The ultimate roadmap planning guide for product teams
Everything you need to know to start building a roadmap
Last updated: November 2025
Learn the essentials of roadmapping for product teams — including benefits and common misconceptions. Plus, get real examples and tips for creating visual roadmaps that keep everyone aligned on what you plan to deliver and why. |
Starting a business? Building a new product? Leading a cross-functional project? No matter the goal, here is an absolute truth: If you want to succeed, you must have a bold vision and a solid plan for how you will achieve it. This is where roadmaps come in. They are visual representations of your strategic plans. When you are roadmap planning (or roadmapping), you:
Link your goals to detailed work
Display the time frame you aim to meet
Include resource, capacity, and risk potential so you can picture the work your team needs to do alongside a corresponding schedule
Roadmaps allow you to communicate plans to stakeholders and track progress against your objectives. And they help with more than just the product development process. We see businesses and teams of all kinds use the different types of roadmaps available in Aha! software, such as business, technology or IT, and marketing roadmaps. Keep reading to see those (and more examples).
This guide title includes the word "ultimate," so we will be thorough. If you only have a minute to skim, use these links to jump ahead and find exactly what you need:
What is roadmapping? Our definition and view on who creates roadmaps
Core roadmapping concepts Releases, epics, dependencies, and other terms
Benefits of creating a roadmap Top advantages of roadmapping
5 common roadmapping misconceptions What people get wrong about roadmaps
8 top roadmapping examples Sample roadmaps for different use cases
How to choose roadmapping software Our recommended roadmap tools
How to create a product roadmap Tips to building your first roadmap
Product roadmapping templates Resources to help you get started
Curious about Aha! Roadmaps? Join a demo.
This is an example of a starter roadmap in Aha! Roadmaps. It lets you quickly sketch out your plans by dragging and dropping records onto the roadmap. As you build it out, you are also building out the data that will help you accomplish it. Learn more.
What is roadmapping?
Roadmapping (or roadmap planning) brings strategy to life.. It helps you visualize what you want to accomplish and when, so you can turn high-level goals into an action plan for achieving them. First, define the actions and resources you need to make your vision a reality. Then, share your roadmap to keep teams aligned around upcoming goals and timelines.
Roadmap vs. project plan
Roadmap: A visualization of your strategic initiatives and the major areas of work you will pursue
Project plan: A supporting document that lays out what you must do to achieve those initiatives
Use them together ➡️ Define the high-level goals and show how you will accomplish them on your roadmap. Then, document the step-by-step actions you will take to reach those goals on the corresponding project plan.
Roadmap vs. strategy
Roadmap: A visual way to connect strategy to actual work and deliver against goals. It helps leaders define a workable plan their team can believe in and follow.
Strategy: The goals, initiatives, and big themes of work that will help you achieve both your vision and mission
Use them together ➡️ Set strategy first to provide focus and help you prioritize the work that will bring you closer to meeting your goals. Create roadmaps aligned with your strategy to define a workable plan your team can see, believe in, and follow.
Aha! Roadmaps provides multiple ways to create custom roadmaps.
Explore how to start using Aha! Roadmaps to align your product team and stakeholders. Learn to set strategy, prioritize features, and share compelling visual plans.
When evaluating whether a roadmap tool is right for you, consider the type of project you are working on and the specific needs of your company and teammates. Smaller teams or less mature organizations might want to start with populated templates before graduating to more advanced roadmapping software.
The tool you choose should let you link your work to the strategy, create different types of views, adjust as plans change, and share your roadmap easily. Some tools treat strategy as an afterthought, focusing more on project planning or tracking time. Unfortunately, these tools are unlikely to help you make a real impact. Having clear goals to work toward is key to successful strategic planning.
Related:
How to create a product roadmap
Product managers use roadmaps to coordinate a cross-functional product team around a common goal, such as the launch of a new product or a major release. Product roadmaps are particularly useful for communicating high-level product plans to company leadership, partners, and customers. There are five basic steps to building a product roadmap:
1. Define product strategy: Outline your product vision, goals, and initiatives. You might want to do more in-depth research — think: creating personas, writing product positioning, and doing competitive analysis — to inform your strategy and provide deeper context.
2. Review and evaluate potential features: You likely already have a list of ideas that could bring value to your product. These could be your own concepts, suggestions from teammates, or feedback from customers. You can use a variety of models to weigh the value of potential features, like a product value scorecard, and then add the strongest ones to your backlog.
3. Prioritize and define requirements: Break down the efforts that best support the strategy into smaller chunks of work. Some teams employ user story mapping to stay focused on delivering customer value. A user story map shows the journey of a user’s interactions with the product. You can evaluate which steps have the most benefit for the user, prioritize what should be built next, and define detailed requirements for engineering.
4. Organize into releases: It is now time to group your ranked list of features into themes or major initiatives and decide when you will release new functionality to customers. You might work cross-functionally with an engineering manager or scrum leader to make these decisions.
5. Choose your roadmap view: Most product roadmaps show major releases over a specific time frame and link those to goals and initiatives. You can adjust the type of information and level of detail you want to share based on your audience and roadmap tool. For example, you might want to include specific features or cross-functional dependencies that will impact your plan.
Product roadmapping templates
Roadmaps are incredibly useful for product teams, but they can be challenging to build from scratch or manually update. We offer several roadmap templates to get you started:
Our free downloadable roadmaps provide you with documents that can be used to get started quickly in PowerPoint, Excel, or Word.
Try out our whiteboard functionality with several easy-to-use roadmapping templates.
For more robust roadmaps that include release plans and feature requirements, Aha! Roadmaps has several built-in templates available.
FAQs about roadmaps
To answer the "what," "when," and "why" of your plans, you will want to include a variety of components on your roadmap: goals and initiatives, releases and milestones, epics and features, timelines, and dependencies across interrelated work. In order to make your roadmap visually compelling, you will also want to use illustrated components such as progress bars, colors, checkmarks, and other symbols. This helps you quickly and clearly communicate the status of work or important dates and milestones.
If you are new to roadmapping, it might be tempting to add every possible feature or idea to your roadmap. But a roadmap is a strategic document. Aim to connect the team's efforts to the overall strategy, and keep your roadmap separate from backlogs or lists of customer requests. Other common roadmapping mistakes?
Not devoting regular time to updating the roadmap as plans or dates shift
Not tailoring the information you present on your roadmap to different audiences
Feeling pressure to commit to exact dates rather than planning in broader time frames
It depends on several factors such as your organization's type, the maturity of your offering, market conditions, and the kind of roadmap you are building. For example, a product builder at a fast-paced startup might create plans quarterly and update a features roadmap every week. A product manager at a large healthcare organization might update the strategic roadmap only once a year. What matters is that you adjust your roadmap when dates, plans, and team capacity change. This helps everyone understand exactly what you are working toward and why it matters.
Read more
What is roadmap software? Key features of roadmap tools
How do you build a successful product? It starts with a breakthrough idea to solve a real problem.
Use our product roadmap template
Show the direction of your product and the work needed to turn product vision into reality
What's new with Aha! Roadmaps?
Learn about the latest enhancements and new functionality available in Aha! Roadmaps.
