A major problem with many product roadmaps is that they only look at what will be completed in terms of output rather than how it will affect your business results through outcomes.
Moving From Outputs to Outcomes
With product teams developing and releasing products on a more rapid cycle, sticking to a rigid schedule based solely on features of the product creates large gaps between what you build and what the market actually buys.
This guide will show you what a complete saas product roadmap example should look like by breaking down each format, goal for each stage, and review cycle for the scaling of a software company.
Why Legacy Release Schedules Fail
In the words of Marty Cagan, product leader and author of Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love, "95% of roadmaps are output driven, not outcome driven." For many years now, software companies have been using Gantt charts and annual product or feature release schedules as the primary means of planning their engineering capacity to develop and deliver their products to customers.
This plan for developing a product is not how modern software is developed.
Today, many companies that are product focused on SaaS, or software as a service, will release 7-9 major features into the market every quarter.
This fast pace of product development makes it impossible to continue to have a strict feature orientation to plan your engineering work and also be able to react to customer feedback in real time or with customers' changing needs.
When product managers commit to a hard date of a feature 6 months prior to delivery, they are creating a trap. In attempting to develop this feature by the deadline of the date given by the product manager, the resources and effort that must be put into this product will create incredible amounts of technical debt and ultimately miss the user's actual need.
Companies need to stop using these obsolete formats for product development. An updated way of creating a product roadmap is to concentrate on the problems that your product will solve for your customers, not a fixed list of buttons to press.
Focusing on Metrics and Outcomes
The overarching goal within the whole company and across all teams is highly focused on metrics as a priority. If a project or feature does not contribute to delivering upon a target metric, the product team has been given the authority to remove it or change direction.
Cohort explorations and identifying shifts in cohort analytics can be accomplished using tools such as Mixpanel and Userpilot. By connecting the items on the roadmap to funnel analytics and cohort retention data, prioritization will be determined by measurable data rather than being based on the arbitrary opinions of a handful of senior executives.
Planning Software with AI Agents
The emergence of AI agents has transformed the way that software will now be planned. It is no longer acceptable to create a roadmap that focuses solely on the human users. A modern saas product roadmap example must include a dedicated product track for developing programmatic capability.
The leading companies now have two separate (and simultaneous) tracks for roadmap development. Track one addresses the human user and track two builds programmatic capability (APIs), connecting and creating tools for AI agents to be able to interact directly with the software.
Companies that ignore the need for building and developing programmatic capabilities for their product will lose valuable sales opportunities and be at a competitive disadvantage. As end-users begin to rely more on AI agents to perform tasks, your software must have the ability to receive programmatic commands. In order to support the development of agent-facing capabilities, your product roadmap must allocate resources necessary to build connections for AI agents.
The Four-Field Accountability Standard
The lack of clear ownership and measurable confidence in roadmap items is one of the inherent weaknesses in many planning templates. There should never be an agenda item on a roadmap that is simply a "big idea" on a generic planning board. All top-tier product teams will have a four-field card structure that they follow for each and every initiative on their board, regardless of whether you use Productboard, Aha!, Notion, or Jira.
The Title and Why
The first field on the card is the title, which should clearly describe the initiative in simple terms so that everyone from engineering to sales can understand what the initiative is without having to ask for a translation.
The second field is the why, which serves as the strategic rationale for why the initiative was created. The why connects the title to a specific SaaS metric. The why will highlight whether the efforts of this initiative are to increase activation, drive expansion revenue, or reduce churn.
If the product manager cannot articulate the why associated with the initiative using a business metric, then the initiative does not belong on the roadmap.
Ownership and Confidence Levels
The third field on the card is the owner. Each initiative must have at least one person assigned as the owner and that person has the sole responsibility for the outcome of the initiative. When there is shared ownership of an initiative, it typically results in delayed decision making and a lack of accountability.
The fourth field on the card is the confidence score. This field lists the team's level of confidence that this initiative will achieve the stated why. Most teams will use frameworks such as RICE, ICE, and MoSCoW when establishing the confidence score for an initiative.
By including a confidence score on the card, teams can identify when they are guessing about the ability of the initiative to achieve the why. As a result, teams conduct additional user research and validate their assumptions before they commit to allocate costly engineering time to a project. The Opportunity Solution Tree created by Teresa Torres is an excellent method for increasing confidence scores prior to starting any engineering work on the initiative.
