SaaS Product Roadmap: How-to Guide, Examples, and Mistakes to Avoid

Without a calculated SaaS product roadmap from the start, your business risks facing a range of issues down the road. We’ve seen it happen multiple times: teams struggling to understand priorities, duplicating efforts in vain, and stretching development timelines. But most importantly, this lack of focus affects the satisfaction of stakeholders and, later on, users.

A well-structured product roadmap for SaaS ensures that everyone involved, from developers to C-level managers, clearly understands what needs to be done. It helps teams stay on the same page, prioritize the most impactful features, and provide a transparent view of development strategy. How to achieve this? Well, that’s what this article is about.

Using Brights’ expertise as a SaaS development outsourcing partner, we created this blog post to guide you through different types of product roadmaps, which can vary depending on your business and project goals. Our end objective here is to help you plan more effectively, release faster, and address the stakeholders’ expectations more accurately so that your solution and long-term vision match perfectly.

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SaaS product roadmap types and templates

Key types of SaaS product roadmaps

Choosing the right roadmap for your SaaS product sets the course for the entire development journey. Below, we explore different types of SaaS product roadmaps, each designed to guide your team toward specific goals. Since many companies have public strategies, we’ll illustrate these types with real-world SaaS roadmap examples.

Now-next-later roadmaps

The now-next-later roadmap is one of the most common types, which prioritizes simplicity and focus. Basically, it breaks the development process into clear phases: what your team is actively working on now, what’s coming up next, and what’s planned for later. This structure helps you keep priorities straight without limiting you to rigid deadlines.

Best for: SaaS teams that need flexibility but still want a clear sense of direction.

Source: Lasso

Outcome-based roadmaps

Rather than focusing on specific tasks, an outcome-based roadmap emphasizes achieving business goals, such as increasing user engagement or reducing churn rate. The approach allows your team to stay flexible about how to reach those goals while keeping an eye on measurable results. For example, you can establish the main objective for the next two quarters to improve customer retention by 20% and then figure out which features or marketing efforts will get you there.

Best for: SaaS businesses that prioritize impact over output and aim to align development with company-wide KPIs.

Feature-based roadmaps

A feature-based roadmap for SaaS involves delivering specific functionalities at defined intervals. This approach works well if your SaaS product needs to introduce new features continuously. The team focuses on what gets built next, prioritizing user-demanded features or those that will help you stay competitive. For instance, you might plan to release a new reporting dashboard in Q2 and add new third-party integrations in Q3.

Best for: SaaS companies that need to show progress through visible updates to maintain user engagement constantly.

Source: Loom

Release-based roadmaps

A release-based roadmap revolves around specific product releases scheduled for particular dates. Each release typically includes several features, improvements, or bug fixes, and the roadmap is structured around those delivery milestones. For example, you might plan a major product update in Q2 with new integrations, followed by a Q4 release focused on optimizing performance and adding user-requested features. The approach helps your team coordinate development, marketing, and support around specific release dates so that everyone is prepared when the product goes live.

Best for: SaaS teams that operate on regular release cycles and need a clear, predictable plan for delivering updates.

Theme-based roadmaps

A theme-based roadmap organizes development work around broader themes that tie related tasks together, giving teams the freedom to explore different solutions under each theme. Instead of focusing on diverse individual features with a different focus, a theme unites the steps needed to achieve a specific goal, like improving the onboarding experience or optimizing customer support. For instance, on the screen below, you may see part of GitHub’s public roadmap dedicated specifically to enhancing the platform's security.

Best for: Companies looking to tackle multiple aspects of their product simultaneously and want flexibility in how they execute those improvements.

Source: GitHub

Technology-based roadmaps

A technology-based roadmap usually focuses on infrastructure, backend development, and scalability over user-facing features. If your SaaS product is in a growth phase and needs to ensure it can handle increased demand, this type of roadmap is essential. Here you may plan for goals like migration to a new cloud environment, security upgrades, and server optimization after a surge in users.

Best for: SaaS businesses preparing for rapid scaling or those that need to ensure their tech stack evolves with the product.

