New product management template: Strategic roadmap

Editor's note: Aha! Notebooks has been split into Aha! Knowledge and Aha! Whiteboards.

Are you a motivational speaker? Your initial answer is probably "no." But success in product management absolutely hinges on your ability to motivate a team to be its best. So even though you might not deliver speeches at a podium, you do need to galvanize team members — connecting their day-to-day work to the product goals and business objectives they impact.

Show the team where you are headed and how you plan to get there with a strategic roadmap. It can drive conversations about priorities and purpose.

Strategic roadmaps visualize the product goals and initiatives you will complete within a given time frame. This gives you a high-level view of the most important work — so you can then detail the epics, releases, and features that fall into each initiative.

These roadmaps are a valuable tool for gaining stakeholder alignment. You can show company leadership how your product strategy connects to business goals. You can also discuss priorities, resources, and dependencies with the cross-functional team that will deliver the work. Be sure to include marketing, sales, and customer support teams in these discussions — they need to know what is coming so they can promote and support all the great new things everyone is building.

Use the new strategic roadmap template in Aha! Notebooks to create a quick and beautiful visualization of your product plans.

Aha! Notebooks is perfect for early conceptual planning carried out in visual notes and whiteboards. However, consider using Aha! Roadmaps if you are looking for both conceptual and more structured strategic and roadmap planning.

This template is built in a collaborative whiteboard, which is especially helpful when you are in the early stages of strategic planning. Use the template to sketch out an initial roadmap, then invite stakeholders to provide feedback — they can add comments and questions directly to the whiteboard. As your plans take shape, you can promote items from your whiteboard into initiatives, epics, or features in Aha! Roadmaps to capture details and send work to the engineering team.

The strategic roadmap template is just one of nearly 100 templates available in all Aha! Notebooks plans. (Templates are also available in Aha! Roadmaps, Aha! Ideas, and Aha! Develop.) Each template was created by product development experts, is fully customizable, and is ready to use right now.

Sign up for a free 30-day trial or log into your Aha! account — then follow the best practices below:

1. Set your roadmap's timeline

Start by updating the template with your desired date range. Typically, strategic roadmaps span across quarters or months.

2. Add product goals

What do you need to do to make your product vision a reality? Your answer forms the basis of your product goals. Add these goals to your roadmap and adjust the size of the containers in the template as needed.

3. Build out the plan

Next, use the template to show how you will achieve your goals. Do this by adding initiatives, epics, or even important features within each container. In our example, we focused on three initiatives per goal and included prospective timing for each body of work.

4. Invite feedback

Share your roadmap and invite stakeholders to collaborate directly within the whiteboard. People can add inline comments or endorse concepts with emojis. Be sure to pass around a final version before moving to implementation.

Drive alignment and excitement around upcoming plans — so everyone knows what is expected and can deliver on it.

Depending on your team's needs, you might want to utilize additional roadmapping templates, including our portfolio roadmap, epics roadmap, and features roadmap templates. As with the strategic roadmap template above, any text-based item from a whiteboard can be converted into work records in Aha! Roadmaps.

Start a free trial today

Guided templates are available to all Aha! customers. Our suite of product development tools works seamlessly together to help teams turn raw concepts into valuable new capabilities — for customers and the business. Set strategy, crowdsource ideas, spark creativity, prioritize features, share roadmaps, manage releases, and plan development. Sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 700,000 product builders trust our software to build lovable products and be happy doing it.