A product roadmap is a visual representation of your product's direction and vision. A product roadmap is used to create a product strategy, a high-level release strategy, guide the team's development of capabilities, align stakeholders on capabilities, gain stakeholder agreement on priorities for capability development, and open a discussion with stakeholders on optional product development scenarios.
A product roadmap is about creating and sharing your strategy with stakeholders, customers, and the Agile team.
The product roadmap helps layout a general order in which capabilities are to be built, which architecture teams can use to ensure the product infrastructure is designed, implemented, and ready to start development and testing.
At the Product Strategy level, the Product Owner and/or Business Analyst assign high-level goals to a release. These goals are expressed as capabilities.
A product roadmap does NOT assign capabilities and features to a specific sprint. It also does not set dates for releases or sprints. Ideally, capabilities are assigned to releases without dates assigned. If pushed, Product Owners and Business Analysts can assign releases to Quarters for a specific year (examples: Q1 2022, Q2 2022, Q3 2022).
Utilizing the Agile Vision Board and understanding your organization's specific growth targets help create a Product Roadmap and Agile Story Map for prioritization.
Your product roadmap evolves as market, customer, and stakeholder expectations change. The product roadmap helps set priorities during product backlog refinement and sprint planning.