Your product roadmap describes the products that you intend to develop and bring to market over time. Each product on the roadmap needs a Market Requirements Document (MRD) to define for whom the product exists, what it must do, and how well it must perform to capture customers and make a profit. The MRD defines what the organization must do to produce a winning product.
Unfortunately, the MRD is dismissed as some irrelevant puffery produced by the marketing department in some organizations. Clues that yours may be one of these organizations would include hearing sentiments like:
“I don’t know why we need an MRD. What really matters is the engineering development plan.”
“Just give me the product specs. I don’t care about all that marketing fluff.”
“Why do I have to sign this?”
“We should just combine the MRD and the engineering development plan to save time.”
These sentiments signal a failure to recognize that the MRD guides the organization to make robust decisions about which products to develop. However, for the MRD to do its job, authors must structure it to support decision making, and the organization must understand its role in the product strategy and development process. This guide shows you how.