Use this Template for your 2014 Product Roadmap.

Companies are slowing down. Holidays, vacations, sickness and code freeze all contribute to that end of the year lull. While this is true for most of your organization, as a Product person you’re likely observing the execs spending more time in meetings, off-sites and conversations across all business units. Next year planning is upon us.

Hopefully this process has already been going on for quite some time and you have had a pretty good hand in what is actually shaping up to be your company’s product strategy for next year. That said, at the time of this writing, this blog is only a week old and I would like to share with you a suggested way of capturing and presenting the product roadmap, not discuss its creation.

You probably already know that there are pretty much no tools or services that work well to capture a roadmap that spans beyond a few sprints. After working on roadmaps at a few different companies I’ve yet to use anything that beats a good ol’ spreadsheet. This year our team was in the same place of wondering how we’re going to capture our plan and in the end we were pretty happy with the result.

Dive right in and check out the shared Google Sheets template or keep reading for some details on how this could work for you. Just go to File>Make a Copy and you’re set.

Why Google Sheets?

• 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 these sections and colors?

• Colors — simply to provide visual distinction among projects
• 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 (can do quarterly or monthly for smaller companies)

Check out the comments in the doc and of course feel free to modify it to fit your organization and share with other product people you know. If you end up having any questions, suggestions or just want to talk shop — feel free to email me.

Happy Planning!