What’s Hot in Product Roadmapping? Key Practices and Success Factors

Abstract

Context: Organizations are increasingly challenged by dynamic and technical market environments. Traditional product roadmapping practices such as detailed and Ąxed long-term planning typically fail in such environments. Therefore, companies are actively seeking ways to improve their product roadmapping approach. Goal: This paper aims at identifying problems and challenges with respect to product roadmapping. In addition, it aims at understanding how companies succeed in improving their roadmapping practices in their respective company contexts. Method: We conducted semi-structured expert interviews with 15 experts from 13 German companies and conducted a thematic data analysis. Results: The analysis showed that a signiĄcant number of companies is still struggling with traditional feature-based product-roadmapping and opinion-based prioritization of features. The most promising areas for improvement are stating the outcomes a company is trying to achieve and making them part of the roadmap, sharing or co-developing the roadmap with stakeholders, and establishing discovery activities.

Product Roadmap Alignment – Achieving the Vision Together: A Grey Literature Review

“…A recent review of the scientific literature about product roadmaps has shown that most scientific articles do not address product roadmaps operationally or refer to modern product management practices [ 5 ]. Furthermore, an initial review of the grey literature on product roadmapping in general and the conduction of expert interviews [ 4 , 12 ] indicate that the topic product roadmap alignment is highly relevant and of great interest for practitioners. In order to obtain more insights, the conduction of a grey literature review is an appropriate approach and contributes to the transfer of practical knowledge in the scientific community.…”

“…Thereby, individual goals are often placed above corporate goals. As a result, not every product activity contributes to achieving the company’s vision and goals, thus wasting important organizational resources [ 2 , 4 ].…”