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5 Hacks for Better Product Roadmap Presentations

Are you prepared for your next product roadmap presentation? How are you planning to run better product roadmap presentations? As product managers, the product roadmap is at the core of everything we do. It is a living document that sheds light on what’s happening today, tomorrow, and in the future. The product roadmap is a key point of reference to keep product strategy, business objectives, and execution aligned. When properly shared and evangelized across an organization, a product roadmap can unite, motivate, and align cross-departmental teams to achieve more. And the first step to evangelizing your product roadmap across your organization is getting it out there for all to see.

Read the Product Roadmaps Guide ➜

Today we look at a few simple tips for product roadmap presentations. We hope these will help ensure your next product roadmap presentation is well received by other internal teams.

1. Tell a story

We’ve written before about the importance of storytelling in product management , so it should be no surprise that this topic is coming up again. An interesting story or anecdote can add valuable context to your presentation that your roadmap simply can’t do on its own.

You don’t need to write an elaborate piece of fiction to be a good product storyteller. In fact, the most powerful narratives are not fiction at all. Simply tell the honest story of how your roadmap came together. Was there a customer request that inspired a new feature? Are you adding some features and functionalities that help push you closer to the product’s vision? Were there any particularly difficult prioritization decisions you can share? Whatever your story is, use it as a tool to keep your audience engaged and to rally their support around the plan.

2. Focus on themes, not features

product roadmap presentation

Here is a graphic to help convey the difference between a theme and an initiative. Notice the goal-driven nature of the theme and the task-based language of the initiatives.

how-focus-on-roadmap-themes-not features

hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); 3. Use visual aids

It should go without saying that a product roadmap presentation requires you to actually show people a visual representation of your roadmap . People need to see how all the various components of your product strategy fit together, so invest time in making sure your product roadmap is well-designed. There are several best practices for designing visual roadmaps, but here are a few guidelines we think are most useful:

4. Know your audience

Channel your inner marketer and tailor each presentation you do to the interests of the audience involved. Executives care about different aspects of product strategy than sales, and sales likely hold different interests than engineering. Furthermore, these groups have varying degrees of understanding around the inner workings of the product and therefore different ways of relating to you as the product manager.

Focus your roadmap presentations around sharing the most relevant information with your audience. If you’re presenting your roadmap at an all-hands meeting or to a broader audience, speak broadly about it. Don’t attempt to delve into a detailed explanation of each and every feature on your roadmap unless that’s what your audience wants. Instead, focus on showing how your product strategy supports organizational objectives and aligns with your product’s vision.

5. Tie in metrics

If you’re having a difficult time rallying the team around your plan, remember that metrics are the great arbitrator; they force us to make objective decisions and not rely on intuition alone. They’re also an important part of the narrative around your product roadmap. You likely used metrics to make your roadmap decisions in the first place, so put them back to work for you when presenting your product strategy.

If your organization is closely monitoring a handful of key business metrics, or has a “ north star metric ,” put these numbers front and center in your presentation. If it’s not immediately clear on your visual roadmap how initiatives influence key metrics, take time to walk through this in detail. Don’t underestimate the power of numbers. They are a powerful tool for selling your product strategy and getting buy-in across your organization…after all, you can’t argue with data.

Bonus Tips for Better Product Roadmap Presentations: Keep it going

1. make it an ongoing conversation.

Sharing your product roadmap is only a small part of the communication that needs to be done around product strategy to evangelize your mission. Avoid thinking about communication as an event and instead bake it into your culture and product strategy. After all, the product roadmap is a living document that evolves in response to the world around it. Your communication should reflect that. Transparency around product strategy at every step of the way ensures no one gets left in the dark.

2. Put your roadmap front and center

Once you’ve done a good job selling your product strategy, don’t hide it away. Keep an up-to-date copy of your product roadmap somewhere easily accessible by other teams who may want to reference it as they develop their own strategies. We’ve heard of a few teams who are so proud of the product roadmaps that they display them on large screens in their offices, but you don’t have to take things that far. A well-circulated and maintained internal document can suffice.

What strategies have you used to successfully share and evangelize your product roadmap across your organization? Let us know in the comments below!

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9 tips to create compelling product roadmap presentations

A crystal-clear roadmap is the best strategic communication tool for a product manager. When properly presented and shared across an organization, a product roadmap sheds light on what’s happening today, tomorrow, and in the future—and motivates teams to achieve more.

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product roadmap presentation

A great product roadmap presentation helps you build trust with your team and stakeholders —letting them all see how you’re creating real value for the company. How you present a roadmap to your internal team can also inform how you should present it to your customers and get them on board with what’s to come.

This chapter dives into the best tips for roadmap presentations to keep every stakeholder invested and engaged before, during, and after you’re done presenting.

Boost your product roadmap presentation with product experience insights

Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback tools help you build your product roadmap presentation on a solid, user-centric foundation.

Why your product roadmap presentation matters

When it comes to keeping product strategy, business objectives, and execution aligned, the product roadmap is your key point of reference. Your work as a product manager (PM) involves working with internal teams and stakeholders to build a crystal-clear roadmap that clearly communicates deliverables, and the expectations for where the product is going and why .

Next, you need to get everyone else involved with the product on board and on the same page. The first step to evangelizing your product roadmaps across your organization is to get them out there for all to see with a product roadmap presentation.

Presenting your roadmap to key stakeholders is a great opportunity to tell a compelling story about where your product is going. 

A well-thought-out roadmap presentation will help you:

Align and validate your team’s roadmap

Reduce the risk of eleventh-hour surprises stopping you in your tracks

Smoothly deliver against your product strategy

Avoid stakeholder confusion or dissatisfaction on where the product is going

Make sure your goals stay customer-centric and align with both your users’ needs and wants, as well as your business objectives

How the product roadmap presentation helps you achieve your goals

Your goal with the product roadmap presentation is to gain alignment around the set of priorities you’ve arrived at. That includes:

Getting approval from business leaders

A good product roadmap presentation shows stakeholders everything they need to know about new products or iterations.

They’ll see how your themes feed into the business strategy, how initiatives help customers experience a better product, and whether it’s a viable product for the market.

Creating a release plan

Creating a product roadmap presentation gives customers and business partners an idea of what to expect in the future.

This keeps everyone in the loop and builds anticipation and excitement for new product developments, integrations, release dates, and milestones.

Bringing your team on the same page

A product roadmap presentation is a perfect opportunity to get your product development team (and anyone else involved in the product roadmap) aligned around the same expectations and goals, right from the get-go.

5 components of a great product roadmap presentation

Every product roadmap presentation is different. In fact, to address every stakeholder’s needs, you may need to first create and present a general strategic product roadmap template, and then move on to discuss lower-level field roadmaps. 

However, there are some components that most product roadmap presentations have in common:

An introduction/agenda: this tells your audience what to expect, what the presentation is about, and how long it’ll last

Your purpose and product vision : the reasoning behind the new product (or new iterations) to give your audience some context and help them see the rationale behind your product direction

The product’s target audience: who are you trying to target with your new product/features? It could be your existing audience, or you might want to reach a new audience in a different market.

Your product roadmap: a top-level view of what you’ve outlined in your product roadmap. For example, you can showcase the anticipated timeline, but don't go into detail about each deliverable along the way.

Feedback and questions: at the end of the presentation, leave space for your audience to ask questions and provide feedback

💡 Pro tip : keep your presentation user-focused with a data-informed strategy and roadmap.

Use Hotjar to gather a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative product experience data for a user-centric approach. 

