Product Roadmap Template for 2015.

About a year ago when I started this blog one of the first things I shared was an easy to use product roadmap template. During this year literally thousands of people have used this template to organize and communicate their product and development plans.

Since writing the original post I have switched jobs, going from a consumer company to a saas organization, and I still found it very easy to continue using this template together with my new product team.

Structurally 2015 version is very similar to the original and you can click the link below to jump right in and start filling it out.

Use this Google Sheets Product Roadmap Template and to make it yours, just go to File>Make a Copy and you’re set.

For those of you wondering if this template can work for you — it most definitely can. I have talked to hundreds of product people from all kinds of organizations who are now using this template to capture their roadmap.

So why Google Sheets? What I wrote a year ago still holds true — there are no flexible enough roadmapping tools that work for everyone. With Google Sheets on the other hand it’s:

• Easy to collaborate — share with your product team and work on it together
• Great to share — for visibility give others in your organization permissions to view and maybe comment
• Easy to modify — this is important, your roadmap will change and there’s only one version to maintain

What are the different sections and colors?

• Colors — User different colors to differentiate among Product/Theme tracks, and use a more transparent color to easily identify which projects are complete.

• Duration — read as “starts in this month and completed by this month”, merge cells to stretch projects across time.
• Outcomes — at the bottom of each quarter we found it very useful to describe the themes and overarching goals of the quarter, executive summaries if you will

• Goals — these are the large company goals and it’s handy to see the hard numbers you’re trying to hit. You can do these quarterly on the roadmap, but I really hope that you are frequently reviewing your core metrics on a monthly basis.

Hopefully you will find this template to be a good start and as always I’m happy to help out if you have any questions. Simply email me and don’t forget to sign up for the mailing list!

Happy Planning!

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