As product managers (and product owners), one of our core responsibilities is to create, manage and own the product roadmap. Not only what we are planning to achieve in the next few sprints but also to be able to show what is a mid and long term vision for the product (or part of product) that we are responsible for. We don’t do this because our managers ask us to do so. We do it because the product is often in the centre of the business impacting many stakeholders. For example, the marketing team needs to prepare marketing campaigns to support new feature launches, customer support needs to plan for more support tickets when a big feature and redesign is planned and many others. 

In this post, I’ll give you a framework that helps you create a longer term roadmap so that the dependencies mentioned above are addressed as well as the product managers aren’t forced to make unreasonable commitments.

A startup pitch is usually your five minutes of glory that can help you attract the investors. Pitching your startup to them is often the only time you get when you are a first time founder and the investors don’t know you. They, on the other hand, hear a lot of pitches and you are “only” one of the many founders they have seen. It’s not a good starting position. But if you avoid making the mistakes that most less experienced entrepreneurs make, you increase your chances with the investors significantly.