Need to quickly create a product roadmap? Use our free product roadmap template to build and share revenue-maximizing roadmaps in 5 easy steps.
Need to quickly create a product roadmap? Get started with our free product roadmap template.
Customize the template and easily share it with stakeholders by signing up for a free Ignition account.
Build your roadmap in Ignition.
Your product team already has tons of ideas for what to build next.
Now, you just need to articulate it all.
Use the AI-powered product roadmap template above to create a structured plan, collaborate with team members, and generate a visual asset you can share privately and publicly.
Our product roadmap template has best practices and automation built-in to save you time from having to constantly update your roadmap with ideas from customer insights.
Wondering how to use this template to prioritize roadmap items with the highest business impact? That’s what the rest of this article will help you with.
Stay tuned for 5 steps to create a customer-centric, up-to-date product roadmap that maximizes your company's revenue opportunities.
- Step #1: Gather customer research and competitive intel
- Step #2: Outline major themes and create product ideas
- Step #3: Prioritize roadmap items and create a timeline
- Step #4: Review and validate your roadmap with stakeholders
- Step #5: Gather feedback and iterate
- Product roadmap example
- Frequently asked questions about Product Roadmaps
- Create roadmaps that you can actually implement
Step #1: Gather customer research and competitive intel
Data-driven decision-making isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the key to building a roadmap that’ll drive revenue.
That’s why, before filling out the product roadmap template, it’s essential that you have updated data regarding:
- Market needs
- Customer feedback
- Voice of customer
- Ideal Customer Personas
- Competitive data
You’ll also need to coordinate with your team members to understand your technical constraints and availability of resources.
By incorporating research into your strategy early on, you’ll be better placed to build products and features that your customers truly want and will pay for…but that’s often easier said than done.
Product teams frequently handle huge lists of expectations. Given the sheer amount of customer and competitive data available and recurring changes being made, it just isn’t feasible to manually keep research up-to-date.
The good news? Dedicated product management software can help with this.
Our dynamic product roadmap template will also give you access to Ignition’s AI-driven competitive intelligence and customer research tools. After connecting your CRM to Ignition, you’ll be able to automate the entire research process by:
- Automatically running competitive analysis against your competitors to understand strengths and weaknesses (Bonus: Ignition turns these into battlecards to help your sales team too)
- Integrating with Gong, Intercom, and Zendesk to collect and analyze your customer feedback in one place
- Analyzing your Win/Loss data to understand key drivers for why you’re winning and losing deals
(Check out our AI research tools by signing up for a free Ignition account.)
Step #2: Outline major themes and create product ideas
After your research has been updated and aggregated in one place – it’s time to analyze.
What major themes keep popping up in customer support tickets? What features does your ICP love the most? Do your competitors have similar features? What feature gaps have been preventing you from making deals?
These are the types of questions that need to fuel your new product ideas. By answering these questions, you’ll be able to truly focus on customer-centricity – which has critical impacts on your feature and user adoption…and, ultimately, your revenue.
(Sources: Hubspot, TIMReview, Shopify)
Luckily, Ignition automates this process as well. Our AI tools for product management help you:
- Summarize hours of customer conversations, CRM deal data, and support tickets in seconds using Ignition’s AI.
- Surface critical themes from customer feedback, including common feature requests, areas for improvement, and overall sentiment analysis.
- Use public feature voting boards and import insights from live customer calls to easily collect product ideas and add them to your backlog.
Step #3: Prioritize roadmap items and create a timeline
Not all product features are created equal.
When you’re building something new, it’s important to prioritize based on potential revenue impact.
A product roadmap is the best visual representation of your work as a PM – so you can’t afford to be hasty with your decisions and end up building something that your customers don’t really want.
If you get a new feature request – who is this coming from? Does this client fit your ICP? Do they generate a large share of your revenue?
Without asking yourself these questions, you risk making the wrong product decisions, missing critical feature requests, costing your company in lost deals, and possibly jeopardizing your current customer revenue, too.
To ensure that your engineering aligns with revenue, you’ll need a way to determine which features and functions should be built out first and which can wait – also known as a product prioritization framework.
Having a formal framework:
- Helps keep all of your teams aligned towards the same business goal
- Minimizes battles of interest
- Can help you ensure that you're not becoming overly focused on the product side of things – instead of the bigger business case picture.
In Ignition, roadmap items are prioritized with the overarching goal of driving up revenue – by helping you build what customers want.
(We like to call this process revenue-based roadmapping.)
Once you’ve connected your CRM to your free Ignition account, use our built-in AI and automation to:
- Automatically identify critical feature gaps – Our AI analyzes your CRM data and customer conversations to automatically identify and categorize the feature gaps currently blocking deals – and then adds them to your idea backlog.
