A successful product directly depends on the development process, which is very tricky because it continues for a long period. The process is affected by various factors that are not always possible to micromanage. This necessitates the need for creating a crystal clear document that records the entire product creation journey eliminating confusion so that everyone remains on the same page. A product roadmap is a strategic document that coherently records the product and its development life cycle, the milestone achieved, and the current product status. The roadmap is like a guiding tool for the team members, indicating key milestones, due dates, ongoing activities, etc. They organize everything in one place, and anyone, at a glance, can understand the project journey and their role in the development process.
How do Product Roadmaps Work?
The product roadmaps are generally designed and maintained by a product manager and are accessible to all the team members and stakeholders, of course, with conditions imposed. Depending on why they are addressed, they can be granular, providing even the most diminutive details of the product creation process. On the other hand, they can be designed to provide an overview of the product generation journey and the upcoming milestones. The product roadmaps document the product creation process by breaking the project strategy into well-defined blocks. The team members to visually understand the development process, completed modules, ongoing and upcoming tasks, and who is responsible for what. Needless to say, the roadmaps precisely identify the risks much earlier by pointing out the dependencies which can be dealt with systematically. Undoubtedly, the product roadmaps align the team members improving productivity, but they can be very messy to design and update, especially in large team sizes. Here, many people may be in charge of maintaining the roadmaps, which can further complicate the process. There arises the need for proper roadmap creation tools to automate roadmap creation and management processes. There are tons of roadmap creation tools in the market that claim to help your organization handle the tasks, but not all of them fulfill the promise and may lack crucial features. Below is the list of features you should never miss out on when picking the product roadmap software for your organization.
Features to look for in a Product Roadmap Software
When looking for the best roadmap software for your business, make sure that it offers the following features:
Clean, Intuitive user interface with a decent number of pre-designed roadmap templates. Flexibility to present different views to different team members or stakeholders. Ability to collaborate and share roadmaps with the team members. Integration support for project management software like Asana, Slack, Jira, and GitHub. The software should be easy to learn and should offer extensive customer support.
Now that you have an idea of what competent roadmap software looks like let’s proceed to explore some of the most robust options available.
Monday
Monday is an award-winning and robust product management software equipped with powerful features to help teams reach every milestone of the product journey. The tool helps plan product roadmaps that support agile workflow configurations and allows detailed data visualization. It is an apt tool appealing to teams of all sizes looking to plan, track and manage tasks and workflow. Monday embodies a beautiful and intuitive user interface stuffed with interesting collaboration features like comments, @-tagging, and attachments that will prove to be useful for all product team sizes. The software comes with visual and flexible features to assist teams needing an agile workflow to collaborate on projects. The availability of 24/7 support makes using this software easier. Monday offers the following features to accelerate the product-building process:
Syncs all the development and collaboration tools in real-time Create flexible workflows that guide the process from conceptualization to product launch Tailor the product development process around a unique product strategy. Supports integration with project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Jira.
Wrike
Wrike greatly simplifies the idea of managing tasks and projects by allowing collaboration between team members to help construct customer-driven roadmaps. The software maintains complete visibility of the product creation process by ensuring that the departments sync and share the progress of each stage and completely align with the objectives. Wrike accelerates the product journey by helping you visualize each milestone you achieve with more thorough planning. Wrike helps plan the following tasks effortlessly:
It enables versatility by allowing you to choose a new approach for a new team or project. Customizable Gantt charts empower the team members to visualize each roadmap stage. Facilitates the stakeholders to examine the progress in real-time. The centralized calendar keeps all the departments in sync and adds layers to avoid work clashes. Displays the product launch priorities segregated by week and minimize potential delays.
ClickUp
ClickUp empowers the teams to create strategic timelines that encourage better team collaboration required to achieve the desired goal. The platform offers a custom field that can be customized for adding milestones, costs, and key contacts if you wish to create tailored roadmaps. The interface is clean and clutter-free, and all your tasks are organized in one place, making it easier to work and collaborate with the team members from a centralized place. Let’s see what all ClickUp has to offer:
Gantt Charts depict overlaps, dependencies, timelines, and releases, helping you identify bottlenecks and risks much earlier. Set milestones and time schedules for your team members to finish their tasks on time. The robust reporting module precisely measures the efficiency of teammates and predicts the achievable goals in a given timeframe. Save the old roadmaps as templates that retain your details, attachments, due dates, comments, and all the necessary information and reuse them later on. Share roadmaps with the clients or external stakeholders and control their access by assigning permissions.
