Agile is one of the most common forms of product management, but figuring out all the steps involved can be tricky. That's why we've put together this guide on building and implementing agile roadmaps to help you boost your workflow and stay on track.

Keep reading to find out the six key steps to building an agile product roadmap and our best practices to help you succeed.

What is an agile product roadmap?

Agile product roadmaps help you visualize and outline your company’s strategy for achieving your product vision. This includes all planned product changes and updates as well as how you plan to align with stakeholders and bring in ROI.

Agile roadmaps typically look different than traditional roadmaps, and are often organized by themes, key goals/objectives, and new features. These roadmaps are iterative instead of linear, and plot updates against more general, company-wide objectives and OKRs. In contrast, traditional product roadmaps are generally static and sequential, and list short-term inputs that lead to longer-term outputs. While traditional roadmaps focus on the specific steps and outputs necessary to achieve your product vision—often by specific dates and deadlines—Agile roadmaps communicate overall strategy and allow for more flexibility.

The focus on goals and objectives over features and dates is better suited to Agile teams and projects, where change is frequent and work is often driven by experimentation. As such, Agile roadmaps are best suited for Agile teams working on iterative, objective-driven projects, while traditional roadmaps are better suited for linear projects focused on deliverables and deadlines.

The benefits of agile product roadmaps

 Agile product roadmaps have many benefits, including:

• Stronger team confidence in their ability to make better, more strategic decisions
• Stronger confidence in your ability to bring the product to market by focusing on shorter iterations instead of the bigger picture
• Improved customer relations and customer satisfaction by being able to response quicker to changing user needs
• More flexibility and adaptability if you run into obstacles or roadblocks 

How to create an agile product roadmap in 6 steps

Let's go over the key steps to help you build the best agile roadmap possible.

Start with research and context-building

 Product roadmaps communicate your goals and priorities throughout product development, but they are also crucial for building support for your product plan throughout your company.

When creating a roadmap, you’ll need to consider who your audience will be. A product roadmap designed for your engineering team will look much different than one designed for stakeholders and executives. What’s important for your audience to understand?

Furthermore, it’s also a good idea to think about what extra context or background you might need to add to a specific roadmap in order to keep everyone on the same level of understanding. Your support and marketing teams may need more information than your product or development teams will, and you’ll need to keep that in mind. 

Decide on the desired outcomes

Agile product roadmaps are outcome-driven and focus on the changes you want to achieve to further your overall product strategy. The features or changes within these roadmaps are simply the vehicles to get there.

To figure out how to organize your roadmap, you’ll need to know what your desired outcomes are. What is your product or company trying to solve? This will help you figure out what your roadmap needs to focus on.

One of the best ways to figure out your desired outcomes is to analyze your competitors and your industry at large. What are customers looking for? What are your competitors doing, and what makes them successful?

Find out what problems need to be solved

Now that you’ve figured out what your desired outcomes, you need to decide what problems your product will solve for your users. What’s your niche in the market? What gaps does your product fill?

Much of this information can be pulled from market and competitor research, but customer feedback is also vital here. Listening to your customers and what they have to say—including what they like and dislike about your product—can help you figure out how to tailor your product strategy and what your final product should be.

Once you have this information, it can also be helpful to measure your desired outcomes and problems to solve against your product backlog. This will help you figure out what objectives to prioritize and which ones should be reconsidered.

Set a timeframe

All roadmaps, traditional and Agile alike, need time frames. While Agile roadmaps don’t need to be as precise in terms of deadlines, you’ll still need to figure out rough timeframes for each iteration to be completed.

This timeframe can change as needed, but try to set as realistic a deadline as you can. You can always look at previous iterations to get a better idea of how long you’ll need to complete the work. 

Organize problems into high-level themes

By now you should have a good idea of your desired outcomes and the problems you want to solve, but not much else. In order to sort your roadmap and make it more readable, you’ll need to visualize these problems in a flow from goals to potential solutions.

This can be done by organizing your problems into themes. Are there any over-arching patterns or similarities between problems? Do some of your problems easily group together?

You don’t need to order these groups yet, just make sure you have a few key themes for your roadmaps. 