By providing a steady inflow of user data, Hotjar’s tools can help you ensure your product strategy and roadmap are always relevant.

9 tips to ace your product roadmap presentation

Before you go ahead with your product roadmap presentation, think about how you communicate your roadmap at these stages:

What to keep in mind when you’re creating your presentation

What to do during your presentation to keep your audience engaged and ensure buy-in

How to tie up any loose ends and check-in for feedback

Before the presentation

When you’re working on your product roadmap presentation, your main goal is to set it up for the best results . To do that, get to know your stakeholders’ needs and motivations, and try to anticipate questions and feedback that might come up in the presentation.

1. Know your audience

As you build your product roadmap presentation, focus on sharing the most relevant information with your audience. 

For example, the C-Suite and the Sales team care about different aspects of the product strategy, while customers and engineers are likely invested in different aspects of the product's direction. Every one of these groups has a varying degree of understanding around the inner workings of the product —and different ways of relating to you as the PM.

To tailor your presentation to the interests of the audience involved, you need to get to know them: their motivations, their deadlines, their pressures, what’s keeping them up at night. This will help you empathize with your stakeholders and create trust.

💡 Pro tip: if you don’t know your stakeholders, set up interviews so you can begin to understand them and their interests. Stakeholder interviews can be informal, simple conversations to get to know their motivations and challenges. They’ll also provide you with some less-obvious opportunities to influence your project’s chances of success.

Once you know your audience, you can tailor your product roadmap presentation to address what they care about and communicate your roadmap for successful buy-in . For example:

Engineering: they want to understand the value of their effort to the business, to customers, and towards improving the product. Keep it short-term and focus on developer-oriented themes—like scalability, usability, quality, performance, infrastructure, and product features.

Executives : these stakeholders care about the company's vision and goals, and how the plan depicted by the roadmap will help the company achieve them. Make sure your roadmap ties each initiative to customer value and business goals. Explain what features you’re adding, and more importantly, how the initiatives will help the product capture the market.

Customer-facing teams : these include Sales and Customer Success and Support teams that mainly care about what they can promise customers, when it will be ready, how it affects pricing, building trust and loyalty, and ways to reduce churn. Give them a transparent timeline they can communicate to customers and users, and show how the roadmap will introduce ways to reduce churn and improve conversion.

2. Channel your inner PANDA 

Building an effective and engaging presentation is all about product roadmap prioritization in the wild. As a PM, that can mean dealing with some pretty dangerous animals. 

From HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) to ZEBRAs (Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant) to RHINOs (Really Here In Name Only), these types of stakeholders can hold up the product development process or force you to focus resources on the wrong priorities.

PANDAs (Prioritizes Amazingly and Needs Data Always) make the best product managers because they prioritize strategically and take a data-informed approach. 

When it comes to developing a stellar product roadmap presentation, channeling your inner PANDA helps you:

Communicate convincing product narratives

Share user and business data that keeps team members aligned

Manage your backlog effectively

Highlight clear, measurable metrics that let you know you’re on the right track 

Keep the product team aligned on shared priorities and initiatives

Build trust with stakeholders who can see that you’re creating real value for the company

Product managers who Prioritize Amazingly and Need Data Always can confidently show that their product decisions will benefit their team, their organization, and most importantly, their users. This is the basis for cross-functional communication and buy-in from execs and other stakeholders.

💡 Pro tip : sharpen your user data to make better decisions for your product roadmap.

The best product managers use research for product prioritization , and Hotjar gives you the user data you need to prioritize brilliantly. 

Ask users direct questions and gather information on what’s important to them by using Hotjar’s non-invasive survey tools—like Feedback widgets.

Use Heatmaps and Session Recordings to spot issues and determine which bug fixes and product optimizations should be top of your list.  

When you’re guided by how your users experience your product and what their needs are, you can stop your priorities from being hijacked by loud-mouthed HiPPOs, arrogant ZEBRAs, or unfocused WOLF types.

product roadmap presentation

A session recording captured using Hotjar

3. Structure the roadmap in themes, not features

Theme-based roadmaps are one of the best ways to give your product roadmap a memorable and meaningful narrative . As they highlight the big picture, themes show the broader objectives at play and make it easier for you to sell your product strategy.

High-level themes are great for structuring the roadmap and setting up your audience for the context you’re presenting in. To anticipate needs and questions during the presentation, make sure you can provide details into what’s behind each high-level item. 

For example, if you've called a theme 'essential services', break it down into key initiatives and epics that will be required to deliver the theme.

During the presentation

To get everyone on board during product roadmap presentations, your goal is to communicate clearly with your stakeholders and ensure everyone is on the same page.

4. Focus on the why 

Whether it’s a traditional feature roadmap or a problem-focused set of objectives and key results (OKRs), why you want to do these things matters. Is it to explore a new business opportunity? To increase satisfaction among a key segment of users? Something else?

If you expect your team to own building solutions—as well as defining and measuring their success—they need to understand why these initiatives matter to your users and the business as a whole. 

As you present, highlight the context for why you are including something on a roadmap, and remember to tailor your message depending on the audience. Technical teams need to see evidence for why you see demand for a feature. Executives want to see a strong connection between the development initiatives and the priorities of the business.

Remember to address different stakeholders' needs, which you may have uncovered in earlier stakeholder interviews or catch-ups. Be clear on the trade-offs you’ve had to make so stakeholders understand the different considerations you and your team have made.

💡 Pro tip : the data speaks for itself, but you can also tell a powerful story from the perspective of your users. 

Include user insights to prove the value of your ideas, and talk about some alternatives that you've excluded—and why.

Use Hotjar's product experience tools to Observe and Ask for user feedback that helps your audience understand the ‘why’ as much as the ‘what’.

The Hotjar Feedback widget

5. Communicate a convincing product narrative

Great product storytelling can get powerful exec HiPPOs on board, motivate disconnected RHINOs, and convince arrogant ZEBRAs and distractible WOLF (Working On Latest Fire) personas to get behind your product plans. 

As you tell the story of how your roadmap came together, use it as a tool to keep your audience engaged and rally their support around the plan . Include details like customer requests that inspired a new feature, features and functionalities that help push you closer to the product’s vision, or any particularly difficult prioritization decisions you can share.

Use simple and clear language and avoid industry jargon, especially if you're trying to align a wide variety of stakeholders. This will help communicate your product roadmap.

6. Engage your audience with visual aids

People need to see how all the components of your product strategy fit together, so invest time in making sure your product roadmap presentation template is well-designed .

Whether it’s dedicated product roadmapping or project management tools, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, Gantt charts, or Excel spreadsheets, every type of product roadmap presentation template uses graphic elements to help stakeholders visualize your overall product strategy, and help you chart the development and release of specific iterations .

#Some of PowerPoint’s free roadmap templates

A few key points to keep in mind: 

Vary your versions : present different versions of your roadmap for different audiences. A good way to do this can be to filter your roadmap content by epics or outcomes, and only show the ones relevant to the departments or teams you're presenting to.

Colormap : use color to distinguish between different themes, objectives, or categories on your roadmap. Don’t forget to include a legend outlining what each color signifies.

Keep it relevant : don’t overwhelm your audience with too many details. Your visual product roadmap should contain only the most relevant insights and graphics. When in doubt, take it out.

After the presentation

It’s time to tie up any loose ends and check in with your audience. As you do so, continue to request feedback and iterate on your roadmap presentation.

7. Tie in metrics

If you’re having a difficult time rallying the audience around your roadmap, remember that metrics are a great arbitrator . They are a powerful tool for selling your product strategy and getting buy-in across your organization.