SaaS Product Roadmap Example by Growth Stage
The way a company generates a revenue stream may vary greatly between a company with $100 million and a newly funded startup.
A good starting point is to use a template when creating a roadmap. By creating a customized template specific to the company's size and market conditions, the template can be built upon.
Early-Stage Startups and Product/Market Fit
Establishing product/market fit should start with establishing the first use case, which usually results in realizing activation at the earliest possible opportunity with minimal human intervention by the user. This will create a strong customer experience.
During this phase, the roadmap will address a lot of challenges associated with onboarding customers. For example, the Primephonic music streaming service used cohort-based redesigns to not only improve their sign-up conversion rate from 20% to 80% but also to establish a strong customer onboarding process.
A standard roadmap during the early stages of a product-led growth (PLG) startup would encompass the Now-Next-Later structure. The "Now" column will include items that you can remove from the customer's sign-up experience. The "Next" column will include ways to enable self-service team invitations. The "Later" column will introduce advanced collaboration capabilities.
Transitioning from Series A to Mid-Market
As a B2B SaaS company approaches $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), many SaaS companies begin shifting their focus from their small market to their larger mid-market. When this occurs, the company will need to switch to an entirely different roadmap for achieving success.
The sales team will face numerous obstacles while attempting to sell mid-market enterprise deals without enterprise-grade features. Therefore, the roadmap should list the key features and functionality that will provide the sales team with the tools needed to remove the roadblocks from achieving mid-market sales.
A saas product roadmap example for a Series A B2B SaaS company may contain the following Now-Next-Later structure. The "Now" column will consist of essential elements (e.g. single sign-on (SAML), usage-based billing, and the creation of a user dashboard for Service Level Agreements). The "Next" column will provide ideas for future enhancements (e.g. how to improve sales outreach). The "Later" column will provide the framework for how to integrate with third parties into the product. The "Next" column provides a roadmap for achieving compliance with SOC 2 Type II and developing deeper partner integrations. "Later" is where all investment will end up for advanced AI analytics and European data residency.
Growth Stage and Retention Focus
In the growth stage of a company's lifecycle, the focus is on maintaining existing customers. Customer churn will be the primary threat to the company's ability to drive shareholder value. To sustain a strong valuation, the focus of the company's roadmap will need to shift from solely acquiring new customers to maintaining net revenue retention.
As companies transition through this phase of growth, outcome-based roadmaps become critical to success. For example, if a company's goal is to increase customer retention by 12% over the first 90 days after signing on to a contract, all initiatives on the roadmap will need to be focused on this goal.
Additional features would include sophisticated reporting, extensive workflow automation, and tools to reduce daily friction for users. The goal is to create a dependent relationship between the user and the software.
Aligning Roadmap Format with Your Sales Motion
When considering the format of your sales motion, it is essential to keep in mind that the way you sell your software will influence the way you design your software.
Companies that sell through self-service models will need to plan their product roadmaps differently compared to companies that sell large enterprise contracts.
If your product roadmap does not align with how you will market your software, there will be confusion within your product and marketing teams.
The Now-Next-Later Framework
The Now-Next-Later framework is the most effective approach for defining your product roadmap for most SaaS companies today. It helps eliminate the stress of defining specific launch dates while giving an overall direction of where the company is headed.
The Now category represents items that are currently being worked on, those items that are actively being designed, developed, or tested, and have a high degree of certainty and dedicated ownership within the engineering team.
The Next category includes the items that are currently in the discovery/design phase as they relate to your product roadmap. They define their why clearly, yet the precise technical boundaries are still being cleaned up.
"Later" serves as the long range vision, and represents untested assumptions and long-range wagers. To think of the items in "Later" as a wishlist of sorts is a mistake; only items that directly correspond to the organization's more extensive vision should appear on the "Later" list.
Outcome-Driven and Strategic Cascade Models
For those firms focusing significantly on metrics: The outcome-driven model projects the outcomes of company efforts. Essentially, this model is based on the business result achieved by using a range of initiatives.
Strategic cascade models operate the same way as outcome-driven models. Strategic cascade models begin with a broad, general objective for the company, and then break that objective down into product themes. Each of those themes represents a collection of smaller technical tasks that tie back up to an executive's larger priorities.
Typically, product teams create links for this view to allow executives to see the strategic view and engineers to drill down into an individual task.
