Production 101 – #10 Producers' Impact On Product Roadmaps – Part 1

An overview of how producers shape this strategic tool to effectively align teams, drive decision-making, and track progress.

• A well-structured product roadmap is essential for managing live service games, aligning teams, guiding decisions, and ensuring development stays on track.

• Effective roadmaps prioritise outcomes over outputs, balance short- and long-term goals, and remain flexible to adapt to changing business needs.

• Game producers and product managers must collaborate closely. Producers focus on execution and timelines, while product managers drive strategic vision and feature prioritisation.

Welcome to Production 101. Here is where we dive deep into game production.

We jump into our series on mastering product roadmaps in game development, drawn from strategies and insights I've accumulated over the years. This series will explore the essentials of effective roadmap management, explicitly tailored to game producers' perspectives.

The first instalment sets the foundation by detailing the critical elements of product roadmaps in live service games, including vision, goals, milestones, and stakeholder collaboration. Understanding these components is key to grasping how roadmaps steer decision-making and monitor progress.

The second part expands on this base by digging into the practical application of these strategies. It discusses advanced techniques and tools for effective roadmap execution, points out common pitfalls, and provides real-world examples of successful management approaches. This section aims to deliver actionable insights and problem-solving strategies to enhance your roadmap effectiveness.

Together, these articles provide a comprehensive view of game producers' dynamic responsibilities, offering strategic guidance and practical advice essential for leading successful product releases. Whether you are just starting or are an experienced professional, this series will enhance your understanding and skills in product roadmap management.

Introduction to Product Roadmaps

Product roadmaps are indispensable for managing live service games. They are strategic tools that align teams, guide decision-making, and track progress. These roadmaps provide a high-level visual plan showcasing the game's vision, objectives, and future direction. They bridge strategy and execution by addressing critical questions such as what the product is, why it is being built, its delivery timeline, and its alignment with business goals.

A well-crafted roadmap outlines the necessary deliverables, explains their importance, and specifies completion timelines. It sets priorities, establishes timelines, and demonstrates how the game supports broader business goals. This communication clarity helps internal teams and external stakeholders stay focused and adaptable to changes.

While product managers typically handle the "why" and "what" of these roadmaps, this post will focus on the "how" and "when" areas that fall under the producer's domain. As a game producer, your involvement in shaping outcomes is pivotal. Yo’ is pivotal. You play a crucial role in setting realistic timelines and managing delivery expectations. Producers can transform roadmaps from static documents into dynamic strategic tools that accelerate game development and LiveOps content delivery by understanding and leveraging these elements.

Key Components of a Product Roadmap

When designing and administering a product roadmap, it's essential to recognise that there are multiple effective ways to represent it. I've discovered that there isn't a single "wrong" way to do it as long as you effectively communicate the essential information.

• Vision and Goals: Articulates the product's overarching purpose and long-term objectives, providing context for all planned features and initiatives.

• Timeline: This specifies timeframes for feature releases, development phases (e.g., MVR, initial release, majority release), or milestones. It can be visualised through timeline charts, Kanban boards, or simple chronological plans.

• Milestones: Represents significant achievements or checkpoints in the product's development journey, helping to track progress and maintain alignment with the product roadmap's goals.

• Features and Initiatives: Lists prioritised features or capabilities that support the product's strategic direction, often grouped into themes or categories to address specific user needs or technical enhancements.

• Dependencies: Identifies tasks or features that must precede others, helping to ensure smooth execution by pinpointing potential bottlenecks early in the development process.

• Stakeholder Collaboration: This approach encourages ongoing input from cross-functional teams and key stakeholders during planning. Regular updates and synchronisation meetings are crucial for refining priorities and adapting to changes.

• Outcomes: This section links initiatives to measurable outcomes, such as user retention rates or revenue growth improvements, ensuring that efforts consistently align with business objectives.

Effectively integrating these components into a product roadmap enables game producers to transform the roadmap from a static document into a dynamic strategic tool that guides and accelerates game development and LiveOps content delivery.

What Makes a Great Product Roadmap?