Metrics related to the success of your product help you make objective decisions and not rely on intuition alone. You likely used these product metrics to make your roadmap decisions in the first place, so put them back to work for you when presenting your product strategy.

Your visual roadmap should present how initiatives influence key business metrics or a 'north star metric'. They’re an important part of the narrative around your product roadmap, so put these numbers front and center in your presentation. 

8. Leave room for questions and feedback

Make sure you give participants the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback on your product roadmap presentation. This will help you improve and have better ongoing communication around your roadmap.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to act on every single piece of feedback. Instead, actively listen and hear people out and make sure stakeholders feel heard and understood.

Some areas you can seek feedback on are:

Is the meeting cadence working for stakeholders?

Do they understand your product team’s priorities and trade-offs?

Do they understand the roadmap’s impact on them?

Then, follow up on any feedback shared during the presentation. After all, alignment isn’t one-sided—it’s an exercise in negotiating different views and opinions.

9. Keep the product roadmap updated and accessible

Once you’ve done a good job selling your product strategy, don’t hide it away. Make sure you follow up your roadmap presentation with thorough meeting notes and the updated roadmap. 

By now it’s clear that roadmaps can’t just be static documents—like an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint template. This also means th e roadmapping lifecycle doesn’t simply end with a presentation . You need to follow up on KPIs and progress, as well as keep your stakeholders and customers informed.

Continue to communicate updates and changes to your roadmap outside of meetings. Create a concrete, editable, and accessible space where stakeholders can continuously check-in, provide feedback, and keep up-to-date on changes. 

Some ideas of how to do this include:

A product roadmapping tool

A shared document

A dedicated space in your company’s knowledge sharing tool

A dedicated channel in your company’s messaging platform

A dedicated space for feedback in the roadmap artifact itself

#A product roadmap presentation template from Miro

Next steps for product roadmap presentations

Roadmap alignment is a continuous, ongoing process. And the way you approach your roadmap presentations can be decisive in how your product moves forward toward success. 

As you gear up to present your product strategy and the specific iterations it involves, consider what you do before, during, and after the roadmap presentation to build alignment.  

Understanding why certain product initiatives matter to your users and the business will allow your team, stakeholders, and customers to rally behind them much more than just being told they need to happen.

FAQs about product roadmap presentations

What should you include in a product roadmap presentation.

An effective, coherent roadmap presentation includes:

The context and ‘why’ behind each initiative 

Substance and concrete outcomes at each stage of the roadmap

A clear business impact of completing the initiative

Details about the product’s target audience to demonstrate how well you know the market, the users, the product, and the business goals

When should you deliver a product roadmap presentation?

There are a few situations where you might need to deliver a roadmap presentation. Here are a few of the most common: 

To get approval from business leaders for new products, features, or a change in product strategy

To alleviate conflicting messages from different stakeholders

To create a release plan that can be shared with customers

To get your team on the same page with and advocate for the product opportunities that will help your company reach its goals

How long should a product roadmap presentation be?

The ideal duration of a product roadmap presentation depends on how many products and features you need to discuss. We recommend reserving around 1–2 hours, including time for brainstorming and feedback at the end.

Product roadmap templates

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10 ways to succeed with a product roadmap presentation

How to influence and inspire teams with your product roadmap presentation. 

Martin Suntinger

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The product roadmap presentation can be nail biting for both developers and product managers; one party has worked hard to come up with a vision while the other party waits to see the unknown that is going to affect their work.

I felt this tension when I worked as a developer and I often found myself unsatisfied with the roadmaps product management put together. I didn't fully buy into the decisions, and I'd often walk out of a planning meeting with the sentiment of "Well, this doesn't make sense to me, but if they think so...", or even worse, a "We'll have to figure out things ourselves and make it look like what we do fits this roadmap.

You might argue the problem was likely me suffering from NIH (Not Invented Here syndrome) and you might be right. As a developer, I had a very strong opinion on what was the right thing to do. But now as a product manager, I see what caused this disconnect, and what general knowledge product managers can draw from this disconnect to hit a home run with a roadmap presentation. After all, if the technical team agrees with and understands the big picture, day-to-day design and implementation decisions will be made with the right context, and you’ll get the product you envisioned.

The following are my top ten ways to win over teams with a product roadmap presentation. 

1. Choose substance over buzzwords

While buzzwords like “big data analytics”, "machine learning," or “an Internet of Things initiative (IoT)” might resonate with business stakeholders as high-level anchor points, they aren't helpful and actionable items for technical teams. Engineering needs to know exactly what it is they're building, how it relates to current products, how it should be delivered, and who will use it in the end, and for what purpose.

Setting high-level themes is great for structuring the roadmap and context, but make sure you don’t stop there and have good answers for what is behind each high-level item. For example, if you've called a theme "intelligent services," make sure to break this down into  key initiatives and epics  that are needed in order to deliver this theme.

2. Set the right context

Technical teams need context for why you are building something on a roadmap. No technical team is going to say, "Just tell me what you want and I’ll build it." On the contrary, engineers need to see evidence for why you see demand for a feature. Let data speak, but also tell a powerful story from the perspective of your users. Use personas, and talk about some alternatives that you've excluded, and why. To help the entire team understand the roadmap the "why" matters as much as the "what."

3. Consider commitments carefully

If a feature doesn't seem well thought through or realistic, yet it is still on the roadmap, this should scream red flag. You don't want the technical team getting the impression that they have to build stuff just because you promised it to someone. This could be a commitment to a customer or because because "management wants it." So be wise about making commitments. Even if you have a forcing function behind yourself that requires a particular change, make sure you understand and pass on the rationale to the team, and stand behind it yourself.

4. Make realistic plans

A vision is good, but it’s even better if everyone feels confident that it can be achieved. The plan doesn't need to be precise, but if the first thing your development manager sees when looking at a roadmap is a huge bottleneck – for example, if the roadmap looks design heavy and frontend centered, but the team only has one designer and has struggled with frontend topics in the last few months – then you'll have he or she struggling with the roadmap throughout the rest of your presentation.

Make sure you do a reality check upfront with the team and play with what-if scenarios. You need to have answers, a clear plan of action, and concise consideration about the "how it can be done" before asking for everyone's commitment. 

Presenting product roadmaps | Atlassian agile coach

5. Think big, start small

You need to be aware of where a product and team skills are today versus where you want them to be. It's great to advance into new fields, which might require new skills in the team or moving away from existing technology, but don’t just write down dreams of where you’d like to be in a year. Instead, think about how to get there realistically. Acquiring talent takes time, adopting new technologies takes time, and abandoning existing products requires clear commitments and a transition plan.

6. Build a business case

Business case? Yes. Technical teams care about businesses cases. Maybe not to the same extent as senior management, but an entire development team cares about why something is relevant to the business, if it produces real results, and how this will be measured. Tap into the business-street-smarts of your technical team. Everyone has a vested interest in the business succeeding as a whole, and it can be great source of feedback or additional ideas.

Also, full clarity on the business impact and seeing it happen can be a great motivator; driving results is satisfying beyond just having built and shipped a feature.

7. Balance mundane with motivating

Engineers want to build unique, innovative products that they can take pride in. If it's just the same old story others have told before, it can be demotivating. Make sure you do research to confirm that your story is as innovative as you think. Aside from demotivated developers, the business impact of the lack of innovation is even worse.

With this said, even roadmaps will always be a balancing act between exciting new features, and technically not too interesting must-haves that just have to be done. Try to make sure that even the mundane is motivating on your roadmap. 

