An Approach to Product Roadmapping in Small Software Product Businesses

Success in software product business requires the release of new products and product upgrades with the right amount of features and quality within an open market window. For this, a systematic approach for managing the contents, timing and roles of future product releases as well as the product architecture is needed. In practice, such an approach is often missing, especially in small companies, due to inexperience, unclear priorities, time-tomarket pressures, or the lack of suitable process infrastructure. In this paper, we present an approach based on product roadmapping that can aid such companies in their product planning. We also discuss initial experiences from using the approach in three small software companies. The product roadmap expresses the release and development schedules, composition of individual releases, changes to the underlying technology, services requiring attention from product development and the planned resource usage.