What a beautifully deceptive depiction of road-mapping! Well if one has a fixed roadmap in this rapidly changing environment... I will leave it up to you to complete the sentence.
Instead the product roadmaps are curvy and bumpy rides! Sometimes with adjustments in the destination too.
So coming back to road-mapping. I recently read a book where the author beautifully explains the correlation between company vision , business strategy , product strategy and product vision.
The road-mapping techniques and intervals are heavily dependent on the vertical , market trends, product phase and technological advancements.
I would like to add an example of mobile app products. I have been working on the android products and have seen huge behavior change with newer operating systems. The challenges of kitkat and nougat are very different and the product map was altered based on the technological developments.
A lot of times the user feedback and feature usage/acceptance shapes the product roadmap.
With the market segment and product maturity , there can be goal - oriented or feature based roadmaps.
For example , A matured product in a dynamic market , a goal oriented roadmap will be more useful than the feature based roadmap. The markets trends can make a huge shift in the feature requirements and hence Goal oriented roadmaps are more helpful.
In another scenario in a stable market and a mature product , feature based roadmaps will be more useful. As the market is stable and the product is mature enough , it will be better to stick to the feature based roadmaps .
One thing I would like to emphasis is that roadmaps are dynamic, its important to adjust these as per the business strategy and market requirements
