Product Development Roadmap: The First Step to Build An Amazing App
When you are going to develop a mobile app from scratch, you inevitably face the issue of converting your initial idea into a working implementation strategy. A product manager has a central role in this process: their mission is to make the work of all people involved in the product development synchronized and coherent. The first and the most important tool to meet this goal is a mobile app development roadmap or product development roadmap.
At Surf, we have been developing mobile apps for various industries since 2011, and we are sure that a high-quality product can be only created with a solid foundation laid in the roadmap.
What is a product development roadmap?
The product development roadmap is a strategic document that reflects the vision and the development plan for your product. It’s conceived as a dynamic summary, documenting each step at every stage of the development process. In simple words, the roadmap is a list of prioritized features or requirements of a product or service that also incorporates the timeline of their release.
Typically, a roadmap for mobile app development looks like a kind of a horizontal bar chart that simultaneously represents progress and timing for a number of initiatives and tasks. The most useful and easy to follow roadmaps should be flexible to enable constant editing. That’s why the most convenient way to compile them is to use roadmap tools and templates.
There are different types of roadmaps depending on the product type and stakeholders (who you create the roadmap for). Nevertheless, the development roadmap should include 8 basic elements:
- Vision. The description of the whole idea of the end-product. Typically, this part answers the questions about who the app is designed for and why, as well as what the final product should look like.
- Execution plan. The list of practical steps you should take to end up with the vision you’ve outlined.
- Practical goal. An objective that is planned to be reached after completing the execution stage. It’s critical to ensure that this goal can be measured by concrete metrics.
- Initiative. Broad themes that unite features that must be implemented in the end-product.
- Feature. A piece of a product, which is either part of functionality or a third-party application.
- Timeframes. Fixed or provisional timelines for delivering the whole product and its specific features.
- Status markers. Markers the team will use to evaluate the progress of product development.
- Metrics. The list of metrics that you will use to assess goals.
The process of building a mobile app has its specific pitfalls and deals with multiple iterations – that’s why a roadmap for mobile app development, as a key part of the whole project management, plays a crucial role in what the result will look like.
Read also: Mobile app marketing strategy by DesignRush
Why do you need a software product roadmap?
The roadmap for mobile app development serves several functions:
- To facilitate internal work on a product. In other words, the mobile app development roadmap plays a bridging role between the general idea of an app and aspired business goals by setting out a concrete plan for how to achieve these goals.
- To streamline communication with external stakeholders. This relates to all investors, contractors involved in the development process, as well as end-users.
- To make the strategy and the vision of the product understandable for the roadmap’s audience.
- To enable displaying of changes and advances of the product in line with market requirements.
- To prioritize particular units of development and set timelines for them.
Clearly and accurately compiled product development roadmap will help you to navigate through the whole process of product development: what your focus should be in the short-, medium- and long-term, what features of the app should be prioritized right now and how to manage stakeholders’ expectations during the project.
Below is the video streaming app roadmap example drafted by Surf in Google Sheets for one of our clients. The app was built on Flutter, and multiple teams were involved in the development, including designers, engineers and content marketing managers, that’s why the main task was to make it universal and easy to understand for different groups.
How to develop the product development roadmap: main steps
Before rushing into drafting the mobile app development roadmap and starting to visualize all the data you have, make sure you’ve gone through the following steps:
- You fully understand the key “why” of your product.
In other words, there is no point to start building a roadmap for mobile app development unless you don’t have an accurately defined product vision. To articulate the product vision, answer the questions below – this will help you systemize the image of the future app:
- What is the mission of your product?
- What goals do you want to achieve by developing it?
- What user problems is the app aimed to resolve?
- Why now is the best moment to develop this product?
At this stage, there is no need to specify all the details and features of the app. The main goal now is to identify why and for whom you are going to build this product, as well as make sure that it’s worth spending time and resources.
An app for the first online bank in Pakistan is exactly the case of a well-identified mission that resulted in an innovative product. The Client’ idea from the very start was to create a cutting-edge and highly practical service with a goal to promote banking services in Pakistan and make digital payments accessible for their target audience, millennials, being the most tech-savvy users. More about the case you can read here.
- You know who you’re writing the mobile app development roadmap for.
Defining the roadmap stakeholders is one of the basic things you should do before drafting it. Various teams and individuals are to some extent linked with the product, so your main goal is to communicate enough information to those groups. The roadmap stakeholders determine the type of the mobile app development roadmap, its content and details.
The roadmap stakeholders can be internal – the teams directly involved in the app development, for example, or external – the roadmap may be created for individuals who don’t participate in the production process.
Meanwhile, this division might seem too general when it comes to putting this classification into practice. For example, an internal product development roadmap can be designed for sales, marketing, or engineering teams. The roadmap for engineers will likely list the main features and progress on them, but it will not be useful enough for sales or marketing. So, a product manager can either compile several roadmaps and tailor them for different groups, or create a universal document that is a much rarer case.
- You identified the main features of the app and their exact functionality.
The product’s vision is the answer to the “why” question, and the list of features and their description is the “how” of your product, its main body. While making the list of features for the mobile app development roadmap, do not underestimate the role of prioritization. Define the necessary amount of resources for developing each of them and set timelines correlating with the preliminary launch date. Note that features’ descriptions should be detailed enough to give engineering teams the context they need to implement the best solution.
- You defined a comprehensive set of metrics to evaluate progress.
The ability to correctly measure current progress is the key to success in the mobile app development process. Based on the defined metrics, you should establish KPIs for all teams involved – this will help you understand what aspects should be in focus during different iterations. To keep your product development lean, it’s important to draft a master list of all features you want to include and relate them with appropriate metrics to monitor progress.
- You chose the necessary tools for creating the roadmap and picked up an appropriate format for the document.
Until recently, Excel was the leading tool for roadmapping, but now the market is literally flooded with various cloud-based product development roadmap tools. Most of the existing software can be easily scaled up for your project needs and enables quick updates. The most common and handy are OpenProject, Product Plan, Aha! and Roadmunk.
There are two approaches to the format: you can either build a traditional waterfall roadmap that implies a sequential model of planning, or an agile product development roadmap, which communicates a short-term plan for achieving product goals.
To connect all the dots regarding the difference between waterfall and agile approaches, look at the table below:
- You keep the information in the roadmap up to date.
As the mobile app development roadmap is intended to reflect progress in product development, you should keep it dynamic. This is crucially important to convey relevant information to all the teams working on a product and stakeholders, both internal and external.
Types of product development roadmaps
There are multiple ways to organize a mobile app development roadmap, so various approaches go beyond any established classifications. However, there are three most common types of roadmaps that help to generate better alignment to the development goals:
- Status-oriented or Now-Next-Later roadmap. This kind of roadmap allows all participants of the process to be on the same page without committing to any strict time frame. Statuses of features and tasks are divided into three columns — now, next, and later. This approach simplifies prioritization and allows easy shifts between the columns.
- Theme-oriented roadmap is suitable when you need to group all existing tasks into broader categories and monitor progress on them. Themes typically include concrete goals that make your roadmap for mobile app development easy to read and understand.
- Outcome-oriented roadmaps set outcomes instead of broad themes. In other words, it reflects the problem that will be resolved by a feature instead of the list of particular tasks. This type of roadmap is easier to understand for external stakeholders who are not typically interested in specific features your team is working on – the most valuable information for them is what issues will be fixed by concrete actions.
Bottom line
At Surf, creating a software product roadmap is an integral part of the app development projects: we always conduct preparatory work to align with clients product’s goals and strategy, preferred format, type of roadmap and required timeframes.