Visionary roadmaps

A visionary roadmap looks far beyond short-term goals and outlines the long-term evolution of your SaaS product, often over several years. It’s more about strategic direction than immediate deliverables. For instance, you might map out how to build your core platform in Year 1 and expand into the enterprise market by Year 2 or Year 3.

Best for: Businesses that must communicate their product's growth trajectory to investors or stakeholders and ensure the entire team is aligned on the big picture.

Product roadmap formats

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to what your roadmap should look like. Some product and project managers create it using collaborative tools like Notion, some turn to list-making apps like Trello, and some go with Google Sheets or Docs. Whatever format works for you and your team is a good choice.

“At Brights, our project managers typically use the Gantt chart in ClickUp, our go-to project managers software. I personally like creating roadmaps in Google Sheets, adding the most crucial information there. These points include task descriptions, links to the project boards, assignees, deadlines, estimation, priority, status, and environment.”

— Polina L., project manager at Brights

How to develop a SaaS product roadmap from scratch

Step-by-step guide to building a SaaS product roadmap

To make the process of building a SaaS product roadmap easier, we suggest breaking it into clear, actionable steps. Here are the five most important stages every SaaS product will have to go through.

Step 1. Start with a clear product vision

Your product vision is the backbone of your roadmap, so it needs to be crystal clear. Start by answering why your product exists and what problem it solves for users. The vision should also be tied to your company’s larger, long-term objectives. Let's say your SaaS tool automates business reporting. In this case, your vision should reflect aspects of efficiency and time-saving.

Make sure the whole team is on the same page by communicating the vision before you start planning any functional or visual aspects of the product. One more tip is narrowing the vision down to one sentence and keeping it visible during roadmap discussions to align all further decisions.

Step 2. Know your audience and the market

The next step is figuring out for whom you’re building the product. At this point, you must gather customer feedback through surveys, interviews, or analytics, collecting actionable insights. Next, develop user personas based on this data, highlighting what pain points users have and what they need most from your product. Keeping an eye on competitors also will help you identify market trends, potential gaps, and opportunities. The results of this extensive research will form the foundation of SaaS roadmap development, helping you make more informed decisions.

Step 3. Set clear priorities and goals

Whenever possible, try to include teammates with cross-functional expertise in the prioritization workshops. By getting input from UI/UX designers, software engineers, marketing specialists, and the customer support team, your approach will be more well-rounded and inclusive.

When building a roadmap, the focus should not be on including all the possible features, but on prioritizing those which would drive the biggest impact. It is recommended to rank and prioritize the features using frameworks like impact vs. effort, or the RICE method: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort.

Once you have identified what is most important, turn those findings into actionable goals. Setting SMART objectives will help your team stay focused and track progress easily. So, next time, instead of deciding to improve user engagement, use a SMART goal alternative and aim to achieve something more precise, like increasing user engagement by 15% in three months with engaging onboarding.

“When we build a roadmap for any type of project, we also have to account for the client’s resources, both in terms of time and budget. Typically, the features fall into four categories based on two aspects: complexity and value for the business. Depending on the budget and preferred timelines, we usually go with simple features of high business value or complex features of high business value.”

— Bohdan K., business analyst at Brights

Step 4. Engage stakeholders early and often

Communication with the stakeholders is key to creating a successful SaaS product development roadmap. We mean internal and external teams, investors, or sometimes even major customers. By inviting these people to the discussion, you can better manage their expectations and ensure alignment across the board.

How exactly can you engage stakeholders? Start by presenting your proposed roadmap in a clear format and explaining the reasoning behind each decision. And don’t stop there: be sure to regularly update stakeholders on the project’s progress, giving them space to voice their concerns and suggestions. Also, it is effective to build a SaaS product roadmap using collaboration tools like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, and whatnot to make the plan accessible to all stakeholders and establish transparency.

Step 5. Stay agile and update the roadmap regularly

The SaaS environment doesn’t stay still, so a static SaaS product roadmap also can't survive in the real world. Make it a point to revisit your roadmap from time to time and incorporate new insights, user feedback, and changing market conditions. Agility doesn't mean changing direction constantly. However, it does mean responding to customer needs and pivoting where necessary. Best practices here include setting a quarterly review schedule to reassess priorities and progress based on new data.

