How to use the Now, Next, Later roadmap

As a product manager, you work day in and day out on prioritization. Every company has limited time and resources, hence it’s necessary to optimize these. This is where prioritization comes into the picture.

Without prioritization, the team and the stakeholders are completely blind in terms of what to build. Through prioritization, you can also determine your product roadmap, which outlines long-term (yearly and/or half-yearly) or short-term (quarterly and/or bi-weekly) plans.

However, choosing the best framework to approach your product roadmap can be challenging given the amount of options. To help you, this article will explain the Now, Next, Later roadmap and how it might fit into your product team.

What is Now, Next, Later?

As the words suggest, Now, Next, Later is a simple roadmap tool that can help teams understand the priority of their work. Let’s consider an example of building a feature to onboard users. You already ran the discovery and now the feature is in the development phase. With the Now, Next, Later roadmap you would break the work into:

Now — This consists of everything that’s immediate/urgent and forms the core of the product. For a feature to onboard users, now will be building a user authentication system that is easy and safe

Next — This consists of requirements that are next in line. After implementing the authentication system, the next would be building the finishing the pipeline of onboarding users

Later — This consists of requirements that are non-urgent but the team would work on at some point. Once the authentication system and the pipeline to onboard users are finished, in the future the team might want to add checks for finding login frauds

Why do PMs need Now, Next, Later?

As a PM, you work on different features/products and it’s important for you to understand what to work on first. The following are the key reasons to use Now, Next, Later:

• Resource management
• Short and long-term planning
• Flexibility

Resource management

Resources are the biggest constraint for software development. This is where Now, Next, Later comes into the picture. It helps you identify what to work on immediately, as opposed to what can be picked up later.

Short and long-term planning

Now, Next, Later helps immensely with short and long-term planning. Every PM knows how important planning is. Without it, the stakeholders are blind and the engineering and design team don’t know what they should work on. Now and next usually target short-term planning, whereas later targets long-term planning.

Flexibility

During the pandemic, everyone had a roadmap until the spread forced teams to pivot. Now, Next, Later helps to incorporate flexibility into your roadmap.

How to create a Now, Next, Later roadmap (with template)

Now that you understand the importance of Now, Next, Later, you can use the following steps to create your own roadmap:

1. Define Now, Next, Later — First you need to define what Now, Next, Later mean. In some cases this could mean this right now, or in others, next quarter, so it’s important to define what these mean and align with the stakeholders accordingly
2. List your initiatives/features — List out all the features/initiatives/validated ideas that came from product discovery
3. Prioritize the initiatives/features — Prioritize the initiatives/features/validated ideas. The important element to consider is how important these are for customers and how soon you need them finished
4. Categorize the initiatives/features — After prioritization, you can categorize the most important ones in now, the medium important ones in next, and the least important ones in the later category.
5. Use tools to create your final roadmap — This is the final phase where you can use any tool to create a roadmap

Here is an example template for a now, next, and later roadmap:

For simplicity, I have created this template in Google Sheets.

What are the common tools used to create a Now, Next, Later roadmap?

There are many tools available in the market to create a Now, Next, Later roadmap. These are some of the most common ones:

• G-Suite — This includes Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Slides. These are the easiest ones to use
• Microsoft Office: Similar to Google apps, Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint can also be used
• Placker — Placker is an easy-to-use planning and tracking tool. It has easy ways to create Now, Next, Later categories and add all the work under each category
• Trello — Trello is a project management tool and the teams that use it on a regular basis can also use it to create now, next, and later roadmap
• JIRA — One of the most popular tools among software development teams
• Monday.com — Monday.com is also one of the project management tools that can help you create Now, Next, Later boards and allow you to add tasks under each of them
• Notion — Notion is a versatile content management system that is known for its simplicity
• Productboard — A product management system that can help PMs easily create roadmaps based on customer insights, surveys, interviews, etc.

How does the Now, Next, Later roadmap compare to traditional road mapping techniques?

	Now, Next, Later	Gantt charts	Waterfall roadmaps	Feature-based roadmaps	Project roadmaps
Definition	Categorizes the tasks into now (short-term), next (mid-term), and later (long-term)	Provides a visual representation of tasks, timelines, and even dependencies	Follows a sequential structure of tasks that need to be delivered	Groups all the tasks required to finish a particular feature into one	Categorizes all the tasks based on the project
USP (Unique selling point)	Versatile and easy to create. Useful for smaller projects	Great for visually showing dependencies between two tasks. Depending on how complex the project is, this might require some special tools to create	Because of its linear nature, this is not suitable for agile projects	Suitable for complex products where there are multiple features	Suitable for managing and visualizing multiple projects

Conclusion

I have used Now, Next, Later since the start of my product management career. It’s a great way to visualize all the tasks and helps to align with the stakeholders. I used it when I was working on a payments product as well as a B2B task management software. This means it can be applied to products regardless of industry, niche, sector, or organization.

Feel free to use these templates as a guide. Good luck crafting your own roadmap!

Featured image source: IconScout