---
name: product-roadmap-generator
description: "Generates a structured product roadmap organized into strategic themes, epics, and time-horizon phases with sequencing rationale, dependency mapping, capacity checks against team size, and a stakeholder-ready summary. Use when building a quarterly or annual product roadmap, translating goals into prioritized initiatives, or restructuring a roadmap around new constraints or objectives."
argument-hint: "[product-goals] [time-horizon]"
allowed-tools: ["Read"]
---

# Product Roadmap Generator

## Purpose
Turn product goals, constraints, and team capacity into a structured roadmap — organized into strategic themes, broken into epics, and sequenced across time horizons with explicit rationale for why each item lands where it does. Solves the gap between a wish-list backlog and a defensible, capacity-realistic plan you can present to leadership and engineering.

## When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Build a quarterly or annual product roadmap
- Translate business or product goals into a prioritized set of initiatives
- Reorganize an existing roadmap around new OKRs, constraints, or leadership priorities
- Sequence epics and features against a fixed team capacity or deadline
- Create a themes-based roadmap to align stakeholders around outcomes rather than features
- Produce a roadmap deck-ready summary for a leadership or planning review

## Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- **Product goals / OKRs**: The business or product outcomes this roadmap must drive (e.g., "increase activated users 30%", "launch payments in EU")
- **Time horizon**: Total planning window (e.g., next 2 quarters, H2, full year) and the phase granularity (quarterly, monthly, or Now/Next/Later)
- **Team size and composition**: Number of engineers, designers, and any specialist constraints (e.g., 6 engineers, 1 designer, 1 ML specialist)
- **Known constraints**: Hard deadlines, compliance requirements, platform dependencies, hiring gaps, or fixed commitments already made
- **Current product state**: What exists today, major known problems, and any tech-debt or reliability work that must be accounted for
- **Priority signal**: What matters most right now — growth, retention, revenue, reliability, or a specific strategic bet
- **Non-goals** (optional): Explicitly out of scope for this horizon

If team velocity is unknown, assume a standard sprint model (~2 epics in-flight per 4 engineers per quarter) and note the assumption. If phase granularity is unspecified, default to quarterly.

## Instructions

### Step 1: Derive Strategic Themes from Goals
Group the goals into 3–5 strategic themes. A theme is an outcome-oriented bucket, not a feature.
- Each theme maps to at least one stated goal/OKR — name the linkage explicitly
- Name themes by the outcome they produce ("Reduce onboarding friction"), not the mechanism ("Redesign signup")
- If a stated goal has no theme, either create one or flag it as deferred with a reason
- Reserve one theme (or a fixed capacity slice) for reliability/tech-debt if the current product state warrants it — sustained feature velocity requires it

### Step 2: Break Each Theme into Epics
Under each theme, define 2–4 epics. For each epic capture:
- **Epic name**: Concrete deliverable ("Guided first-transaction flow")
- **Outcome**: The measurable change it targets, tied to the theme's goal
- **Rough size**: T-shirt sizing (S / M / L / XL) with S ≈ 1–2 sprints, M ≈ 1 quarter for a small pod, L ≈ most of a quarter, XL ≈ multi-quarter (should be split)
- **Dependencies**: What must land first (technical, legal/compliance, another team, or data availability)
- **Confidence**: High / Medium / Low — how well-understood the scope is

Split any XL epic into sequenced sub-epics before proceeding.

### Step 3: Sequence Across the Time Horizon
Assign each epic to a phase using this priority logic in order:
1. **Hard constraints first**: Compliance deadlines and fixed commitments anchor their phase — build around them
2. **Dependency order**: An epic cannot precede its prerequisites; unblock foundational work early
3. **Value-to-effort**: Within the remaining freedom, front-load high-value / lower-effort epics for early momentum and learning
4. **Risk sequencing**: Place Low-confidence, high-impact bets early enough to fail cheaply and re-plan

For each epic placement, write one sentence of **sequencing rationale** explaining why it lands in that phase (constraint, dependency, value, or risk).

### Step 4: Capacity Check Against Team Size
Validate that each phase is achievable, not aspirational:
- Estimate concurrent capacity: roughly 1 M-epic in-flight per 3–4 engineers per phase, adjusted for the actual team composition
- Flag any phase that is over-committed and name what gets cut or pushed
- Call out specialist bottlenecks (single designer, one ML engineer) that serialize otherwise-parallel work
- If a hard deadline exceeds capacity, state the trade-off explicitly — scope cut, hire needed, or deadline risk

### Step 5: Identify Risks and Open Questions
List the top 3–5 risks to the plan: dependency risk, capacity risk, low-confidence scope, or external unknowns. For each, note a mitigation or the decision needed to resolve it.

### Step 6: Produce the Stakeholder Summary
Write a 4–6 sentence executive summary: what the roadmap achieves against the goals, the through-line of the sequencing, the biggest trade-off made, and the top risk to watch.

## Output Format
- **Structure**: Executive summary first, then a themes → epics breakdown, then a phased roadmap table, then capacity notes, risks, and open questions
- **Length**: 1,000–1,400 words
- **Format**: Prose summary + structured lists for themes/epics + a roadmap table (rows = epics, columns = phase, theme, size, dependencies, rationale)
- **Sections**: Executive Summary → Strategic Themes → Epics by Theme → Phased Roadmap Table → Capacity Check → Risks & Open Questions
- **Tone**: Product-manager-to-leadership — decisive, trade-off-aware, no hype; every placement is justified, not asserted

## Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] Every stated goal/OKR maps to at least one theme, or is explicitly listed as deferred with a reason
- [ ] There are 3–5 themes and each has 2–4 epics
- [ ] Every epic has a size, dependencies noted, and a one-sentence sequencing rationale
- [ ] No epic is sequenced before its listed dependency
- [ ] Each phase has an explicit capacity verdict (achievable / over-committed with a named cut)
- [ ] Any hard deadline that exceeds capacity states the specific trade-off
- [ ] The roadmap table is complete — no epic is missing a phase assignment

## Notes
- Themes-based roadmaps age better than feature-list roadmaps because outcomes stay stable while features change — resist the urge to list dated features in Later phases
- The most common failure is a plausible-looking roadmap that ignores the single-designer or single-specialist bottleneck; the capacity check exists specifically to catch serialization
- Later-horizon phases (Later / Q3+) should stay intentionally coarse — commit to themes and directional epics, not to precise scope you can't yet estimate
- If goals conflict (growth vs. reliability with fixed capacity), surface the conflict rather than silently optimizing one — the trade-off is the PM's decision to make, and the roadmap should expose it

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## How to use this skill

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**Installing in Claude Code:**
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**Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:**

1. Drag this file into a new chat, or copy and paste its contents
2. Send your task or request as your next message — the AI will apply the skill where it fits

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