SPEAKER: Today I'm going to tell you how to make amazing product roadmaps. Product managers are storytellers and our canvas for storytelling is a product roadmap. Like any story, it must have a start, it must have a middle, and it must have an ending. And our roadmaps must reflect the themes or the business objectives in the starting, a large number of features that are bread and butter in the middle, and then we must end it with some value and benefit. Those are like the three components.
First up, like I said, the three things, what I'm showing now on my screen here, is an example of an MVP or a minimum viable product. You notice that I have three themes. These could be anything such as improving login experience, it could be improving a shopping experience, it could even be a new alternative payment that you might want to support on a website. I have my key features, I have a value, and it's a very straightforward way to say what you're building. It could even be an MVP you're launching.
Now this is like a slightly larger kind of mechanism to show a roadmap, but the one which is more common is kind of this arrow mechanism. It's very simple to do. Go to smart arts, pull one of these smart arts, it's a straight arrow. I'll show you how to do it. Click here, there's processes, and you'll find one of these over there. But the thing to keep in mind is you always want to have your time and scope as part of it.
The other one which we typically also do is like a multi-roadmap where we have multiple product streams that we build features and capabilities for, we basically reflect it in one place. So these are like some simple ways to show a roadmap on a PowerPoint. But there are simpler tools out there. If you're not a PowerPoint person, we actually have websites. The one I typically like to use is called Aha. It's one of the easiest websites to use, very simple to set up, and best part, you can actually connect Jita and ADO, all of your usual development tools to it.
So I'm going to start with my first release, which I always name mine as a Marvel character, so I'm going to call it Iron Man. So we have an Iron Man release. I'm also going to have a couple of features that I'm going to add here. Say Biometric Login, that could be another feature. You can keep adding these features on top of your releases. So it's very simple to do. You can actually change dates. You can export this out of a PDF. You can also go ahead and do an Idea Board, which is this really cool feature where you can have other people giving you ideas about your product. It could be your customers, your business stakeholders, and you can even move stuff into a parking lot, which is very cool. So you don't want it kind of in your roadmap. So these are some cool ways that I've used for making my roadmaps.
A roadmap is a high-level strategy of when and what a product team is building and launching into the marketplace. It is a living document, which means it could change over time, and we know the market's always changing. So it is directional in nature when it comes to a roadmap. And number three, each of your roadmaps must always have a time and scope, and that's the key three factors. And that's one-on-one about product roadmaps.