A product roadmap is a communication artifact showing what a product team plans to build, in what order, and on what time horizon. It is used to align engineering, design, sales, leadership, customers, and investors around the same direction of travel. It is the most-misunderstood deliverable in product management because internal audiences want commitments and external audiences want certainty, while a good product roadmap exists to communicate priorities and tradeoffs honestly across both.
The dominant modern format is now / next / later (popularized by Janna Bastow at ProdPad), which groups initiatives into three time-horizon buckets without committing to fixed dates: now (in active development, this quarter), next (plann...