8. Think beyond MVP and v1

Creating a minimum viable product, and then a version 1 is one thing, but there’s also everything that happens post-launch: operations, maintenance, feature requests from users, continuous improvements, and new versions of other products and/or platforms that are integrated. A quick think on what the challenges and obstacles might be after a launch will bring these to light without much effort, and engineers will be thankful that you didn't ignore these realities. Rough estimates suggest that the initial effort of building a new feature is often only a third to one half of the total effort spent on it over its entire lifetime. In other words: the aftermath is more costly then the initial build, and some "quick small things" become very costly in the long run.

9. Roll with the punches

Estimates are a good thing. They give you guidance, and are created to the best of a product manager's knowledge at each given point in time. However, many assumptions made for estimates turn out very wrong once you go into implementation or refine a design. Make sure you prepare and present the roadmap so that it’s flexible to changes.

10. Be open and honest

A roadmap is there to provide guidance. It’s not a detailed plan for execution and everyone on a software team knows that. There's no need to sell it as something different than it is. So if you don’t have all the details on a topic yet, be open about it. Share what you have, what the intention is, what the open questions are and highest risks that still need to be addressed. Point out areas that require experimentation and more research to nail down the "what." Just remember to account for this experimentation time in planning.

The bottom line?

Your team deserves a roadmap that clearly paints the big picture, but doesn't neglect realities. Your team also deserves a roadmap that is motivating, exciting, and has enough details so the entire software team knows what to do in the next 1-2 sprints with a feeling of confidence that they'll achieve great results with material impact for the business.

Do you need additional help? Check out the  roadmaps features in Jira Software and a product roadmap template in Jira . Or try Jira Product Discovery , made for PMs, for free.

Martin currently leads Atlassian’s ecosystem team. Having successfully founded a startup in the Atlassian Marketplace before, he’s incredibly passionate about making sure our customers get access to a great choice of high quality apps in our Marketplace, as well as provide a great experience for all developers building on our platform. Outside the office, you’ll likely meet him mountain biking, kayaking, or chasing down the best coffee in town.

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The best presenters tell a compelling story. They lead audiences through a clear, logical explanation of concepts and bring data to life by connecting it to real-world use cases and examples. Roadmap presentations are the perfect opportunity to share what is coming next for your product in an engaging and memorable way. After all, you have an invested audience and you get to share where your product is headed — the inspiration for new features and updates, what your engineering team will get to build next, and how this work will bring value to the business and customers alike.

Build a roadmap presentation in Aha! Roadmaps — free for 30 days .

This guide will walk you through how to create your own winning roadmap presentation so you can clearly communicate the why, what, and when of upcoming product work. You can even kickstart your presentation prep by downloading a roadmap presentation template configured for one of seven different audiences. Whether you are presenting to executives or customers, the tips in this guide will get you started on the right track.

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What is a product roadmap presentation?

How do product managers use product roadmap presentations, what are the elements of a product roadmap presentation, roadmap presentation templates, tools to build roadmap presentations.

Building and presenting a product roadmap is an essential part of a product manager’s job. A product roadmap presentation informs stakeholders inside and outside the company where the product is headed and how you will get there. It is your opportunity to share product plans and explain how core initiatives and features map to the company’s strategy . Most importantly, you will show how the updates you are planning will delight customers and further differentiate the product.

Of course, before you put together a roadmap presentation, you must first build your roadmap. You can choose a robust roadmapping tool like Aha! Roadmaps or use a lighter weight solution such as Aha! Create .

Try a lightweight roadmap in Aha! Create. Sign up for a free account .

Screenshot of roadmap template from Aha! Create

Start using this template now

Product managers use roadmap presentations to communicate with a range of audiences — from executives to customers to engineering teams . Your presentation can be tailored to deliver different messages to your various audiences depending on the information you cover.

For example, you might use the presentation to show company leaders how major product themes or initiatives roll up into company-wide strategic efforts. Or you might want to show customers and partners what to look for in the next release. Internally you might need to highlight the timing of important customer needs and feature requests to engineering teams.

But roadmap presentations are about more than just timelines and features. They facilitate opportunities to open up dialogue, answer questions about product direction, and listen to feedback. You need to go beyond giving product updates — demonstrating why the updates matter and how they will make a real difference for your customers.

Presentation controls on an Aha! presentation.

You can create presentations in Aha! Roadmaps. Pull in live views and your data will stay up-to-date.

The best product roadmap presentations are designed to both communicate and persuade. Here are some essential elements to include and plan for in any product roadmap presentation:

There is no such thing as a "one size fits all" presentation template. Each presentation should be created with a specific audience in mind. Start by identifying your audience. Then identify your goals, how you will tie the roadmap to the broader product vision , and which roadmaps you will share.

Here are a few examples of roadmap presentation templates and guidelines for deciding what to include in your presentation:

Roadmap presentation template: Executives and advisory boards

Screen Shot 2020-12-03 at 1.12.47 PM

Roadmap presentation template: Marketing team

Marketing roadmap update

Roadmap presentation template: Engineering and IT teams

Engineering roadmap update

Roadmap presentation template: Sales and support

Sales roadmap update

Roadmap presentation template: Customers

Customer roadmap update

Roadmap presentation template: Partners

Roadmap template for partners

Roadmap presentation template: Analysts and media

Analyst roadmap update

Every product roadmap presentation will have a specific purpose guided by its target audience. However, building many customized presentations can be a time-consuming process.

Consider using roadmapping software to centralize your product planning and feature definition. You may need to aggregate information from multiple sources to create your roadmap presentation — spreadsheets, documents, other presentations, and design tools. Software purpose-built for product management makes it easier to share product roadmap plans securely with a target audience.

Regardless of how you create your roadmap presentation, the most important thing is to focus on your audience and your goals. This will allow you to clearly communicate the features and timelines of your roadmap. You will also demonstrate the "why" at the center of it all — how the product will deliver value to your business and your customers.

Set brilliant strategy, prioritize features, and share visual plans with Aha! Roadmaps — a purpose-built product development tool. Get started with a free trial for 30 days.

How to ace your roadmap presentation

Roadmapping doesn’t end once you’ve built your roadmap. The purpose of your roadmap is to visualize a transparent plan across your organization .

To ensure your roadmap is effective (and actually, you know, executed), you’ll need to align each team in a roadmap presentation.

Basically, your roadmap is just words on a page (or screen or whiteboard or wall) until it’s been validated in some form of roadmap presentation or meeting. During a well-executed roadmap presentation, you have the chance to show stakeholders that you understand their motivations — and they have a chance to publicly affirm their alignment. But if your presentation flops, so might your product or marketing strategy.

Wanna learn about the entire roadmapping process from beginning to end? Check out our roadmap guide here to learn the definition, why roadmaps are important and how you can use them to ✨shine in front of your decision-makers

What is a roadmap presentation.

The most important point to remember before your roadmap presentation: this is not the place to get buy-in for your plans. That might seem contradictory. (After all, we just described roadmap presentations as an opportunity for stakeholders to “publicly affirm their alignment.”) But it should be just that: an affirmation of alignment that was already established prior to the meeting.

(If you’re butting heads over the alignment process itself, we’ve written about how to get roadmap buy-in from each department in our product roadmapping guide. And, more specifically, how to get buy-in from executives .)

A roadmap presentation is far more than the words you actually say. Think of it as an alignment exercise whose success depends on what happens before, during and after you take the stage.

This is an essential chance to understand stakeholder motivations and forge consensus before moving forward with your plans.

To get nuts-and-bolts-y, we’ve found that roadmap presentations generally fall into one of two categories:

Short-term updates

Taking place weekly or biweekly, these frequent syncs tend to get in the weeds, covering the particularities of what’s getting built and how that affects other departments. This type of sit-down would be more common on smaller teams. And because these catch-ups happen regularly, formal buy-in before the presentation is not imperative. But the roadmap still needs to be communicated prior to the meeting to avoid any major surprises or backlash.

Long-term updates

For bigger organizations and teams, the roadmap presentation will likely happen monthly, bimonthly or even quarterly. For these conversations, buy-in before the meeting is critical. These meetings can often involve high-stakes projects that rely on massive alignment and dependencies . Show up to your presentation without everyone on board, and you’ll probably leave feeling pretty beat-up.

Before your roadmap presentation: How to prepare

When it comes to roadmap presentations, the pre-game is just as important as the main event. There are three areas you should learn inside-out to ensure a productive meeting:

Know the high-level strategy

Let’s use a product roadmap as an example. You’re going to build feature X, Y and Z — but what’s the big-picture goal those features address? Without being able to speak to the high-level strategy — and the tradeoffs that must be made to prioritize within that strategy — everyone will just start asking for whatever is most advantageous to them. Be able to speak to product vision and company vision — and how your roadmap aligns with both targets.

Check out Roadmunk's free, ready-to-use product roadmap template and make it your own.

Know the stakeholders

We mean actually get to know them: their motivations, their deadlines, their pressures, what’s keeping them up at night. Again, trust is crucial . For example, marketing and sales needs to feel that product decisions are sound — otherwise they might go rogue. This won’t happen overnight. But it’s important to invest the time.

Know the resource constraints

One of the most common (inevitable?) pushbacks you’re going to get is related to time. “Why can’t we move faster?” To counter this complaint, it’s absolutely crucial that you have an inside-out knowledge of your resources at any given time. You must be able to clearly articulate the resources required to execute a given task — and the tradeoffs that will be made if you swap in something else. It can also be useful to discuss historical timelines, reminding the room of how long things have taken in the past.

During your roadmap presentation: What to actually present

There’s no one way to slice your roadmap. So what should you actually show during your roadmap presentation? We can’t tell you exactly how to build a roadmap that suits your particular organization ( that’s where our template library comes in handy ), but we do recommend that you aim to meet at least a few of the following criteria:

1. Flexibility: Does your roadmap distinguish between what’s planned and what’s still TBD?

2. Personalization: Does it address the individual needs of each department and/or stakeholder?

3. Collaboration: Can you iterate on the roadmap during the presentation itself?

4. Clarity + Attractiveness: Does it look good? Is the plan visualized in a clear manner? Don’t underestimate the power of good design .

Below, we’ve included some options for structuring your roadmap for your presentation. With a dedicated roadmapping tool like Roadmunk , you can easily create and present multiple pivots of the same data.

1. Flexibility

It’s helpful to communicate which initiatives are actually in the pipeline, and which are still subject to change. One of our favourite ways to structure a roadmap is to organize items by In Progress , Scheduled and Proposed . If your organization works on a timeline, you can simply colour code the items on your roadmap.

If your organization prefers to avoid timelines, you could also create a Swimlane View with the headers In Progress, Scheduled or Proposed.

Like the way this roadmap looks? It's a Roadmunk template. Check our library of 25+ templates .

We’ve found this roadmap structure very effective for reducing backlash during a roadmap presentation. Stakeholders get a clear and immediate visual indication of which features are actually committed, and which are still being decided. Overall, it means you’re less likely to hear knee-jerk peanut gallery protestations.

2. Personalization

As we mentioned above, it can also be effective to visualize ownership during your roadmap presentation. A great way to do this is to organize your roadmap by department or even by the individual responsible for each task.

The roadmap below includes the same data as the roadmaps above, but we’ve included subheaders indicating individual ownership over each project.

If you really want to get granular with ownership, you could create a Swimlane View roadmap that highlights department , resource or individual owner . This puts the focus on who’s doing what for which department — not the timeline.

3. Collaboration

There’s a reason why the sticky-notes-on-a-wall method is such an enduring way to make a roadmap: it’s easy to change things up on the fly. Although you’d ideally have buy-in for your roadmap before the presentation, your meeting will go much smoother if you are also able to update your roadmap during the conversation.

With a tool like Roadmunk, you can easily add comments or adjust your roadmap directly within the app during the meeting. This makes for a much more dynamic and participatory presentation.

4. Clarity + Attractiveness

The core purpose of your roadmap is to visualize your strategy and make it crystal-clear to everyone in your organization. “Make something pretty!” may sound trite, but you’ll undermine your end-goal if your roadmap is unattractive or unclear.

Start building beautiful + collaborative roadmaps with Roadmunk. Signup for a free trial here.

Obviously, the content of your roadmap is more important than the appearance of your roadmap. But it will be a lot easier to highlight key information — no matter how complicated — if your visualization is easy on the eyes. Also recommended: custom branding .

What pushback should you prep for?

No matter how much you prepare, there are some common points of friction that come up again and again in roadmap meetings. A great way to ace your presentation: prepare for the pushback before it starts pushing. Here are some common questions to expect.

Are you actually going to achieve this timeline?

You’ll most frequently hear this from sales or execs. They want to confirm that your roadmap is realistic so they can plan accordingly. If you have a history of late delivery, be prepared to address why this time will be different. (Then make sure you deliver.)

How can we scope this down?

Just because stakeholders are skeptical that you can hit your deadlines doesn’t mean they don’t want things to go faster. One way to ship features quicker: scope them down. Especially at startups, executives might push the “M” in MSP when they see scope creep getting out of hand. Be prepared to answer why you’ve scoped each feature to its current specs — and be flexible when it’s possible to scope things down.

What’s the value of this roadmap?

Don’t just speak to the qualitative value of each new feature. Be prepared with hard numbers. How will this roadmap help achieve your revenue targets? What specific clients or market segment does it address? You should be able to tie items on your roadmap to specific dollar-sign potential, and articulate value vs. effort.

What are the maintenance costs going to be?

The cost of maintenance is one of the things most commonly neglected on the roadmap — even though it’s one of the most important and resource-draining aspects of any organization. Expect more technically inclined team members to pipe up with maintenance questions, or simply visualize maintenance initiatives directly on your roadmap.

Where are the risks or dependencies?

Sure, the roadmap looks great. But what factors could derail its execution? What risks does each stakeholder need to be aware of, and how will that affect their department’s ability to reach their targets? Also, what steps can stakeholders take to pitch in and mitigate those dangers? The more honest you are about the realities facing your roadmap, the more likely you’ll build trust — and get buy-in for your plan.

What happens after the presentation?

Alignment is a continuous process . It doesn’t just end when your meeting is finished. Make sure you follow up your roadmap presentation with thorough meeting notes and the updated roadmap. Create a concrete space — whether it’s within an email, a shared document, or your roadmap itself — where stakeholders can share feedback.

Reminder! The Number 1 way to fail your roadmap presentation is to not talk to anyone beforehand. Your presentation is all about alignment. Set the tone before your presentation by talking to — and, more importantly listening to — each stakeholder.

With Roadmunk, you can centralize customer feedback, prioritize what to build next and build beautiful customer-driven roadmaps. Signup for a free trial here .

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product roadmap presentation

Roadmap Presentation 101: How to Present a Roadmap to Stakeholders

What is a roadmap presentation, why presenting your roadmap is important, how to present a roadmap, what happens after the presentation.

Have you ever gotten close to launching a feature...only to be surprised by unexpected stakeholder feedback?

Perhaps this new information caused you to delay?

Or waste effort and time?

Most of us product people have found ourselves in this unfortunate situation. Happily, this problem can be overcome with a bit of planning.

A well-thought-out roadmap presentation will help you smoothly deliver against your product strategy.

Teams use roadmaps to communicate where we’re going with our product. Product managers put tons of thought into them.

Roadmap delivery states are carefully considered. We ruminate over whether we communicate our roadmap in outcomes or features. 

But to get the most out of our treasured product roadmaps, we need to get buy-in from our wider teams and stakeholders .

Get started with ready-made templates

airfocus templates

One important way to create buy-in is an effective roadmap presentation to your roadmap to stakeholders. Presenting your roadmap to key stakeholders is a great opportunity to tell a compelling story about where you're going. It's a chance to align and validate your team’s roadmap.

Thoughtfully present your roadmap and you will ensure your stakeholders can get behind your roadmap.

You will also reduce the risk of those nasty eleventh-hour surprises stopping you (and your product) in your tracks.

Before you go ahead with your next roadmap presentation, think about how you communicate your roadmap at these stages:

Before : get to know your stakeholders’ needs and motivations. Anticipate questions and feedback that might come up in the presentation.

During : clearly communicate with your stakeholders and check-in for feedback.

After : continue to request feedback and iterate on your roadmap presentation.

.css-1rpxuvi{position:absolute;left:0;top:-85px;} What is a roadmap

Roadmaps are a common way of expressing product direction to teams.

They come in all sorts of different formats.

But one thing good roadmaps have in common is that they map where you’re going with your product.

A roadmap provides a high-level overview of a product or project’s vision and direction over time.  

roadmap-new-timeline

A roadmap serves several purposes :

It maps out your vision and strategic goals.

Details how you’ll deliver against that vision and strategy.

Communicates the necessary information to align stakeholders.

Sets your priorities so that you focus on what’s important. 

A roadmap is meaningless unless you can deliver against it.

This is why it’s so important to create alignment with your team.

You want to make sure they are behind your roadmap so you can solve all the important problems you’ve prioritized!

A roadmap presentation is a communication and alignment exercise. It is part of your wider ongoing stakeholder management strategy.

The presentation shouldn't be the first time your stakeholders see your product roadmap. It should be part of an ongoing series of meetings or updates to communicate where your product is going.

The format and cadence of your roadmap presentation depend on your organization and stakeholders.

Some common types of updates are smaller check-ins as well as more formalized leadership presentations. 

Smaller team check-ins

You might set up regular check-ins (e.g. weekly or bi-weekly) to talk about your roadmap with team members who are close to your product.

For example, if you are in a small startup, you may report directly to a CEO.

With a small check-in, you can regularly walk your CEO through your product roadmap every two weeks to ensure she has a firm grasp of where you’re going.

These check-ins will give her the chance to feedback and ensure she is on board.

Another example is a regular check-in with the developers in your team. This sync will help them understand how their daily work fits into the bigger picture.

It will also give them the opportunity to feedback on the roadmap.

Recurring leadership presentations

Product managers also use more formal roadmap presentations to communicate with leadership and other key stakeholders.

This is often the case in larger product-led organizations.

These organizations likely have a well-established product practice and hierarchy.

Your organization may already have an agreed-upon roadmap presentation process for teams.

For example, your leadership team may ask that you present your roadmap at the beginning of each quarter, or each month.

This might be a more formal session with less room for back and forth, depending on time constraints.

In these types of meetings, concise messaging is critical. It is also important to have a clear view of your roadmap’s impact on other teams, departments, and the wider organization.

This way, you are anticipating dependencies and cross-over between your team and other teams.

Presenting your roadmap to key stakeholders is a great opportunity to tell a compelling story about where you're going.

It's a chance to bring to life your product roadmap artifact.

By presenting your roadmap to relevant stakeholders, you can build alignment and validate your team’s roadmap. This will help you and your team avoid:

Stakeholder confusion or dissatisfaction on where the product is going;

Conflicting messages from different stakeholders.

Last-minute stakeholder feedback and unanticipated surprises that might result in wasted effort;

A good roadmap presentation will ensure your stakeholders can get behind your roadmap. You and your team will feel confident that you have the right buy-in to deliver against your strategy.

Preparing for your roadmap presentation

Think ahead about how you’ll communicate your roadmap so that you can get the most out of your presentation. Your future self will thank you for putting in the time!

1. Ensure your roadmap aligns with the overall organization strategy and goals

Your roadmap should ladder up to your business’s strategy and goals.

Make sure you’ve put in all the work necessary to tally your product vision and roadmap up with the organization's strategy and goals.

Make it clear how where you’re going is in line with where the business is going.

roadmap presentation

If your roadmap doesn’t fit in with where the business is going, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get key stakeholders on board with it.

2. Identify your stakeholders’ interest and influence

Get a firm understanding of stakeholders' interests and influence on your product. This will help you communicate effectively with them.

Spend some time figuring who your stakeholders are, and mapping them out. A simple and impactful approach to this is the interest and influence matrix.

Stakeholder mapping will help you determine who you’re communicating your roadmap with, and how to communicate with them.

Take time to think about who will be in the room (or call), and whether you have all the right people you need for buy-in. Review your stakeholder map to help you make decisions about the guest list beforehand.

If the right people are there, you’ll be able to have a concise conversation and get the feedback and alignment you need.

3. Empathise with your stakeholders

Stakeholders have different goals, motivations, and challenges. Get to know your stakeholders before you hold your session.

This will help you understand them and create trust. Note that this is more relevant for more formalized leadership presentations. If you're presenting to a close team, you'll likely know those team members better already.

If you don’t know your stakeholders before your session, set up some stakeholder interviews. This will help you to understand them. Stakeholder interviews can be informal. They're simply conversations to get to know stakeholders' motivations and challenges.

“Stakeholder interviews will help you understand the essential structure of the organization, how your work fits into the organization as a whole, and the approval process for various aspects of your project. They’ll also provide you with some less obvious opportunities to influence your project’s chances of success.” — Erika Hall, Just Enough Research

If you are very unfamiliar with your stakeholders, you can approach your conversations with more structure. Consider some guidelines to prepare for them.

4. Create buy-in with your stakeholders

You may already know stakeholders and their goals well.

Still, individual meetings are important for creating before your roadmap presentation.

This buy-in is most relevant for higher stakes leadership roadmap presentations.

Even if your roadmap presentation is more of an informal team sync, take the time to communicate your roadmap before the meeting to avoid surprises.

Early conversations will help you anticipate feedback and challenges that may come up in your presentation. It will also be useful to consider how your roadmap impacts on stakeholders and other parts of your organization. Listen actively to understand points of friction and potential pushback.

Aim to get stakeholders on board with your roadmap before your roadmap presentation. Remember that your presentation is to create alignment. You’ll be far more likely to align with a wide group of stakeholders if you’ve created buy-in 1:1 beforehand.

During your roadmap presentation

1. set the agenda.

I find it useful to spend time upfront being clear on the purpose of a session, and the format. Some areas to cover early on include:

Your roadmap presentation objective(s)

Outcomes you want to achieve with this roadmap presentation

The stage your team is at with your roadmap (are things largely defined at this stage, or is there ample opportunity for stakeholders to shape the roadmap at this stage?).

How you’ll take feedback during the session, and outside of the session

You may also want to spend some time aligning on what a roadmap is. Don’t assume that everyone knows! Tailor your message depending on the stakeholders you're speaking with and how product-led your organization is.

