Know the difference between Product Roadmap & Technology roadmap

Know the difference between Product Roadmap & Technology roadmap

The term roadmap is thrown around quite a bit in the world of software development. While many people assume that it’s a single document, organizations often have different roadmaps for different purposes or audiences. The two most popular types of roadmaps are product roadmaps and technology roadmaps.

Let’s take a look at the differences between product vs technology roadmaps, as well as best practices for building and managing both of them.

What is meant by product roadmap?

Product roadmaps are typically built by product managers for stakeholders, customers, and other non-technical audiences. With a focus on high-level features and broad timelines, they show stakeholders progress towards a goal and customers what lies ahead. They help ensure that everyone is on the same page at a high level without getting into the weeds.

Product roadmaps start with an overarching strategy that defines why the product exists (e.g., target customers, customer requirements, and product vision). After collecting feedback from customer research, sales conversions, and other sources, the product manager creates a set of features that define what will be built to execute on business strategy and deliver value.

Examples or product roadmap items include:

• Adding shipping notifications to an e-commerce application.
• Creating a community leaderboard for an exercise application.
• Adding new sign-in systems for any type of application.

These product roadmap items should not focus on technology initiatives, or go into specific implementation details of technology solutions (e.g., what service to use to send shipping notifications or specific libraries to use for sign-in methods); rather, they are designed to provide a high-level overview of upcoming features that are prioritized based on subjective and objective metrics.

In long term, product roadmaps can be made public to show customers what’s coming and even enable them to vote on features. Trello boards (made public) are a popular way to implement public product roadmaps but organizations that prefer deeper integrations or customer-only access may want to use Roadmap Portal built on Jira service management. Thus following some product roadmap examples can help you figure out which one will work best for you. 

Amoeboids’ Roadmap Portal – Source: Amoeboids

What is meant by technology roadmap?

Creating a technology roadmap is typically done by the engineering team members, for the benefit of other teams in the organization. With a focus on technical details, they outline what internal team members must build to advance the product roadmap. They help engineering team members communicate the scope of what needs to be done to product managers that are responsible for the higher-level product roadmap.

Why do you need a technology roadmap?

Unlike product roadmaps, technology roadmaps are typically built using engineer-focused tools, such as Atlassian’s Jira. These tools enable product managers to correlate roadmap objectives with actual backlog items, burndown charts, and other tools to check the development status and assess the viability of completing them on time.

Jira-based Technology Roadmap – Source: Atlassian

The best technology roadmaps provide a high-level overview of what’s coming while avoiding the granular details of a product backlog. From a product management standpoint, they are a bridge between the product roadmap designed for non-technical stakeholders and the development backlog that contains individual features or bug fixes. 

Technology roadmaps also help ensure that everyone in the organization is working together. A technology roadmap example may include planned upgrades to language systems or frameworks that impact multiple engineering teams or plans to migrate between different service provider systems. This roadmap enhances communication to avoid excess dependencies and spiraling costs while improving the rate at which new technology is adopted.

How They Fit into the Development Process

Product vs technology roadmaps is designed to help guide the development process from a high level without getting into the nitty-gritty of the systems they work in. At their core, both types of roadmaps should also be guided by reason and defensible with a consistent set of metrics.

Product roadmaps should be the starting point for development efforts. Bringing together technical and business stakeholders, these roadmaps should be built based on an overarching strategy with a focus on providing value to the customer. Engineers should participate in a limited role to ensure that the technology roadmap example that they’ll create will take these factors into account – so that the project is feasible in terms of technology, time, and cost. They can follow product strategy examples to create the right framework.

Technology roadmaps are primarily driven by the engineering team. Using the product roadmap as a guide, these roadmaps are focused on deciding what languages, platforms, and dependencies are ideal, as well as how features will be implemented with them. They should ensure that the entire engineering team is on the same page at all times.

Actual development should still occur using a development backlog along with an Agile process. As features and bug fixes are deployed, the product and technology roadmaps should be updated to reflect that progress—typically by the product manager. Any changes to business decisions or concerns that arise can then be brought up in subsequent weekly or monthly meetings.

How do you create a technical plan?

The technical plan follows the technology roadmap and ensures the team members understand their course of action well. The more detailed technical plans are, the clearer the roles of individuals will be, and the easier it will be to map their roles and responsibilities to the goals of the organization.

A detailed technical plan contains a summary of the results expected, the standards and formats used, hardware and software requirements (changes), details about data usage, details about technical support and the experience it requires, and how to ensure continued availability of the solution.

The Bottom Line

Product vs technology roadmaps is essential parts of any software business. Product roadmaps help keep non-technical stakeholders on the same page at a high level while technology roadmaps help organize the implementation details for engineers. When combined, these two roadmaps help ensure that a project stays on time, on budget, and on track to achieve the long-term goals of the organization.