What's Hot in Product Roadmapping?

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly challenged by dynamic and technical market environments. Traditional product roadmapping practices such as detailed and fixed long-term planning typically fail in such environments. Therefore, companies are actively seeking ways to improve their product roadmapping approach.

This paper aims at identifying problems and challenges with respect to product roadmapping. In addition, it aims at understanding how companies succeed in improving their roadmapping practices in their respective company contexts. We conducted semi-structured expert interviews with 15 experts from 13 German companies and conducted a thematic data analysis.

The analysis showed that a significant number of companies is still struggling with traditional feature-based product-roadmapping and opinion-based prioritization of features. The most promising areas for improvement are stating the outcomes a company is trying to achieve and making them part of the roadmap, sharing or co-developing the roadmap with stakeholders, and establishing discovery activities.

This summary refers to the paper What´s Hot in Product Roadmapping? Key Practices and Success Factors. This paper was published as full research paper in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES).