Product Roadmap vs. Development Calendar

What’s the difference between the product roadmap and the development calendar? It’s not uncommon to think that they are the same, especially if this is your first technology project. However, they serve different purposes and are typically owned by different people in the business.

What’s A Product Roadmap?

The product roadmap includes high level feature / function goals for the product. The audience for the product roadmap is certainly everyone in your company, as well as your customers and investors, and is created by the Product Owner at your company. The product roadmap also frequently contains the “why” for a particular feature, meaning identifying the customer problem you’re solving with a particular feature.

There’s a school of thought that in fast-moving, early stage companies that a product roadmap is virtually useless. The reason is that you should be in close contact with your customers, and iterating quickly on new features or addressing gaps in existing features. It does no good (and only serves to create angst in the company) if you’re wasting cycles thinking about what’s going to happen six months from now, when in reality you don’t have any idea yet.

However, as your company grows, you’ll need to coordinate efforts both within and potentially outside the company, and the roadmap serves as the high-level guide to where you’re headed.

Here’s what a roadmap might look like in an early-stage company:

Did you catch that there are no dates in the roadmap? That’s not a mistake. In today’s product roadmaps, you want to have at the most some broad brushstrokes of when things are coming. The dates show up in the Development Calendar.

What’s A Development Calendar?

If the roadmap is the general guide for the road ahead, the development calendar is turn by turn directions. The development calendar is the responsibility of the technical leadership in your company (i.e. your CTO). The development calendar takes the product roadmap and breaks the work down into the individual tasks required to get a feature into the hands of your customer.

The development calendar is a detailed project plan with specific dates for the items on the roadmap that are currently in focus. Depending on your level of sophistication, the development calendar can be as simple as a Trello board or as complex as a blown out six-month schedule.

I’d recommend that, particularly when you’re early in your product development cycle, that you not even bother planning your calendar beyond the next couple of months. Keeping the planning windows small ensures that you’re not building a bunch of stuff that no one cares about. If you’ve got a large feature that’s going to require more than a couple of months of work, find ways to break it down into smaller chunks and get it out sooner.

Just Remember

• The Product Roadmap is a business-focused, strategic document typically owned by the product manager or whoever at your company is speaking on behalf of the customer
• The Development Calendar is a detailed plan to execute the building of the items on the roadmap. It is typically owned by the technical leader of your company
• Keep your planning windows as small as possible to ensure you’re building what customers want

Your Assignment

Do you have a product roadmap that everyone in the company is aligned around? Is it visible to everyone? If not, take the time today to write down your roadmap and discuss it with the rest of your company. The goal is not perfection, so don’t worry if it changes a month from now. The goal is to get your current thinking about where you need to be captured so that you can clearly communicate the vision for the product to all of your constituents.