You can also cover any key principles that underpin your roadmap. For example, you may want to highlight to stakeholders that your roadmap is outcome-driven, rather than feature-driven.

Discussing what a roadmap is and its principles will create a shared understanding before you go into the artifact in more detail.

2. Communicate clearly and address your stakeholders’ needs

Using simple and clear language is a good bet in any setting. Avoid using industry jargon. Accessible language will go a long way to helping communicate your product roadmap. This is especially true if you're trying to align a wide variety of stakeholders.

Tailor your message depending on the audience. If you’re speaking to leadership removed from your team’s day-to-day, your message should be concise and to the point. If you’re holding a more regular roadmap catch-up, you’ll naturally want to cover more detail.

Be clear on the trade-offs you’ve had to make so that stakeholders get a good understanding of the different considerations you and your team make.

Give stakeholders the big picture so that they can understand where they fit in.

Remember to try and address your different stakeholders' needs. You may have uncovered these in earlier stakeholder interviews or catch-ups.

A good way to do this can be to filter your roadmap content by “epics” or outcomes. You can show the ones that are relevant to the departments or practices that you are speaking with.

3. Leave room for questions and feedback

One of the key goals of a roadmap presentation is to validate your roadmap with stakeholders.

Make sure you give participants an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback. After all, alignment isn’t one-sided! It’s an exercise in negotiating different views and opinions.

Actively listen and hear people out. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to act on every single piece of feedback, but make sure stakeholders feel heard and understood.

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Presenting your roadmap is part of your wider ongoing stakeholder management strategy. This means that once you’ve shared your product roadmap, things don’t end there.

1. Make the roadmap artifact accessible

Create ongoing alignment by sharing your roadmap with stakeholders in an accessible place. This means putting it somewhere obvious where people can go and look at it regularly.

This will allow them to continuously check-in and keep up to date on changes. You should continue to communicate updates and changes to your roadmap outside of meetings. For example, you can update regularly using your company’s messaging platform (e.g. Slack , Microsoft Teams ) or other communication tools like Loom .

2. Follow up on feedback

Don’t leave stakeholders hanging. Be deliberate about feedback on your roadmap. Make sure to follow up on any feedback shared during the presentation.

Also, consider creating a space where stakeholders can continue to provide feedback on your roadmap on an ongoing basis. Some ideas of how you can do this:

A shared document

A dedicated space in your company’s knowledge sharing tool, if you have one (e.g. Notion , Confluence , Coda )

A dedicated channel in your company’s messaging platform

A dedicated space for feedback in the roadmap artifact itself

Be sure to manage expectations on how this feedback will be reviewed and actioned.

3. Iterate on your product roadmap presentation

Get feedback from stakeholders on if your presentations and updates are working for them. This will help you improve and have better ongoing communication around your roadmap.

You may have been presenting product roadmaps in the same way for years but there is likely still room for improvement! Some areas you can seek feedback on:

Is the meeting cadence working for stakeholders?

Do they understand your product team’s priorities and trade-offs?

Do they understand the roadmap’s impact on them?

A roadmap presentation is a great way to align with stakeholders and get the buy-in you need to get on with delivering against it.

Roadmap alignment is a continuous, ongoing process. Be thoughtful about how you approach your roadmap presentations. Consider before, during, and after the roadmap presentation to build successful alignment.

Hilary Johnson

Hilary Johnson

Quadri Oshibotu

Quadri Oshibotu

23 Feb 2023

Adam Thomas

Adam Thomas

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Home PowerPoint Templates 45+ Product Roadmap PowerPoint Templates & Presentation Slides

45+ Product Roadmap PowerPoint Templates & Presentation Slides

Download and use product roadmap templates to create your own roadmap presentation in PowerPoint and Google Slides. The 100% editable product roadmap slides for PowerPoint can help you to make presentations with attractive roadmap designs .

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Building a memorable product roadmap presentation in 5 steps

product roadmap presentation

Blake Thorne

November 21, 2022.

Great product roadmaps are useful even without a formal presentation behind them. But when it is time to deliver a tour of what’s on the roadmap, there are some tried and true things you can do to make sure the right message and details get across. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

You have a lot to say in a short amount of time during a product roadmap presentation. 

So it’s best to rely on visuals, not words alone. Not relying on visualized data makes for confusing presentations no one will remember.

Another common mistake when creating a product roadmap is not giving enough attention to how it’s communicated and presented to all stakeholders. These are just a couple of problems you can avoid as you’re preparing your next presentation. 

‍ Next, we’re going over five core steps you need to create a product roadmap presentation that engages your stakeholders and gets you their buy-in.

Before all else, let’s clarify what a product roadmap presentation is and its purpose. ‍

What is a product roadmap presentation?

A product roadmap presentation is a visual way to communicate the initiative and strategy held within a product roadmap.

The purpose of a roadmap is to convey strategy and vision in a manner that aligns everyone around the success of the project. It helps organizations make better decisions and measure progress toward strategic goals by communicating key milestones, roles, dependencies, and risks.

We should note, the question of how you present your roadmap and how you create and build your roadmap go hand in hand. A big part of the point of a roadmap is to serve as a communication and presentation tool. So while this guide is about the act of presenting a roadmap, there’s plenty in here about the decisions that go into building and maintaining a roadmap in the first place.

Who delivers the presentation? 

Product roadmap presentations are typically delivered by someone on the product team — such as a product manager or head of product. Often product marketing managers will deliver the presentation.

Who’s the audience?

Typically stakeholders across the business: sales, support, marketing, customer success, even the senior management team. Sometimes customers or specific VIP customers will be privy to a roadmap presentation.

How to prepare a product roadmap presentation in 5 steps

With our systematic five-step formula, you’ll be able to build a product roadmap presentation that gets all ideas across without the extra hard work.

Establish an agenda

A product roadmap presentation agenda is a visual overview of how the product team will present information related to the product roadmap. Agendas are a great way to ensure that everyone knows what they are presenting and how it fits into the entire context of the meeting.

They usually include an introduction or overview, objectives, key insights, and the general content structure. It’s vital to mention this information in your presentation to build trust with stakeholders and connect your story to their needs. Your executive team will see how the product fits into their larger strategy, and feel more confident about moving forward with its development.

We recommend starting the presentation with a discussion of the project’s goals and objectives. Then move on to the product roadmap itself, including key features and benefits, timelines for development and release, and specific objectives on each team member’s accountabilities.

Understand your audience

Your audience is anyone who cares about the product, including customers and prospects.

Some things that can help you determine who your audience is include:

A roadmap presentation often goes over details about how a company plans to develop its offering over time. The goal is to give people who are interested in what you do an idea of what's coming up next and why it's important.

It's also important to know who the audience for a roadmap presentation is because it helps you tailor your message accordingly. You don't want to tell customers something they already know or assume they'll care about something they don't have any interest in. In short: Talk to them in their language, using phrases that make sense to them and that align with how they think about business problems.

To get to know your stakeholders better, follow these two essential steps: 1. Ask them questions . The key to getting people to want something is to understand what motivates them and what they value. Asking open-ended questions like "What do you hope will happen?" or "How do you feel about X?" can help you uncover their desires and motivations. However, be sure that you ask these questions in a non-leading way — don't make it obvious how they should answer them

2. Watch what they do rather than listen to what they say. You can learn a lot from watching how people react when given new information or ideas — especially if it's something that contradicts their existing beliefs or values. People tend to behave differently when their beliefs are challenged, so pay attention to signs of discomfort or frustration when presenting new ideas, products, or services.

