If you don’t know where you’re going, you aren’t likely to get anywhere. This is true in life, and it is doubly true for product development. Enter the product roadmap. 

For the uninitiated, a product roadmap is a visual summary mapping the vision for your product offering from conception to development to release into the marketplace. An action plan aligning your product team around short and long-term goals, the product roadmap lays out exactly what needs to be done, how to do it, who will do it, and (crucially) when it will be done.

Deadlines vs Horizons

Traditional product roadmaps tend to be timeline-based, placing upon a project's deliverables a series of deadlines to be met on specific dates. “In Q4 of 2026, we will release feature x”. Sound familiar? 

While this approach does ensure things get done, it’s an inflexible strategy that does little to allow for strategic shifts in response to internal or external changes. What if in 2025, customers decide they don’t want or need feature x?

By contrast, the Now-Next-Later framework is designed to be adaptable and responsive. It sets out broad time horizons for the product team to work within vs establishing often arbitrary dates to work against. This strategy ensures the product team is building the right thing at the right time according to recent data, and not just working away at last year’s to-do list that may or may not still be relevant.

What is the Now-Next-Later framework?

The Now-Next-Later (NNL) framework, developed by Janna Bastow, is a roadmap strategy for product management that helps teams organize development priorities into three distinct time categories: immediate actions (‘Now’), short-term plans (‘Next’), and long-term goals (‘Later’). 

Like timeline roadmaps, the NNL framework aligns activities with overall organizational goals. But it does so in a way that gives teams the agility they need to respond to shifting customer demands and organizational priorities.

‍

The NNL Framework Structure

The Now-Next-Later framework provides a simple yet powerful structure for organizing your product roadmap and aiding project management. It helps to prioritize tasks and maintain a clear vision of your product’s evolution by breaking down your roadmap into three distinct categories:

• Now: Focus on immediate priorities and ongoing work to deliver value quickly. This category includes all the tasks currently being worked on or needing immediate attention. This category is about ensuring your team is aligned on what has the highest urgency and importance. By concentrating resources on these tasks, you will achieve quick wins that bolster team morale and demonstrate progress to stakeholders.
  
  
• Next: Plan for upcoming features and improvements that align with your short-term goals. This category consists of tasks that are not yet started but are the next in line to be tackled. They have been identified as critical for the near future and are typically in a stage of preparation or refinement. Awareness of this timeframe allows you to allocate resources effectively, ensuring there is a seamless transition from current to future work without losing momentum.
  
  
• Later: Outline your long-term vision and potential future directions for your product. This category includes ideas and initiatives that are further out on the horizon. They are not immediate priorities but represent the strategic direction of your product. By documenting these ideas, you ensure that your team is aware of the broader vision and can consider these elements when making present-day decisions.

By categorizing your roadmap items in this way, you create a clear hierarchy of priorities. The 'Now' category keeps your team focused on delivering immediate value, while the 'Next' and 'Later' categories provide a roadmap for future development without committing to specific deadlines based on priorities that may change.

Remember, the NNL framework is not a rigid structure but a flexible tool. Items can and should move between categories as priorities shift and new information becomes available. This flexibility is one of the NNL framework’s key strengths, allowing you to adapt quickly to changing demands.

Let’s look at each category in depth:

Now: Deliver Immediate Tasks and Value

The 'Now' category is all about what you’re currently working on and what’s coming up in the very near future. This is where you focus your immediate efforts to deliver value to your customers quickly and consistently.

To effectively implement the 'Now' category:

• Prioritize: Use methods like MoSCoW (a prioritization technique used to help key stakeholders understand the significance of initiatives in a release by categorizing deliverables as Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) or RICE (an acronym for four factors used to evaluate each project idea: reach, impact, confidence, and effort) to determine what truly belongs in the 'Now' category. Your 'Now' category should primarily consist of ‘Must have’ items, with perhaps a few high-priority ‘Should haves’ if resources allow.
  
  
• Integrate NNL with Agile: Align your ‘Now’ items with your agile sprint cycles for seamless execution. Integration with your sprint planning process is crucial – these items should directly translate into your sprint backlogs, ensuring a smooth flow from roadmap to execution. Tight integration helps maintain alignment between your strategic roadmap and your day-to-day development efforts.
  
  
• Ensure continuous reassessment: Implement processes to ensure regular, valuable updates to your product. The goal of the 'Now' category is to deliver value continuously. Implement processes that allow for regular releases and updates to your product. This might involve adopting practices like continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) to streamline your delivery pipeline.

When populating your 'Now' category, be ruthless in your prioritization. Every item here should be something your team is actively working on or will begin very soon. This isn’t the place for wishful thinking or ‘nice-to-haves’ – it’s about concrete, actionable tasks that will move your product forward in the immediate term.

Next: Short-term Goals and Flexibility

‘Next’ items are your stepping stones towards bigger objectives, allowing for adaptability as market conditions change. This category bridges the gap between your immediate focus and your long-term vision, providing a clear direction for your product’s near-future development.

Managing business tasks by breaking larger projects into smaller tasks and assigning them appropriately ensures effective resource allocation and progress tracking.