An excellent product roadmap is more than a to-do list. It’s a strategic tool that guides teams and stakeholders towards meaningful outcomes. When evaluating a roadmap, here are the essential elements to consider:

• Outcomes Over Outputs: A strong roadmap prioritises results over deliverables. It communicates the goals or outcomes behind each initiative, ensuring alignment with players needs and business objectives. This focus keeps the team centred on delivering value rather than merely completing tasks.

• Opportunities and Problem Spaces: A roadmap should define the opportunities and problems it aims to address rather than simply being a simple list of features. Highlighting these areas encourages creative problem-solving and ensures efforts are directed at solving real player challenges, not just building features for the sake of it.

• Balance Between Short-Term and Long-Term Work: A practical roadmap balances immediate deliverables and long-term strategic objectives. Short-term wins sustain momentum, while long-term initiatives drive progress toward bigger goals. Focusing too much on either risks losing sight of timely value or broader aspirations.

• Flexibility: A good roadmap is adaptable. Changing business environments, players needs, and priorities require a roadmap that can be adjusted without derailing progress. Keeping it high-level and focused on priorities rather than granular details ensures it can evolve while maintaining a clear direction.

Including these elements makes a roadmap a strategic, outcome-driven tool that aligns teams, fosters focus, and delivers meaningful results.

Product Roadmap By Audience

Different product roadmaps serve various purposes depending on the audience, product release goals, and level of detail required. Game producers must choose the correct format to communicate priorities and effectively align teams with strategic objectives. Here are the key types of product roadmaps commonly used in game development:

Strategic Roadmap

A high-level view designed for executives and senior stakeholders. This roadmap focuses on overarching business goals, significant milestones, and long-term vision rather than specific features or deadlines.

This is typically created and maintained by the product team with inputs from production.

• Purpose: Aligns the game's development with company objectives.

• Audience: Executives, investors, and leadership teams.

• Timeframe: 12–24 months or longer.

• Format: Simple timelines or goal-driven frameworks, often without fixed dates.

Tactical Roadmap

This more detailed and execution-focused roadmap outlines key development phases, features, and release windows. It balances flexibility with structure, helping teams plan and prioritise efficiently.

• Purpose: Translates strategic goals into actionable development plans.

• Audience: Producers, developers, and cross-functional teams.

• Timeframe: 3–12 months.

• Format: Feature-based layouts, Kanban boards, or quarterly breakdowns.

Feature Roadmap

A roadmap specifically focused on upcoming features and updates. It details planned improvements, their impact, and how they fit into the broader game vision.

• Purpose: Ensures feature development aligns with player needs and business strategy.

• Audience: Designers, engineers, QA, and marketing teams.

• Timeframe: 1–6 months.

• Format: Lists, timelines, or swimlanes organised by feature categories.

LiveOps Roadmap

This roadmap details content updates, events, and monetisation strategies, making it essential for live service games. It ensures a steady flow of engaging content while maintaining game balance and performance.

Unlike other roadmaps, this often requires fixed dates for key items, especially seasonal content and time-limited events, to align with player expectations and marketing efforts.

• Purpose: Supports ongoing player engagement and revenue growth.

• Audience: Community managers, marketing teams, LiveOps teams, and developers.

• Timeframe: 1–12 months, often with flexible scheduling.

• Format: Event-driven timelines or recurring content cycles.

Technology Roadmap

A roadmap focused on technical infrastructure, engine updates, platform transitions, and backend improvements. It ensures the game’s technical foundation evolves to support new features and maintain stability.

• Purpose: Guides long-term tech investments and reduces technical debt.

• Audience: Engineering teams, producers, and technical leadership.

• Timeframe: 6–24 months.

• Format: Layered timelines showing dependencies between systems.

Marketing & Publishing Roadmap

This roadmap aligns with game releases, promotional campaigns, and community engagement efforts, ensuring that marketing efforts complement development milestones.

• Purpose: Synchronises game updates with marketing campaigns and community strategies.

• Audience: Marketing teams, PR, publishers, and social media managers.

• Timeframe: 3–12 months.

