (investor pitch), or timelines (strategic plan presentation to team and stakeholders).
Tips for Creating and Managing Visual Roadmaps
Before I share examples of visual roadmaps in action, let me share a couple of handy tips that product managers use for building and managing product roadmaps.
- Simplicity: Visual roadmaps must be simple and contain little text and visual elements. The reason is readability. Visually heavy roadmaps are excruciatingly hard to read.
- Color coding: Use color codes to group similar elements on your roadmap. You can group them by product area (e.g., Android app), initiative (e.g., stability improvements), or category (e.g., technical debt).
- Regular updates: Roadmaps are living documents and will constantly change based on market conditions or internal factors. So, make sure to update your roadmap at least once a quarter.
- Specialized tools: There are plenty of free product roadmap tools that can make your life easier. They come with predefined templates, integrations with task management tools, and more.
Finally, remember that the number one goal of creating roadmaps is communication. So, once you have it done, make sure to share it with all relevant teammates and stakeholders.
Visual Roadmap Examples
Now, let’s better understand the concept of visual roadmaps by looking at a couple of product roadmap examples from different use cases.
Gantt Chart: Roadmaps are not always about showing your upcoming features. Sometimes, you need to create a roadmap for other product activities, too. This one, for instance, is a plan for launching your product.
Using a Gantt chart is perfect here, as product launch activities are heavily dependent on each other.
Kanban Board Roadmap: This is my favorite kind of roadmap considering its simplicity. It fits perfectly for the cases when you need to show the big picture to your development and product teams.
Timeline/Infographic Roadmap: As a product manager, you might work with a wide variety of roadmaps from other teams, apart from the product roadmap you’re creating. Here’s an example of a roadmap that you might work with.
This one is a mix between an infographic and a timeline roadmap since it still shows activities on a time axis but uses a more advanced visual style.
Visual Roadmap Templates
I always suggest that PMs use product roadmap templates to speed up their project roadmap creation process. Here are a couple of great templates that you can take advantage of:
- Agile roadmap from Craft.io.
- Multi-product portfolio template from Productplan.
- Generic business roadmap by Clickup.
- Technology roadmap template by Miro.
Most of these templates have dedicated sections for strategic goals, breakdowns by team members, and real-time updates.
Visual Communication Is Highly Effective
Visual roadmaps are arguably the most effective ways to communicate your product development vision with your team, stakeholders, and users. While each use case assumes a different visual format for your plan, all of them are easy to read and comprehend.
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