Product portfolio roadmap template

What is a product portfolio roadmap?

Product portfolio roadmaps are strategic plans for multiple products simultaneously. They help to manage a set of products and their relationships, ensuring that each product is directed towards a common goal(s). 

But don’t get confused between a product portfolio roadmap and a multiple product roadmap! Product portfolio roadmaps are usually cross-product — they can include initiatives from many products. This is not common for multiple product roadmaps.

Because product portfolio roadmaps contain information on several product development workflows at the same time, they can be a real headache to build. After all, you need to keep in mind all the tiny details about each product and how they intersect. That’s why a product portfolio roadmap template can be so useful to help lighten your load!

What are the features of a product portfolio roadmap template?

• A product portfolio roadmap often visualizes long-term periods of time — about 9 months up to 5 years. The further items are placed in the future, the fewer details you include. 

• A portfolio roadmap works perfectly for teams or organizations when they have a broad product line and want to visualize a high-level summary across all of their products. airfocus’s product portfolio roadmap template can be customized to any number of products that your product line contains.

• On the value side, product teams often consider the economic impact, competitive advantage, and customers while prioritizing the items that make it onto the roadmap and rate these against development and operational costs.

Why create a portfolio roadmap?

Not knowing the clear direction you are heading for can result in many hours of unnecessary work. And that’s something all PMs want to avoid. “If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” - Laurence J. Peter (creator of the Peter Principle)

So how does a product portfolio roadmap help?

• With the help of a product portfolio roadmap, you can link the strategy not only across the products but also up to the product line, departments, and the company. That way, you will achieve consistency of goals and initiatives on all levels.

• Aligning all the products in one map helps reveal gaps in the overall strategy and approach, providing an opportunity for brainstorming, innovation and new ideas. Thanks to our premade product portfolio roadmap template, you can save up time on building the map from scratch and spend it on high-impact activities instead!

• Having a product portfolio roadmaps mitigates misunderstandings between internal and external stakeholders once switching the view from low-level aims to the high-level ones.

How do you create a portfolio roadmap?

Let’s look at the key steps for creating a portfolio roadmap using our template:

Step 1: Double-check the strategy of the company. Have a conversation with the heads of all departments to account for all possible impacts on the product.

Step 2: After a clear vision and strategy have been confirmed, you should set goals for the product department. This is important so that, when the product team is considering a new feature, they have all the strategic groundwork in place to prioritize effectively with the overall goal in mind.

Step 3: As soon as the initial goals are set, the plans of the product team need to be reviewed. It is essential to estimate how they fit into the strategy and goals. All the initiatives that are scheduled for implementation must correspond with a certain goal of the product and company.

Step 4: Last but not least, there’s prioritization. You need to objectively assess the importance of each goal and decide what to bring forward and what to delay — regardless of how certain managers might feel if their features and products get sidelined!

The steps above can sound like an extensive amount of work, but our product portfolio roadmap template is here to make building the roadmap a breeze! Try it out today.