Common mistakes of SaaS product roadmap development

Knowing and navigating the potential pitfalls to avoid is equally important to following SaaS product roadmap best practices. Both come from the collective knowledge based on numerous cases similar to yours so that they can lead to smarter decision-making in your SaaS development process from the beginning. Here, we’ve listed the most attention-worthy mistakes to avoid during SaaS roadmap development.

Lack of research and clarity during the planning stage

When working on a SaaS product roadmap for startups, skipping or rushing the research phase will almost inevitably lead to significant missteps later. Proper market analysis, understanding of customer pain points, and competitor insights are a must if you plan to build a successful product. Without these, you risk investing in building something that nobody needs.

The outcome of this mistake is simple: products that don’t dedicate enough time to research have higher chances of failing later, no matter their name or resources. For instance, Google Wave, a collaboration tool we’ve already forgotten, was developed without clearly validating its user expectations. The product lacked and failed to quickly add certain functionality vital for a collaboration app, such as a notification system and a simplified process of adding new users. However, Google Wave had a lot of potential, with some even believing it partly inspired Slack creators.

Overloading the product during MVP development

The whole point of a Minimum Viable Product is to test the core idea of the SaaS app. Yet, a common mistake we notice is overcomplicating MVPs by trying to stuff them with an abundance of features at once. As a result, businesses lose the essence of what an MVP should be and overload the product, which leads to delayed launches, higher costs, and greater risks. So, it’s essential to remember that you can’t solve every user’s problem in the first iteration, at least not without stretching your resources too thin.

Not involving stakeholders during planning and development stages

Building a SaaS product roadmap in a silo without stakeholders' involvement will most likely lead to alignment issues later on. Product teams, developers, marketing, sales, and customers can add their invaluable opinions so that you can form a rounded, holistic picture of project priorities. If the stakeholders are not engaged upfront, there's a risk that the roadmap isn't going to have crucial support, which could result in misaligned expectations, unmet needs, and potential friction later on.

One of the vivid examples of SaaS product roadmaps that failed is Quibi, a short-form streaming service. Despite significant financial backing of $1.75 billion in investor capital, the product was live for just six months. The app launched focusing on mobile-exclusive short-form content but failed to address a real demand in the streaming market. They also entered a highly competitive space without a clear advantage to their paid product, which nobody really needed, while ignoring free alternatives like TikTok and YouTube. The focus on a single big launch, lack of user testing, and over-reliance on celebrity-backed content led to its quick downfall.

Ignoring customer feedback after the launch

Once a product has launched, user feedback is one of the richest inputs into the SaaS product development roadmap on a continuous basis. At the same time, customers often feel alienated and eventually churn if their feedback is selectively ignored or barely acted upon. So, be sure to have mechanisms for collecting and processing customer feedback and prioritize common user concerns over adding new features — there will be time for that. Otherwise, your audience might go elsewhere.

In 2018, Snapchat’s redesign caused controversy due to overwhelmingly negative feedback from users. In fact, their audience gathered around 1.3M signatures on Change.org, demanding that the update be rolled back. Snapchat tried pushing the new solutions forward, yet after poor advertising revenues and user growth rates, the platform was forced to uninstall some redesigns.

Obviously, it’s a huge and popular platform, so they recovered after this incident. However, for smaller products, especially SaaS apps dependent on subscriptions, that might not be the case.

Focusing solely on new features during the growth phase

At the growth stage, you may find it tempting to keep releasing all the new features you envisioned earlier to attract users. However, at this point, you have to put performance, scalability, and optimization first. Without solidifying the product’s foundation, businesses often struggle to scale effectively.

Before releasing major new features, we recommend ensuring users will actually enjoy using those instead of getting frustrated with performance issues. Prioritizing operational efficiency is a non-negotiable rule for those who want to figure out how to create a SaaS product roadmap that works.

Sticking to a static roadmap

A rigid roadmap that doesn’t account for shifting customer needs, technological advancements, or market changes can lead to stagnation. SaaS businesses operate in fast-evolving environments, and the ability to pivot or adjust priorities is crucial. Sticking too rigidly to a predefined plan can leave a company unable to capitalize on emerging opportunities or avoid pitfalls.

