Before diving into specific strategies and metrics, it's crucial to establish your product roadmap as an integral part of your organization's broader documentation and communication channels.
Define your key strategic initiatives that align with business goals and establish measurable metrics for each strategy. These strategies should directly support your overall product vision and have clear success criteria.
For each strategy, identify specific features that will help achieve your goals, making sure to consider technical requirements and dependencies. Include both user feedback and market demands in your feature selection process.
Evaluate each feature by rating its Impact, Confidence, and Ease on a scale of 1-10, then calculate the ICE score (Impact × Confidence × Ease ÷ 10) to create a prioritized list. Use these scores to make data-driven decisions about feature priority.
Take your prioritized features (but use your judgment; you should decide, not scores!) and organize them into time horizons (Now, Next, Later), considering both resources and dependencies.
Now should contain precise, well-defined items that are committed for the next quarter, Next should include items that are planned but may need more discovery for the following 2-3 quarters, Later should encompass strategic initiatives and ideas that need significant research or are dependent on earlier deliverables. Balance the need for quick wins with longer-term strategic investments.