Major products publishing public roadmap to have a loyal customer following has become a thing in the industry. While a ton of products publish public product roadmap, here are a few examples that might inspire you.
Building a great roadmap is a win-win for both your team and your customers. Here’s why:
- Public roadmap helps you and your team to commit to something that you are building;
- Public product roadmap helps your customers know what is coming next and what is being worked on.
Now that you are reading this article, I understand that you are looking to build a product roadmap for your product as well.
If you are using featureOS to publish public product roadmap, you are already enjoying value of public roadmap. If you are not a featureOS user, this post could help you get some inspiration for the best public product roadmap.
Monzo Bank Public Roadmap:
Monzo is one of the most popular digital bank in the UK. Being a digital-first bank, Monzo’s Product Management team quickly realized the importance of keeping their customers informed with their public product roadmap.
In fact, Monzo’s team went on to name their public roadmap, Making Monzo. Ever since they released their roadmap to the public, it has picked up within their customer circle quite well.
Monzo’s roadmap is quite simple and effective as well. We like the fact that their have a huge engineering team who can build and manage their public roadmap. But I cannot imagine the amount of effort they put in every time they need to update their roadmap.
Monzo’s strategy to create their own public roadmap is welcoming, considering the amount of customizations they could do to this roadmap page, but it is not something that is efficient and consistent. It takes quite a bit of learning for the customer to read through the roadmap and know what is happening with their Monzo app.
What is Monzo’s Roadmap great for: If you are someone who wants to build a custom roadmap for your product, this engineering-first approach could be the way.
featureOS comes with “Custom Roadmap” — where you can customize every single aspect of your product roadmap. Try it here .
GitHub Public Roadmap
We use GitHub heavily at featureOS. We use it to manage our code and to collaborate with our team of engineers spread across the globe. For a team who relies on GitHub for code versioning and collaboration, we are always curious to know what features are coming next from the GitHub team.
GitHub uses their own “Projects” feature to share their product roadmap in public. One of the best things about using this strategy for publishing public roadmap is that you make your users aware of the features in your product.
While GitHub Projects are typically used to manage projects internally, it is not ideal or even close to anything that is related to a product roadmap. Sometimes, it is filled with so much data that we as users get overwhelmed about what we need to read as well.
Pro Tip: Make sure your product roadmap is easy for your users to understand. Ultimately, remember that it is your users who need to find it easy to consume the information in roadmap.
When to use GitHub’s Public Roadmap strategy: When you are a GitHub user already, and you are building in public, and want to turn your issues into roadmap items.
Buffer Public Roadmap
Buffer is one of the most successful and open companies in the industry. Buffer’s transparent culture goes to the extent of sharing their salaries, their fundraising process, and so much more to the public.
Buffer’s public product roadmap is hosted on Trello — a widely used task management tool. While Trello isn’t an ideal fit for publishing public product roadmap, it works for organizations who rely on it for managing their task.
Maybe Buffer’s management team would want to simplify the use of ‘their tools’, and choose Trello as an option. While it is extremely simple to know what is in Buffer’s public roadmap in Trello, it could also be confusing for many users.
Pro Tip: Choose tools that are built with your customers in mind. Choose a product roadmap tool that your users would find it easy to understand and a tool that brings delight. Try featureOS .
In Buffer’s case, there is quite a bit of “write-down-the-notes-before-going-through-roadmap” sort of effort involved. They have something called Keys, which allows you (as a end-customer) to spend time filtering the roadmap posts based on key and explanation as possible.
In Buffer’s case, the card which says “How does this board work?” drops the ball for me, despite its simplicity.
When to use Buffer style public roadmap strategy: Use Trello based roadmap when you have as little things to publish. When you are small, and you don’t want to spend of a roadmap software .
So how do I choose the best public roadmap tool for my product?
Thanks to the world we created for ourselves today, we have a bundle of options to choose from. Before choosing a public roadmap tool, make sure it checks the following boxes:
- The user experience of the tool is great;
- The user interface of the tool is simple and self-explanatory;
- You are able to embed public product roadmap into your product;
I strongly believe that a product should have as minimal design and explanation as possible. If you prefer using Google Sheets for Roadmap, you can checkout this featureOS Roadmap Template on Google Sheets .
Take Apple’s iPhone for example. When you buy an iPhone and open it for the first time, the first thing that you see is an iPhone. Not pamphlets, not instruction cards. Just a beautifully designed iPhone that invites you to pick it up and use.
At featureOS, the principles of simplicity affects everything we do for you, so that we become the best representation of your product in front of your customers.
You could be selling a $500 product to your customers, and you don’t want to give them a sub-par experience with your roadmap tools. Try featureOS .
Have some more great examples of public roadmaps? Tweet us @getfeatureOS , and we will credit you for the information.