RoadMunk
Brands like Microsoft, Dell, and Hulu, streamline the product development cycle using the customer-driven roadmap by RoadMunk. The end-to-end roadmap tool effectively captures the customer’s feedback to prioritize what the team should work on next. RoadMunk is easy to use and empowers you to create boardroom-ready roadmaps in just a few minutes. RoadMunk effectively communicates your strategy through the following features:
More than 35 fully customizable templates supporting timeline view and swimlane view Easily export your roadmap designs into URL, PNG, and HTML formats and share them with the stakeholders. Capture and store feedback from your customers or support teams directly into the tool and use it to fuel the roadmap.
ProductPlan
Use ProductPlan as an all-in-one platform for designing a winning strategy and opportunities into a roadmap to gain a competitive advantage. It offers a holistic view of your product strategy, giving valuable insights into real business outcomes. ProductPlan enables you to perform the following functions:
Create multiple roadmaps portfolio for different product lines viewable from a single platform. Use custom views and filters to control the audiences’ access to the information. Flexible layout options allow the teams to visualize the deadlines and view the data as a list. Scale and streamline the product workflows for building roadmaps, prioritizing ideas, and launching new products. Use the roadmap highlights to visualize how successful your strategy is and what needs improvement. Integrations with third-party apps allow data syncing between other tools, and REST API enables you to build a custom integration.
ProductBoard
Moving on, we have ProductBoard, a road mapping software that efficiently aligns everyone, including team members and stakeholders, around the product roadmap. The tool results in agile and highly customizable product roadmaps largely driven by customer feedback and stakeholder needs. The roadmap generation tool helps group the product features based on release, sprint, broad time horizons, or now/next/later buckets. This way, it helps track the dependencies needed to mitigate risks much earlier. ProductBoard ensures that the customers are the center of the roadmap creation strategy hence offering unrestricted team access to the customer’s feedback. The tool helps keep the development team in sync by offering integrations to tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Trello, and Pivotal Tracker. Other functions are as follows:
Dynamically organize, create, & update roadmaps Customize roadmap structure to develop detailed release plans A detailed timeline helps visualize when to start and finish working on tasks and initiatives.
Airfocus
Providing a comprehensive solution for the project teams to manage and communicate the strategy, Airfocus definitely needs a mention on the list. This modern tool helps the team members prioritize their work and build roadmaps based on the feedback provided by the customers. The platform offers integration with several project management apps like Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, Shortcut, and more, enabling you to tackle specific problems like prioritization and feedback gathering. Airfocus aligns everyone to the vision by building uncomplicated product roadmaps and facilitating collaboration with team members, products, and other units of interlinked workspaces. It enables the teams to visualize the dependency between the different components, thus identifying risks and planning objectives and milestones better. Airfocus also provides rich templates, highly customizable to meet all of your product management needs.
TogglPlan
TogglPlan portrays a crystal clear view of product roadmaps to help build better products. It brings transparency to the work environment by letting everyone know what tasks someone is working on and what milestones need to be achieved. TogglPlan helps with the following:
Color-coded project timelines help identify the progress of assigned tasks in a single glance. Easily share the project plans with anyone at a button click, including the external stakeholders. The drag-and-drop editor helps design the roadmaps in minutes without any requirement for external training. Kanban boards view segment tasks by their current status, ensuring no task gets missed. Allow data import from spreadsheets when switching from other tools like Asana or Trello to help get started quickly.
Aha!
Aha! makes the road mapping capabilities accessible to everyone thanks to its straightforward features that get tasks done in no time. The platform offers better features than other roadmap creation tools; it links goals and tasks initiatives directly to the product releases, epics, and other components, with the drag-and-drop technique to depict strategic alignment. The platform offers six different template designs for varied product needs, which can be customized easily without requiring expertise for roadmap designing. Roadmaps are not an important document for the team members; it is extremely easy to share them with the stakeholders and customers as a PDF, image, or secure webpage. Aha! Strives to bring all the project-related aspects on a single platform for easy accessibility and management purposes. Customer insights and feedback are built right into the tool to derive inspiration and implement them in the next release.
ProPad
Let’s end with ProPad, a decade-old project management software featuring an extremely intuitive and visual interface. Customizable visual charts on the platform help the team members prioritize tasks and show their progress. The permission settings can be configured to restrict unimportant data from external stakeholders. ProPad roadmap software primarily follows the global lean product roadmap approach. This connects the roadmap tracks with the objectives and key results (OKRs) and contextualizes every ongoing task. ProPad supports Azure DevOps, Dropbox, GitHub, Trello, Slack, and Salesforce integration and is also available as a Chrome extension. Apart from this, they also offer API access and custom webhooks for further accessibility.
Key Takeaways
An hour of planning can save you ten hours of doing. This especially holds in product development scenarios. The product roadmap software outlined above will help streamline the product development journey by keeping everyone in the loop. You may also explore some best project management software for SMBs.