Your stakeholders probably have different perspectives on your product and how it fits into the rest of the business. They may also have different expectations for how you're going to execute on each feature or release.

For example, let's say you're building a new feature that will allow customers to purchase products through their mobile devices. Your sales team might be excited about this because it means more sales, but your operations team might be concerned about how much bandwidth will be available for their systems when customers start loading up their phones with apps.

The more you know about your stakeholders, the better positioned you'll be to create an effective product roadmap presentation that addresses any concerns they may have while still keeping them informed about what's coming next from your team. So get to know WHO they are before you dig deeper into understanding what they want.

Choose the right format

There are various formats you can choose from when sharing roadmaps: Gantt Charts, timeline roadmaps, metric-focused roadmaps, etc. The most effective format you can use if you’re just creating your first presentation [and you might want to scale in the future] is a Kanban board. These allow you to clearly show how your roadmap aligns with your product strategy.

If you have a long-term roadmap, it’s important to show how each item fits into this bigger picture. A Kanban board allows you to do exactly that. It gives you a clear visual way to organize your product items and show their importance relative to one another.

On top of that, Kanban boards let you control the pace of change on a visual level. If an item isn’t ready for release yet but is a high priority, it can be placed at the top of the board so everyone knows what needs work and by when it will be done.

This makes it easier for stakeholders to understand which items need more attention before release and which ones can wait until later (or never).

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Get started with creating your first shareable roadmaps for free.

Consider all obstacles, even beyond your MVP

The more specific and detailed you are about the problems that need to be solved for your product roadmap, the more opportunities you will create for yourself.

For example, if you're selling an e-commerce product, it's important to mention that people are not comfortable buying online and that they prefer to physically touch products before making a purchase decision.

Or if you're building a new mobile app that offers personal health management services, it's important to note that many people don't like being monitored by others and prefer to take care of their own health issues.

When mentioning these issues, talk about how they negatively affect your product roadmap and how they can be solved through your product or service offering.

But don’t stop here.

Think about what resource constraints could impact your product after the launch of the MVP.

You may not have the resources available to implement every change that you want to make. Or customers could complain about a specific functionality or the user experience in general.

Above all, take note of all constraints ahead of time.

Customize for each department

A product is naturally influenced by all areas of your business.

So making sure this presentation speaks to everyone shouldn’t be a surprise.

Here are some tips to help you customize your product roadmap presentations for different core departments:

Don’t forget to leave room for change. This is inevitable when you’ve got different teams chiming in with new ideas and finds so prepare accordingly.

What else should you keep in mind for your next product roadmap presentation?

You've got your product roadmap presentation. You know what you're going to say, and you've got a few ideas about how to say it. 

But as with any presentation, there are a few more things that will help you deliver your message effectively:

Make the presentation conversational: Don't just talk at people — engage them in conversation and encourage them to ask questions as well. This will help keep the audience engaged throughout the entire presentation and ensure that they're understanding everything correctly!

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Product Roadmap Presentation Template

Show colleagues, stakeholders, and clients the direction of your product development with the Product Roadmap Presentation Template.

About the Product Roadmap Presentation Template 

The Product Roadmap Presentation Template outlines the direction of your product development. Use a product presentation template to show what you want to create, why you think your customers will value it, and how it aligns with your company's strategy. 

What is a product roadmap presentation? 

A product roadmap presentation is your opportunity to share product plans with your internal and external stakeholders. It presents the key information from your product roadmap , explaining how new products and product features align with business objectives and provide customer value. 

At the end of the presentation, product managers will have a chance to answer questions about product direction. It's a collaborative process, aligning your team and getting everyone on the same page. 

What should you include in a product roadmap presentation? 

Every product roadmap presentation is different. However, there are some common topics that crop up in most presentations:

An introduction and agenda

Tell your audience what the presentation is about and what it’ll involve. That way, they know what to expect and how long it’ll last. 

Your purpose and product vision

Show your audience the reasoning behind the new product (or new features) to give them some context. For example, customer feedback shows that buyers are looking for an additional product feature. That way, your audience can see the rationale behind your product strategy. 

The product’s target audience

Be clear about who you’re trying to target with your new product. It could be your existing audience, or you might want to reach a new audience in a different market.

Your product roadmap

Show your audience what you’ve outlined in your product roadmap, but keep it top-level. They don’t need to know all the ins and outs, so make sure you only outline the key information. For example, you can showcase the anticipated timeline but don't go into detail about each deliverable along the way. 

Any feedback and questions

At the end of the presentation, provide your audience with the opportunity to ask questions. This will be your opportunity to have a discussion with them and get their feedback. 

When should you deliver a product roadmap presentation?

There are a few situations where you might need to deliver a roadmap presentation. Here are a few of the most common: 

To get approval from business leaders

Before you can make any changes or launch new products, you need approval from management. Delivering a product roadmap presentation is a good place to start. Why? Because it shows them everything they need to know about the new product. They’ll see how your product themes feed into the company-wide strategy, how it’ll offer customers a better product, and whether it’s a viable product. 

To create a release plan

Creating a product roadmap presentation gives customers and business partners an idea of what to expect in the future. Think of Apple as an example. They don’t have specific release dates for their products, but the business provides regular updates of what improvements and changes they plan to make in the future. It keeps everyone in the loop and builds anticipation. 

To get your team on the same page

A product roadmap presentation is a perfect opportunity to get your product team (and anyone else involved in the product roadmap) on the same page. From the get-go, everyone has the same expectations and is fully aligned with the goals. 

How do you create a product roadmap presentation with Miro?

Miro is the perfect online presentation creator to quickly build a presentation. The Product Roadmap Presentation Template is ideal for collaborative teams. It’s intuitive, easy-to-use, customizable, and distributed teams can access it from anywhere. To get started, select this free template and follow these steps. 

Step 1: Add your roadmap to the template

Start by adding the key pieces of information from your roadmap into the template (it’s easy to add files if you want to upload images from the roadmap). Try not to overload the presentation with details from the roadmap. You only need to provide a high-level view of the crucial pieces of information, such as the timeline, budgets, and customer insights. 

Step 2: Customize the presentation template

With the key information in place, you can visualize where everything else will sit in the template. With Miro’s template, you’ll have access to our pre-made slides. They’re fully customizable, so you can move things around to suit your specific presentation. You can also add or remove slides, edit the placeholder content, and add your own company branding. 

Step 3: Add supporting information and context

Now you can start to flesh out the presentation. You’ll add your introduction and agenda, followed by the main purpose. Then, you can outline who your target audience is and add your market research to provide context. If you have data and customer insights to share, you can add shapes , charts , and link internally and externally to any relevant reports. 

Step 4: Get feedback from colleagues

When the template is complete, share the presentation with colleagues to get feedback and make any necessary changes. Using Miro’s digital workspace, it’s easy for teams to collaborate throughout this process — even if they’re working remotely. 

Step 5: Deliver the presentation

Select presentation mode to deliver the presentation in full screen. Use the arrow buttons or keys to move the presentation along (only the slides in the frames you selected will be visible).

How long should a product roadmap presentation be?

It varies depending on how many products and features you need to discuss. Around 1–2 hours is ideal and allows plenty of time for brainstorming at the end.

What’s included in this Product Roadmap Presentation Template?

In this template, you’ll get access to Miro’s ready-made presentation slides. Each slide in this template is a frame with placeholder text. Simply edit the content in the slides, add or remove new slides, and change their order to create your ideal presentation.

Get started with this template right now.

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