Behavioral Product Roadmap Example
What is a Behavioral Product Roadmap Example?
A product roadmap describes the steps that a business plans to take to meet business objectives.
What is a Behavioral Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap describes the steps that a business plans to take to meet business objectives.1 Items in a product roadmap are linked back to each of the strategies it attempts to address, thus answering the question of why in addition to how.2
Before attempting to create a roadmap, product owners must have a grasp of their:
- Goals
- Market strategy
- Constraints (e.g. time, money, energy, etc.)
- Value propositions
The topics covered in a roadmap will vary depending on the type of product: for example, the development team may only focus on one product, while the executive team may focus on multiple. Most importantly, a roadmap must be easily understood for everyone involved, detailed enough to provide context and simple enough to be approachable.
Communication is important when deciding on priorities; in fact, a recent study revealed that many companies are having difficulty identifying and implementing a prioritization system that can deliver value to stakeholders and customers.4 Fortunately, there are a variety of prioritization techniques available which can be categorized as “mapping-based approaches,” “scoring-based approaches”, and “game-based approaches.”5
When it comes to deciding which items meet the threshold for inclusion on the roadmap, there are various frameworks, including OKRs, the Rice Scoring Model, and MoSCoW.3
Product roadmaps can also be structured in a few different ways, although the most common is a multi-layered time-based chart, showing how different strategies are aligned.6 There is no singular product roadmap format that will suit the goals of every product in every organization at every stage in development, and as such, it’s important for development teams to have clear goals from the onset.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