• Format: Calendar-based schedules with key messaging milestones.

Choosing the Right Roadmap

No single roadmap fits every need. Successful game producers often maintain multiple versions, tailoring them to different stakeholders while ensuring they stay aligned through a centralised strategy. Balancing clarity, adaptability, and alignment with both short-term execution and long-term vision is key to making roadmaps effective rather than burdensome.

In Part 2, we’ll explore practical strategies for managing multiple roadmaps, synchronising them, and avoiding common pitfalls. These strategies include handling competing priorities, maintaining flexibility, and ensuring roadmaps remain actionable rather than becoming static documents that quickly lose relevance.

Now-Next-Later Product Roadmap Approach

When refining a roadmap process, I frequently utilise the Now-Next-Later format. This approach is beneficial because it can be assembled quickly, and omitting specific dates facilitates negotiations and helps pave a clear path forward.

This format is one of the most straightforward and manageable product roadmap structures to develop and maintain. Additionally, if date commitments involving forecasting are needed, the insights derived from the Now-Next-Later format become a crucial component of that process.

The Now-Next-Later product roadmap was developed as an alternative to traditional timeline-based roadmaps, which often impose rigid deadlines that can restrict the flexibility needed for teams to perform optimally. The emphasis is shifted from deadline-driven tasks to a focus on continuous discovery.

Discovery involves staying attuned to player needs and business opportunities, ensuring that development is directed towards relevant and timely product offerings rather than adhering to an outdated list from previous planning sessions.

In my experience, the flexibility of the Now-Next-Later roadmap is one of its most significant advantages. This format allows for adaptation to shifting business needs and evolving market conditions. In contrast to traditional roadmaps, which can quickly become obsolete due to their inflexibility, the Now-Next-Later roadmap is designed with regular reviews and updates in mind.

The Now-Next-Later product roadmap categorises work into three temporal segments—Now, Next, and Later—arranging tasks from the most immediate to long-term priorities. This structure clarifies the immediate focus and maintains a broader vision, thus aligning each task with overarching business objectives.

This approach is particularly beneficial for product teams aspiring to operate in a lean environment, as it allows adaptability and prioritises spending time on what's most relevant. It provides a framework that:

• Offers flexibility and adaptability in planning.

• Allows for varying degrees of certainty.

• Saves time by focusing efforts on current and near-term needs.

• Ensures alignment with business goals.

• Influences more impactful product decisions by focusing on what's most crucial.

By adopting the Now-Next-Later product roadmap, teams can focus on current challenges with clear, actionable items while keeping future opportunities and innovations in sight. This method supports a forward-thinking product management approach, catering to immediate needs and long-term strategies.

Now-Next-Later With Jira

Implementing a Now-Next-Later roadmap in Jira is a lightweight yet powerful approach that requires no additional plugins. By leveraging Jira’s built-in features, teams can create a dynamic roadmap that enhances product release visibility and decision-making.

Swimlanes provide structured horizontal groupings, enabling teams to categorise tasks precisely across the "Now," "Next," and "Later" stages. Custom JQL queries define these swimlanes, offering a real-time visual representation of strategic priorities that adapt as product releases evolve.

Custom views take this further by allowing teams to refine how issues are sorted, grouped, and coloured. This flexibility helps stakeholders quickly grasp immediate priorities, upcoming initiatives, and longer-term goals. Quick filters and intelligent card displays make navigating complex product releases more intuitive and transparent.

The result is a roadmap that transforms a standard Kanban board into an adaptive communication tool. Without relying on third-party plugins, teams gain a flexible, real-time planning system that bridges the gap between execution and strategic vision.

Strategic and Tactical Product Roadmap Functions

Producers and product managers for live service games play distinct but complementary roles in developing and managing roadmaps. Though their responsibilities overlap somewhat, their primary focuses and scopes differ significantly.

When I first encountered the need to share responsibilities with product managers, I experienced the most friction in product roadmap planning and delivery.