Prioritize features and themes into initiatives

Now it’s time to order your themes into initiatives and decide how to prioritize them. There are many different prioritization frameworks to choose from. You could prioritize based on feasibility, desirability and viability, or effort/cost vs impact, or whatever else makes the most sense for your business.

Likewise, you could also score themes based on the RICE Method, which helps you prioritize items based on four factors: Reach (how many people the feature will affect in a given period), Impact (how much this feature will impact your goals), Confidence (how confident you are the feature will be successful) and Effort (how much time the feature will require from all product teams).

Once you've scored your themes based on this framework, multiple Reach, Impact and Confidence together and then divide that number by Effort. This will give you a measure of the total impact per time worked, giving you a quantitative metric to score themes off of.

Set metrics to measure success

So you’ve ordered your problems into themes and then into initiatives. But you still need to set a framework for measuring the success of each initiative, and that’s where metrics like quarterly OKRs (Outcomes and Key Results) come in.

OKRs help you keep your daily tasks within an Agile iteration tied to your overall product strategy. By knowing what you want to achieve in a given period of time as well as the key results you’re using to measure, you can figure out how much progress you’re making and whether or not you’re on the right track. For instance, you might want to increase customer loyalty by measuring customer churn and customer retention rates.

The feedback you get from each quarterly OKR will help you build your roadmap for the next quarter and so on, helping you better adapt your product in the process.

Review and align your roadmap with all teams

 Good product roadmaps require reflection, revision, and compromise. You likely have many different teams working on your product, and your roadmap will need to balance the needs of all of them. That’s why it’s important to collaborate with other internal teams and stakeholders as you build and refine your roadmap.

These groups can also give you invaluable feedback because they offer an outside opinion. Make sure you ask them what problems they see as the most urgent and high-priority, as well as anything else to consider about the industry and market at large.

Best practices for agile roadmaps

Here are some of our best tips and tricks to help set you up for success.

Preview your roadmap with trusted sources

 It’s always a good idea to get the opinions of those you trust before publishing or presenting your roadmap to others. They can give you a fresh perspective and point out things you may not have considered or would have otherwise missed. This can be the difference between a good roadmap and a great one.

Showing your roadmap to a select few before launch can also help you better tailor it to your target audience and refine your product-market fit.

Keep your narrative clear

Storytelling is an essential part of product management, and it’s a vital skill for anyone in the product world to have. Messy narratives can muddy up your roadmaps and make them unreadable, but bland, overly technical roadmaps can hurt your company, too.

You’ll need to find the right balance between the two. Add context and anecdotes when needed, but try to cut out fluff and unnecessary additives where you can as well.

Stay high-level

Agile roadmaps are much less detailed than traditional roadmaps, and if you’re not used to working in agile, it can be a bit of a learning curve. Try and stay high-level and focus on the themes and initiatives you’ve pulled out and prioritized instead of wasting time discussing all the details of individual features. You can go into more depth later if you need to.

Be open about what you don't know

There will always be uncertainties and variables within product management, and that’s okay. Embracing what you don’t know can actually help your company by creating honesty and trust with your customers.

Are there any areas where you might need to do more research or experimentation to validate ideas? Point them out. Whether you come back to these spots later before launch or leave them open for feedback from users or other teams working on your product, admitting what you don’t know is much better than pretending otherwise.  

Make sure your roadmap is accessible to everyone

Everyone should be able to view and understand your roadmap. It should be your product teams’ central source of information, and a common resource for stakeholders to stay up-to-date on your journey. While some parts of your roadmap may hold more meaning for certain groups, everyone should be able to look at the document and understand what the overall product strategy is and how much progress you’ve made, as defined by OKRs and other metrics.

Use product roadmap software to stay flexible

Roadmaps can be difficult to create from scratch, and a pain to update. That’s why customizable roadmap software can be a lifesaver for many new companies by making publishing and updating your roadmaps a breeze.

Using roadmap software like UserVitals’ roadmap feature can help you create a central place for information for both you and your customers by setting up a feedback loop. Our all-in-one feedback management platform helps you collect user feedback from around the web, but it helps you set up and update both a product roadmap and a changelog page as well to keep your customers updated on your product journey.

Roadmap platforms like UserVitals make it easy to add features to your roadmap and update them as priorities change. Plus, we also include feedback boxes so customers can let you know what features they’re most looking forward to and give their own opinions on what’s coming next.

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