- Check the impact of product decisions on your KPIs – Prioritize with a clear view of potential revenue impact, user needs, and internal value by automatically mapping each of your roadmap items to your CRM deal data and checking how they may affect your current deals.
- Close the sales loop – Sent automatic notifications to sales deal owners when products ship – so reps can efficiently unblock stalled deals, capture upsell opportunities, and retain revenue.
You can rank your new products or features according to the metrics that are most important to your company, such as:
- Projected revenue impact
- Projected effort and cost
- Key impacted accounts
- Voting board results
…while keeping revenue front and center.
The best part?
You can use your roadmap in Ignition to instantly generate a launch plan personalized on the basis of launch tier, GTM motion, and budget. Each plan includes a list of marketing channels to use, assets to create, and tasks to be done.
You can also schedule automatic email, Slack, or Team updates to keep stakeholders and team members in the loop about deadlines and launch dates – and easily share critical information about status, strategy, or assets.
Step #4: Review and validate your roadmap with stakeholders
With the first draft of your roadmap in place, it’s time to share your work.
Use Ignitions’s advanced sharing permissions to share relevant roadmaps with different groups of stakeholders easily. Share roadmaps across teams internally or generate a public URL for your customers.
You can also easily export roadmap items to your dev tracker in Jira or Linear for easier engineering collaboration.
Our product roadmap template includes dedicated columns that track task status, OKR status, and the potential revenue impact of the entire roadmap – as well as each roadmap item. This makes it easy for PMs to explain the why behind their product decisions to stakeholders and build a business case for each new feature that they’re prioritizing.
Step #5: Gather feedback and iterate
Product roadmaps have to be updated often to stay relevant – taking into account real-time feedback and competitive data.
Since this can generally be a difficult process involving drives full of roadmap versions with increasingly long names, we’ve included features in our product roadmap template to make things easier.
In Ignition, all of your roadmaps live in the same dashboard as a single list of revenue-boosting opportunities — all proposed products and features in one place for all PMs and PMMs to access.
This makes updating your roadmap a breeze — just select the relevant features and add or remove specific roadmap milestones from the master list as needed.
Product roadmap example
Pat yourself on the back — you’re now well on your way to using your roadmap to maximize your company's revenue opportunities.
If you’re curious about what a roadmap example looks like in Ignition, here’s an example:
Frequently asked questions about Product Roadmaps
How do you write a product roadmap?
There are 3 main phases to writing a product roadmap:
- Research and strategic planning
- Prioritization and collaboration with stakeholders
- Updating and iterating based on real-time changes
Product roadmap templates can come in handy here, especially when you’re low on time. But it’s important to remember that a static template is only a snapshot of your product roadmap at a particular moment – it doesn’t convey business impact.
In the age of AI, it’s important to use a product roadmap template that connects with your other research tools, automates the brunt of the work, and has a prioritization framework and best practices built-in.
What is included in a product roadmap?
Product roadmaps outline a product's direction, priorities, and progress over time. Depending on who it’s shown to, it’s both a plan of action and a visual asset that clearly displays what you’re building next for your product.
A truly successful product roadmap however, should also clearly communicate the why behind your new product milestones – not just the what. Due to this reason, product roadmaps have to be created with key competitive intel and customer data in mind.
Since roadmaps often have to be updated, dynamic product roadmap templates are essential to ensure responsiveness to customer feedback and competitive data changes.
What is a product roadmap in agile methodology?
Agile product development involves using a collection of practices and methods centered around the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto. Teams create products through short cycles of work, allowing for ongoing feedback and quick enhancements.
In agile development, a roadmap serves as essential guidance for the team's daily tasks and long-term goals, adapting to changes in the competitive environment. Several agile teams might collaborate on a single product roadmap, or each team could also maintain its own roadmap.
How do you create a roadmap template?
Many roadmap templates are available online created primarily by design or project management software brands. The difficulty with customizing these templates in order to create your own is that manually inputting all of your data can end up taking hours of time.
Pro tip: Use AI and automation-driven tools like Ignition that integrate with your other research software so that you can import and analyze data much more quickly and easily.
Create roadmaps that you can actually implement
It’s time to get yourself a product roadmap template that does more. Ignition’s product roadmap template gives you access to our top AI tools that’ll help you:
- Automate your research process
- Easily update
- Share internally and externally
- Ultimately, build a product roadmap that prioritizes your revenue goals
That’s how you take your roadmapping to the next level.
Get started with our free product roadmap template by signing up for Ignition today.