Through a particular conflict, I first recognised the value of a RACI matrix. Understanding who was accountable for the various aspects of the roadmaps allowed me to focus more on my designated areas. However, I admit that letting go of specific controls was challenging.

It is helpful to consider how these positions collaborate daily to clarify the relationship between the overlapping and distinct roles of producers and product managers. While both roles aim to deliver a successful product, their approaches and responsibilities differ significantly.

Producers typically manage the operational aspects of product releaseproduct execution, such as timelines, resources, and team coordination, ensuring that the product manager's vision is realised efficiently. On the other hand, product managers focus more on defining the strategic direction of the product, such as market fit, user engagement, and long-term product evolution.

They determine the "what" and "why" behind the product features, while producers tackle the "how" and "when" to ensure those features are delivered effectively. By understanding these nuanced differences and areas of overlap, both roles can better collaborate, leveraging their unique strengths to enhance product development and drive success.

Producer Responsibilities

• Oversee the "Road to Live" timeline and ensure timely completion of deliverables.

• Focus on milestones, deliverables, and overall project management.

• Manage schedules, budgets, and resources to meet product release milestones.

• Coordinate cross-functional teams to guarantee on-schedule delivery.

Product Manager Responsibilities

• Define the overarching live strategy of the product.

• Drive the product's vision, ensuring it aligns with market trends and innovation.

• Prioritise features that offer the highest value to users and the business.

• Define, track, and respond to KPIs to enhance player experience and boost acquisition, retention, and monetisation metrics.

• Work with business teams to establish clear profit and loss (P&L) strategies.

Key Differences

Strategic vs. Tactical Focus

• Product Managers should adopt a more strategic focus, concentrating on the "why" behind initiatives and the long-term vision of the product.

• Producers: Take a more tactical approach, focusing on the "how" and "when" of product release execution.

Metrics and Performance

• Product Managers: Focus on user-centric and business metrics such as acquisition, retention, and monetisation KPIs.

• Producers: While producers primarily focus on project-based metrics such as timelines, budgets, and resource allocation, they also play a pivotal role in overseeing the technical performance aspects of the game, like load times, frame rates and ANRs. It's important to clarify, however, that while producers monitor these metrics to ensure they meet product standards and objectives, detailed technical management and optimisation are typically handled by technical leads or developers. Producers ensure effective communication and alignment between the development team and other departments, facilitating a comprehensive overview of the product's technical and operational status without delving deeply into the technical specifics themselves.

Stakeholder Management

• Product Managers: Primarily interact with business, marketing, and analytics teams. Due to the nature of product management, there is often communication (and possibly conflict) between the product manager and the design team.

• Producers: Mainly liaise with development teams, licensors, platform holders and external service providers. They are typically accountable for release management.

Roadmap Emphasis

• Product Managers: Prioritise features based on their value to users and the business impact.

• Producers: Focus on milestones and deliverables aligned with product release timelines and release expectations.

Post-Launch Involvement

• Product Managers: Remain heavily involved in post-launch strategy and continuous product evolution.

• Producers: Typically, they transition to support roles or shift to new projects after launch. The exception occurs when they take a proactive role in monitoring and reacting to the technical performance of the live game.

Both roles work closely to ensure the roadmap aligns with strategic goals and practical execution constraints. The product manager generally sets the vision and priorities, while the producer provides a sensible and effectively implemented roadmap.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the first part of our series on mastering product roadmaps has set a solid foundation by illustrating the critical elements that make roadmaps practical tools for game development. From defining vision and goals to understanding milestones and the importance of stakeholder collaboration, we've covered the strategic facets that enable producers to align product releases with broader business objectives. This understanding not only aids in steering decision-making but also in adapting to the dynamic nature of game development.

As we wrap up this instalment, producers must consider how these roadmap components can be tailored to their products to enhance clarity, focus, and team alignment. These foundational elements are essential for transforming static documents into dynamic tools that drive game development forward.

Please stay tuned for the next part of our series, where we will discuss these strategies' practical applications in more detail. We will explore advanced tools and techniques for implementing effective roadmaps that circumvent common pitfalls and leverage real-world successes to maximise product outcomes.