Creating a roadmap in PowerPoint presentation is one such tool that can help you to achieve your business goals and milestones. Making different sorts of roadmaps needs you to be creative and innovative for which using free PPT templates is the smartest way forward. To find the best free PPT templates visit this site.
What is a product roadmap?
Now, let us try to explore what product roadmaps are all about, by delving into the details.
A product roadmap is essentially a very high-level summary of the vision and direction of a company’s product over a certain period. The most important thing that a product roadmap can tell is why a product is being prepared and what it is going to do, which is technically the two most important things about a product.
- The product roadmap essentially can become a document that helps in various things like offering the idea of what direction the product is going to go i.e. the vision about the product and the development strategy.
- The roadmap will also act as a guiding document for teams to execute the strategy.
- It also helps in aligning the internal stakeholders with the vision of the product. With a roadmap, the teams involved can have a solid foundation to work upon and they can be open for discussions or changes in the plan as required based on the roadmap.
- Lastly, the roadmap also helps in communicating with the customers and other external stakeholders.
Product roadmaps include various elements and milestones related to product development. However, there are also a lot of things that are often put into roadmaps that are extremely generic and sometimes outright redundant.
Your product the roadmap should include convincing storytelling and that is why, including anecdotes, and contextual references are far more important. But then, overdoing it can potentially take the interest out of your audience, so such things must be optimized well to ensure that the roadmap is crisp.
The other thing that is vital in a product roadmap is visual elements. A product roadmap essentially is a visual way of showing the strategy, but it is more important to ensure that only relevant visual elements are put in. Cluttering with unnecessary visuals certainly degrade the quality of a roadmap and the clarity reduces.
We mustn’t forget that the main objective of a product roadmap is to elucidate the purpose and the vision of a product that complies with the company’s business objectives. Your PPT must talk about a strategy that is easily relatable to your fellow associates.
Different renowned businesses around the globe utilize roadmap software to design the marketing strategy of their organizations, IT planning, and so on. This is because using a PowerPoint roadmap brings in a lot of advantages and streamlines efforts.
What are the advantages of using product roadmaps?
- Strategizing – If you are a project manager then a product roadmap will help you in chalking out the strategies, then guide you through the implementation stage, and show you the effective timeline. You as a manager can use this tool to improve the product and its efficiency. This tool helps you to see the vision of the product concerning why and what made you develop the product in the first place. You can communicate with internal as well as external stakeholders also the customers, all because of the support that this tool provides.
- Communicating – Suppose you want investors and stakeholders to understand the vision of your product, this tool will help you to do it. This way even the stakeholders will get a clear idea of how they can contribute to help the product touch the sky. Furthermore, this tool will facilitate you to see the launching or tentative delivery dates of the product.
- Understanding continuity – A product roadmap will help you to understand the journey of the product because you will see the continuity of your purposes and how, to improve it, you can assign your teams properly.
- Customizing products – You can customize your product roadmaps which will be specific audience-centric.
- Generating newer ideas – It facilitates that part of planning which includes fabricating executive strategy from a pile of backload tasks, concepts, and ideas. You can generate ideas and concepts which will comply with the product vision.
- Budgeting – You can get a budget idea because this tool will predict the performance of the product and what impact the product is likely to create in the market.
- Managing portfolio – You will be able to manage a portfolio of the product and can collate relevant products with your product, which will give you an idea of how competitive the market is and you will be able to work on the refinement of the product.
- Prioritizing – You will get the updates on the product, whether any new change has been implemented or not, and much more. This will help you prioritize based on the product’s advancement.
Presenting a product roadmap to your audience
To derive maximum benefits out of a product roadmap, it is important to ensure that it communicates the right message effectively. So while presenting the product roadmap to your target audience make sure of the following –
- Your presentation strategy, technique and a particular focus on certain facts of the roadmap should be improvised according to the audience to which the roadmap is being presented like in case of internal stakeholders the implementation strategy can be stressed upon however in front of customers and external stakeholders the stress should be on the growth and prospects.
- The product roadmap is meant to be a high-level document and the presentation should ideally avoid delving too much into the details.
- The most important thing is to do your homework properly. While presenting a roadmap the presenter will definitely be subject to various questions and queries. Thus it is important to know finer details about the project to be able to respond to such queries.
Product roadmaps allow you to be more confident and look beyond just the release of the product; it will help you to decide the future of a product.