Managing Public Roadmaps Without Setting Dates
Public roadmaps are becoming increasingly common for SaaS companies to help build credibility and get user feedback on their products. GitHub, Loom, Trello, Atlassian, through their own public boards, signal to their communities where their products are going.
However, public roadmaps can become extraordinarily dangerous if not managed correctly. They can quickly devolve into a series of broken promises.
In general, best practices dictate that a Kanban-style public roadmap should be divided into a series of categories: "New Ideas", "In Progress", and "Launched". You should never attach a release date to a public roadmap to keep your audience's expectations low. Use something like GitHub Discussions or Featurebase as a way for your community to vote on product ideas, but to make it abundantly clear that votes do not necessarily mean that those ideas will see development.
Unifying Your Planning Cadence
Even if a roadmap is created, it will be irrelevant if it is not updated on a regular basis. Inconsistent and outdated roadmaps will generate distrust. Therefore, sales teams will proactively avoid looking at roadmaps and engineering teams will disregard them altogether.
In order for product leadership teams to continue to ensure the accuracy of their roadmaps, they need to maintain an established monthly review cadence.
Monthly Alignment Meetings
The product leadership teams should hold 45 minute strict alignment meetings every month. These meetings are not brainstorming sessions, but rather operational sessions focused on the current roadmap alignment.
During this meeting, the team needs to review the status of all items in the "Now" column. If an item is behind schedule, the team needs to make the critical choice to either cut some of the scope, increase resources on that task, or terminate it.
The monthly alignment meetings help ensure that the go-to-market organization is aware of what is currently being developed to support launches.
Quarterly Re-Plans and Scrap Sessions
Every quarter, product leadership needs 2 hours to conduct a deep dive into the roadmap and make adjustments in items moving from "Next" to "Now" and from "Later" to "Next."
Again, product leadership has to be brutally honest during this exercise. If a product manager has an idea for a mobile application or wants to completely redesign the organization's API, and that request does not fit with that quarter's objective, it is imperative that the request is declined or moved to the parked list.
Don't allow the "Later" list to become the dumping ground for ideas that are not a priority or not aligned with the current company's objective. If you are not going to build it, remove it from the board altogether; this will help you stay focused on what's most important.
The Baseline for SaaS Product Development
The software industry has moved into an era where rigid project plans and arbitrary release dates are no longer valid. Today's standard is complete alignment between what a company produces as a product, and how it achieves its desired business result. The companies that continue to rely on an output-driven Gantt chart strategy are consistently blinding themselves to current market conditions and significantly hindering the velocity with which they ship product.
The best product teams create accountability through single ownership and confidence scores based on data for every initiative they pursue. They adapt their planning formats to fit their specific growth stage (e.g., if their goal is to achieve activation of their products, or to comply with enterprise level regulations), and also by formally integrating agent capabilities next to traditional user features.
This enables them to prepare for the next significant evolution of software consumption. The roadmap is no longer just a means of tracking development; it is the ultimate tool for strategically communicating a company's ability to remain competitive in its marketplace.
Executive Q&A: Eliminating Roadmap Bottlenecks
How can we prevent the sales team from selling future features in the "Later" column?
Sales teams will tend to sell features that are currently in the "Later" stage when either the current product does not provide competitor parity or because the roadmap format gives the sales team the false impression of having a definitive timeline. To eliminate this practice, completely eliminate any dates from anything outside the "Now" column.
Educate the sales team that any items displayed in the "Later" column are unproven hypotheses and are NOT scheduled to be delivered. Implement strict policies surrounding only allowing sales to close deals using items currently in some form of active development or beta testing.
When should an item be removed from the backlog?
An item should be removed from the backlog as soon as it becomes misaligned with the company's current key business outcome, or if it has been stagnant in the "Later" column for longer than two planning quarters.
Holding on to outdated concepts causes clutter to the mind. If any initiative cannot obtain a dedicated owner, a strong confidence score and a clear correlation to a metric such as retention or activation during a quarterly review, it must be removed forever, not delayed.
What do we use to measure success on an AI agent capability?
You will measure success of AI agents in the same manner as you measure human users: through the rate of task completion and usage frequency. Instead of assessing click-paths, record the number of successful API calls or programmatic interactions compared to the total number of users.
If an AI agent feature was built, but it does not lead to an increase in the speed or frequency of the user's core workflow; it has failed to deliver results and needs to be addressed immediately.
