Types of product roadmaps

Different audiences need different information from your roadmap. Creating specialized versions helps communicate effectively with each group:

• For executives, focus on high-level strategic concepts like driving growth, market position, or customer satisfaction. These roadmaps should connect product initiatives to business goals and show expected ROI rather than technical details.
• Engineering roadmaps often focus on features, releases, sprints, and milestones. They're typically more granular and include as much detail as possible about implementation to help developers understand what they'll be building and when.
• Sales teams need roadmaps that show how the product will help them sell more. Focus on customer benefits, group features into themes for easy discussion with prospects, and avoid specific dates to prevent premature commitments. Instead, provide approximate timelines for upcoming launches and highlight the benefits these will bring to customers.
• For customers, create simple, visually appealing roadmaps that emphasize benefits to them. These external roadmaps should be easy to understand and typically avoid specific release dates to maintain flexibility. Consider publishing these product updates on your company’s blog or appropriate social channels as a way of sharing with your customers what’s coming up.^[1]