How to Create Your First Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is more than just a project timeline—it's a strategic communication tool that aligns your team, stakeholders, and customers around a shared vision of where your product is headed.

What is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product offering over time. It communicates the why and what behind what you're building.

Unlike a detailed project plan, a roadmap is:

• Strategic — focused on goals and outcomes, not just features
• Flexible — adapts as you learn and priorities shift
• Communicative — designed for audiences beyond just the product team

Step 1: Define Your Product Vision

Before diving into features and timelines, clarify your product vision. Ask yourself:

• What problem does your product solve?
• Who is your target customer?
• What makes your solution unique?

Your vision should be ambitious yet achievable, and should guide every decision you make about what goes on your roadmap.

Step 2: Identify Strategic Priorities

With your vision in place, define 3-5 strategic priorities for the next quarter or year. These are the high-level themes that will drive your roadmap.

Examples of strategic priorities:

• Improve user onboarding — Reduce time-to-value for new users
• Expand into enterprise — Add features for larger teams
• Increase retention — Focus on engagement and habit-forming features

Step 3: Gather and Prioritize Ideas

Now it's time to collect feature ideas and initiatives from across your organization. Sources might include:

• Customer feedback and support tickets
• Sales team requests
• Engineering technical debt items
• Competitor analysis
• User research insights

Use a prioritization framework like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) to rank these ideas.

Step 4: Map Ideas to a Timeline

Once you've prioritized your ideas, map them to a timeline. Consider:

• Now — What you're actively working on
• Next — What's coming up in the near term (1-3 months)
• Later — Longer-term initiatives (3-12 months)

Avoid committing to specific dates too far out—the further you look, the less certain things become.

Step 5: Choose the Right View

Different audiences need different views of your roadmap:

• Timeline view — Best for communicating delivery windows
• Kanban view — Great for tracking work in progress
• Hierarchy view — Shows how initiatives break down into smaller pieces
• List view — Efficient for bulk editing and status updates

Step 6: Share and Iterate

A roadmap is a living document. Share it broadly, gather feedback, and update it regularly as you learn more about your customers and market.

With wey, you can create shareable links in one click—no login required for stakeholders to view your roadmap.

Common Roadmap Mistakes to Avoid

1. Treating it as a commitment — A roadmap is a plan, not a promise
2. Too much detail — Keep it high-level and strategic
3. No alignment to goals — Every item should connect to a strategic priority
4. Set it and forget it — Review and update regularly

Getting Started with wey

Ready to build your first roadmap? Get started with wey — our strategic roadmapping tool designed for teams who think clearly about priorities.

Create beautiful, shareable roadmaps in minutes with our intuitive timeline, hierarchy, and kanban views. No complex setup required.