A product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. It’s a plan of action that aligns the organization around short and long-term goals for the product or project, and how they will be achieved. - Atlassian

The roadmap consists of features (milestones) to be delivered over a period of time. A good roadmap should have clear milestones, launch dates, and the teams responsible. Each milestone can be comprised of epic and each epic can have stories.

Epic

A feature that can be delivered or deployed independently (details might include stories, flow diagram, sketches/prototypes, etc.) Timeframe - one or two quarters

Story

Smallest unit of business value that can be delivered by the team, part of the feature and timeframe - one sprint

How to write good user stories

The INVEST framework by Jill Blake -

A good user story should be:

  • “I” independent (of all other user stories - should not overlap in implementation/concept)
  • “N” negotiable (not a specific contract for features)
  • “V” valuable (delivers value to the customer)
  • “E” estimable (delivers should be able to estimate the effort required)
  • “S” small (so as to fit within one sprint)
  • “T” testable (in principle, even if there isn’t a test for it yet)

For example, for a booking feature (epic), the stories could be built along the customer journey (select the service, select the doctor, select date and time, make payment, confirmation, reschedule/cancel)

Format: As a [type of user/user persona], I want [an ability] so that [some benefit/value/reason]

Example: As a customer making an appointment, I want the ability to select a date for a future appointment so that I can self-complete the booking process.

JIRA can be used as a tool with the issue Type as Milestone.

OKR vs Roadmap

More about OKR here

OKRs are the objectives to achieve and the roadmap shows what is required to achieve those. For example, if KR is to close x deals then the roadmap might include release y, launch z campaign, etc.

References -

StorMotion