What's Hot in Product Roadmapping? Key Practices and Success Factors

Context: Organizations are increasingly challenged by dynamic and technical market environments. Traditional product roadmapping practices such as detailed and fixed long-term planning typically fail in such environments. Therefore, companies are actively seeking ways to improve their product roadmapping approach. Goal: This paper aims at identifying problems and challenges with respect to product roadmapping. In addition, it aims at understanding how companies succeed in improving their roadmapping practices in their respective company contexts. The study focuses on mid-sized and large companies developing software-intensive products in dynamic and technical market environments. Method: We conducted semi-structured expert interviews with 15 experts from 13 German companies and conducted a thematic data analysis. Results: The analysis showed that a significant number of companies is still struggling with traditional feature-based product-roadmapping and opinion-based prioritization of features. The most promising areas for improvement are stating the outcomes a company is trying to achieve and making them part of the roadmap, sharing or co-developing the roadmap with stakeholders, and the establishing discovery activities.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement

• Publication date

  2019-11-27

• Fields of study

  Business, Engineering, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_29
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Product Roadmap – From Vision to Reality: A Systematic Literature Review

  2019cited by this paper
• Data-driven Roadmapping Turning Challenges into Opportunities

  2018cited by this paper
• Design Roadmapping in an Uncertain World: Implementing a Customer-Experience-Focused Strategy

  2018cited by this paper
• Why feature-based roadmaps fail in rapidly changing markets: A qualitative survey

  2018cited by this paper
• Qualitative Interviewing

  2015cited by this paper
• Integrating analysis of customers' processes into roadmapping: The value-creation perspective

  2011cited by this paper
• Linking the business view to requirements engineering: long-term product planning by roadmapping

  2005cited by this paper
• Technology roadmapping—A planning framework for evolution and revolution

  2004cited by this paper
• Integrated strategy development: an integrated roadmapping approach

  2003cited by this paper
• Science and technology roadmaps

  2001cited by this paper
• Technology management via a set of dynamically linked roadmaps

  2000cited by this paper
• Roadmapping Integrates Business and Technology

  1997cited by this paper
• The Survey Handbook

  1995cited by this paper
• Business Research Methods

  1980cited by this paper

• Applying the WOWA operator for Digital Requirements Prioritization in the Automotive Industry

  2025cites this paper
• Metaverse Meets Management: A Modular Approach to Augment Management Practices With Augmented and Virtual Reality

  2025cites this paper
• Criteria definition for digital requirements using hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms sets: an application to the automotive industry

  2024influential citation
• The discovery effort worthiness index: How much product discovery should you do and how can this be integrated into delivery?

  2023cites this paper
• Transformation Towards a Product-Led Company: Case Studies from Industry

  2022cites this paper
• Aligning Platform Ecosystems Through Product Roadmapping: Systematic Mapping Study and Research Agenda

  2022cites this paper
• A Transformation Model for Excelling in Product Roadmapping in Dynamic and Uncertain Market Environments

  2021cites this paper
• Facing the Challenges with Product Roadmaps in Uncertain Markets: Experience from Industry

  2020cites this paper
• Essential Approaches to Dual-Track Agile: Results from a Grey Literature Review

  2020cites this paper
• Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops: XP 2020 Workshops, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 8–12, 2020, Revised Selected Papers

  2020cites this paper
• Product Roadmap Alignment – Achieving the Vision Together: A Grey Literature Review

  2020cites this paper
• DEEP: the product roadmap maturity model: a method for assessing the product roadmapping capabilities of organizations

  2019cites this paper