Selecting the appropriate product roadmap is all about understanding your priorities and objectives. It’s important to recognize that a roadmap isn’t an unchangeable agreement. It’s not immutable nor set in stone. Rather, it serves as a guiding tool to navigate the inevitable complexities that come with nurturing and developing your product. Flexibility is your friend.

How Brights can help with SaaS product roadmap creation & implementation

As outsourcing software development partners, we at Brights often help our clients figure out the most efficient path to SaaS product development, helping them with vision, research, feature prioritization, and more. Since not all SaaS businesses publicly share their SaaS product roadmaps, we can’t demonstrate the strategies of clients’ products. However, we can share the results of our work in the SaaS field.

Showcase

Showcase is the first website builder designed for digital creators, where they can share their photo and video art without worrying about censorship limitations or restrictive guidelines. But most importantly, the platform offers proprietary device-secured watermarking technology to protect each piece of media content from intellectual property infringement.

Showcase, a SaaS platform developed by Brights

As you might remember, in roadmapping, it’s important to focus on core functionality that brings the most value to the product. That’s exactly what we did together with the client. Our primary task was to find the most effective solution for protecting visual content from intellectual property infringement. For this, we enhanced the website with IMATAG integration, which allowed us to create ​​Unique Digital Watermarking per user on images. The technology helps track users who leak photographs, displaying all the details in a convenient dashboard on the admin side of the website.

Obviously, that wasn’t the only feature: we also enabled artists to showcase their work through virtual galleries, monetize through subscriptions and locked content, and even set up non-disclosure agreements for subscribers. Yet, we still kept focus on one specific goal: providing artists with a safe and secure place to share their art. The efforts paid off, and here are the results we got even before the product’s official release:

• Three paying customers in its first month of silent launch;

• 237 subscribers for one of the creators, with 99% actively purchasing the subscription;

• First identified cases of leaked photographs, proving our watermarking technology effective.

Brights’ expertise

There are many more SaaS product cases by Brights we encourage you to explore: Signal Intent online calculator, Termix app for remote control of POS-terminals, Easy Peasy insurtech app. Yet, right now, we want to talk about you.

What kind of SaaS are you building? What impact do you expect it to make? Who is your audience? And which goals does your team put first? We’d love to know all about your project and offer our support in figuring out the optimal roadmap for your project.

If you’re hesitant about bringing in an external team, here is what you need to know about Brights. Our team has been developing software and SaaS products for 13+ years, during which time we launched over 300 projects. We are known for our meticulous and, frankly, nerdy approach to hiring. However, this means that with us, you will get access to expertise from 100+ brilliant specialists, including project managers, business analysts, UI/UX designers, software engineers, DevOps engineers, QA specialists, and more. Here is what one of Brights’ teammates says about our approach to roadmap development:

“At Brights, we take a flexible approach to project planning and always seek a balance between business priorities and technical dependencies to ensure that critical features are delivered on time. We’re not afraid to say a reasonable “No” to our clients when needed, with the project's best interest at heart, especially when a request poses more risk than value.

Our strength lies in assembling optimal teams and scaling resources quickly to keep the project moving efficiently along the roadmap. We plan realistically, never making promises we can't keep, and maintain full transparency with our clients — they always know exactly where we stand in the process.”

— Karyna V., project manager at Brights

Conclusion

We understand that creating a product roadmap strategy for SaaS is a lot of work. There are countless factors to consider and often compromises to be made, especially when you’re just getting started. It’s not always easy to balance immediate needs with long-term goals or to know which features should come first. But the good news is it will give you confidence to move forward. Besides, you don’t have to do it alone.

Working with a tech partner who understands the challenges of SaaS product development can make all the difference. An outsourcing partner like Brights can bring a fresh perspective, combined with experience developing similar projects, helping you build a product roadmap that aligns with your users’ needs and your business goals. And, of course, we can implement your strategy and turn it into a successful SaaS product. So, if you need a dedicated team with relevant experience under their belts, we’re here to help you build a solid foundation and get your SaaS project started.