A well-thought-out roadmap is the north star of product lifecycle management. When you do it right, your roadmap guides a product seamlessly from concept to launch and everything that comes after. However, if your roadmap turns a blind eye to certain things, your guide can turn into a gridlock.
For your next launch, watch out for the common pitfalls of roadmap planning. This way, you empower stakeholders to focus on what they each do best and lead the whole product to success.
What Are the Common Pitfalls of Making a Product Roadmap?
1. Not Using the Right Tools from the Beginning
Roadmaps made in a static PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheet can quickly become chaotic, outdated artifacts that fail you before the team even gets started.
A must for any agile roadmapping technique is using advanced tools: a system that is dynamic, web-based, and accessible to all stakeholders. This ensures that your roadmap is always up-to-date and not created in isolation from any one department or decision-maker. Group involvement also counters the risk of team members or execs going off and doing their own thing despite an agreed-on plan.
2. Not Clearly Prioritizing Features to Address the Objective
A successful roadmap guides everyone to one main goal before you add any bells and whistles. Your immediate team will probably already know what top features to tackle first. That’s great, but you should make sure all stakeholders know which parts of the plane need to be built before it can fly. Features or benefits that don’t align with the product vision can be a make-or-break for proper resource allocation for your product.
3. Not Accounting for Problem Resolution
You’re probably all too familiar with roadmap speed bumps that arise from surprise complications during testing. These can turn into substantial issues when not addressed efficiently, derailing the entire roadmapping process.
Sprig identifies problems before they affect your customers, helping you avoid those painful delays as your team rolls out new features. Sprig’s GPT-powered AI Analysis in particular is a powerful colleague. It automates product learnings by surfacing product issues and opportunities, giving your developers the advantage of powerful insights in real-time.
The result? Your roadmap and team end up with more effective resource allocation and an easier way to identify potential problems. When factoring in problem resolutions early and often, an AI analysis could save sprints — and sanity — in the long run.
4. Not Considering Key Real-Time Feedback
Collecting and promptly acting on stakeholder feedback is a given for teams and senior product managers, so keep regular check-ins in your roadmap. But one of the most valuable data sets your roadmap — and therefore product development — might be missing is real-time user feedback.
User feedback can differ drastically from internal notes. Not only are users your product’s intended audience, but they also know the least about it — well, at first. Their feedback can actually point out major disconnects in your UX flow, unexpected drop-off points, and other issues you might not know about. Your team can turn real-time user feedback into opportunities and vital fixes — but only if there’s space allotted for this in your roadmap.
5. Not Putting Your Team in Your Users’ Shoes
Thinking of your guide as a customer-centric roadmap could alleviate a lot of grievances. That’s where Sprig’s Replays come into play. You’ll see what customers see, as well as how they engage with the product. Your team can trigger targeted user clips to spot friction points and fix them.
After you reach a project milestone, it’s helpful to take a step back. Put in the work to see how the changes you’ve implemented impact flow, engagement, and product experience firsthand. Planning to regularly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes (i.e., watching a user’s five-minute replay) can go a long way in roadmapping.
6. Not Including In-Product Surveys
Customers are your best source of feedback. But sometimes, your data can get so muddled that it becomes unusable. With Sprig’s in-product surveys, you can analyze your users’ experience in real-time to solve this problem.
You can build in-product surveys in minutes with Sprig’s proven templates. From there, you can put your surveys exactly where in the product journey they belong and gather compelling insights based on the targeted user. Because these surveys are a seamless part of the experience, they eliminate the possibility of recall bias that happens when giving feedback down the line.
7. Not Considering Risk Management
Factoring in worst-case scenarios for your product roadmap can feel tedious and like a bit of a downer. However, great risk management offers the escape route your team might wind up needing to arrive at the finish line.
Of course, all products come with inherent risks such as emerging competitors and budget, and you can only control these so much. On the other hand, you have power over hidden liabilities such as implementing unproven technologies or setting unrealistic key performance indicators (KPIs).
Once you’ve defined what risks could derail your product development, build contingency plans into your roadmap. For example, it may be helpful to transfer some of your risks to another vendor. You can also go the safe route and add an extra round of review for testing and debugging. Risk management is an ongoing process that, when built on clear communication, keeps your roadmap resilient.
8. Not Being Realistic
Don’t create your roadmap while wearing rose-colored glasses. This may be an obvious notion, but it’s still one of the most common roadmap planning mistakes. Every stakeholder will have their own idea of what’s most important, but it’s key to keep a realistic big-picture view in mind.
For example, you need to fully know your team’s technical capabilities before agreeing to tasks and deadlines that only advanced coders can realistically achieve. The pressure will always be there to incorporate all the features as soon as possible, but a realistic roadmap sets up everyone for success.
Ready, Set, Map
Product roadmaps do more than list features and quarterly milestones. When properly built with the right tools, clear expectations, and flexibility, a roadmap serves as the blueprint for a successful product. As the owner of the roadmap, the more you’re aware of its possible shortcomings, the better you can plan for a successful launch. More than that, you give yourself tons of power over everything that comes afterward for your product.
Beyond getting everyone on the same mapped-out page, there are more ways to empower your team to make smarter product decisions. From prototyping to collaboration to enhanced A/B testing, check out Sprig's tech stack integrations.