To effectively plan your 'Next' category:

• Use outcome-driven planning: Focus on the desired results rather than specific features to maintain flexibility. For example, instead of saying “Add a dashboard”, frame it as “Improve user’s ability to track their progress.” This outcome-driven approach maintains flexibility in how you achieve your goals, allowing you to adapt your plans based on new information or changing circumstances.
  
  
• Ensure stakeholder alignment: Regularly review and adjust ‘Next’ items with key stakeholders to ensure relevance. This ensures your planned developments remain aligned with business goals and market needs. Schedule regular roadmap reviews where you can discuss and reprioritize ‘Next’ items based on the latest information and stakeholder input.
  
  
• Make data-driven decisions: Use customer feedback and product metrics to inform what moves from ‘Next’ to ‘Now’.  Analyze customer feedback, usage metrics, and market trends to identify which ‘Next’ items are likely to deliver the most value. This data-driven approach helps you make informed decisions about where to focus your development efforts most efficiently.

Remember, the ‘Next’ category is about maintaining a balance between having a clear plan and remaining flexible. It’s okay for items here to be less detailed than those in the ‘Now’ category – you’re painting with broader strokes to indicate direction without committing to specifics that may change between ‘Now’ and ‘Next’.

Later: Long-term Strategy and Vision

The ‘Later’ category helps you maintain a forward-looking perspective without committing to specific timelines. This is where you capture your big ideas, long-term goals, and potential future directions for your product.

To effectively populate your 'Later' category:

• Hold vision workshops: Conduct regular sessions to brainstorm and refine your long-term product vision. Bring together diverse perspectives from across your organization – product, engineering, design, marketing, sales – to brainstorm future possibilities for your product. These sessions can help you identify potential new features, markets, or even entirely new product lines.
  
  
• Trend analysis: Incorporate industry trends and emerging technologies into your 'Later' planning. Stay informed about emerging technologies, shifting market dynamics, and evolving customer needs. This forward-looking perspective helps ensure that your long-term vision remains relevant and competitive.
  
  
• Roadmap evolution: Regularly reassess and update your 'Later' items as your product and market evolve. Remember that your 'Later' category should evolve. Regularly reassess these items, moving some to 'Next' as they become more relevant or feasible, and adding new ideas as they emerge. This ongoing evolution keeps your roadmap fresh and aligned with your changing business and market conditions.

The 'Later' category is an excellent place to capture ambitious, even audacious ideas. This is the place for moonshots. Items that might seem out of reach today could easily become tomorrow's game-changing innovations.

Benefits of the Framework

The NNL framework offers several benefits for product managers and strategic planners:

Aligns with OKRs and outcome-based roadmaps

The NNL framework is designed to work seamlessly with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and outcome-based roadmaps. By aligning the framework with OKRs, teams can ensure that their efforts are focused on achieving specific, measurable goals that contribute to the overall business objectives. This alignment enables teams to prioritize tasks and initiatives effectively, ensuring that they are working on the most important tasks that drive business value.

Enables effective prioritization and decision-making

By categorizing tasks into ‘Now’, ‘Next’, and ‘Later’, teams can focus on the most urgent and important tasks first, while also keeping an eye on upcoming tasks and long-term goals. This framework enables teams to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources, ensuring that they are maximizing their impact and achieving their business objectives.

Adaptability

While it is important to have a long-term vision for your project, it is difficult to predict with any certainty whether the future needs you can imagine today will in actuality be required or desired tomorrow. Where a strict timeline roadmap establishes (often arbitrary) deadlines, the NNL framework encourages continual reevaluation to allow teams to pivot as required by customer demand or marketplace realities.

How to Create a Now-Next-Later Roadmap

Creating an NNL roadmap involves several steps, including defining goals and objectives, identifying immediate tasks, and prioritizing tasks and initiatives.

1. Define your goals and objectives

The first step in creating a Now-Next-Later roadmap is to define your goals and objectives. This involves identifying the overall business objectives and determining how the product team can contribute to achieving those objectives. 

Teams should establish clear, specific, and measurable goals that align with the overall business objectives. These goals should be outcome-focused, meaning they should be centered on achieving specific business outcomes rather than just completing tasks.

2. Identify immediate tasks

Once you understand your goals and objectives, it should become obvious which tasks should be addressed immediately and which can be put off until later.

3. Prioritize tasks and initiatives

This step is just an extension of the previous one. Once you have established what tasks need to be addressed immediately, you can then work outward to brainstorm all of the follow-up tasks that will be required to achieve the overall goal. So identified, these initiatives can now be assigned to the ‘Next’ and ‘Later’ categories.

Communicating Your Now-Next-Later Roadmap

Effective communication of your roadmap is crucial for alignment across teams and stakeholders. The Now-Next-Later framework provides a clear structure that can help make your roadmap more understandable and actionable for everyone involved… but only if they are aware and on board.

Necessary elements for effectively communicating your Now-Next-Later roadmap include:

• Visual representation: Create clear, visually appealing roadmaps that highlight the Now-Next-Later structure. Use different colors or sections to delineate each category effectively. Tools that allow interactive roadmaps can be beneficial, enabling viewers to drill down into more details as needed. Consider incorporating graphics and icons to make information more intuitive, accessible, and engaging.
  
  
• Stakeholder-specific views: Tailor your roadmap presentation to different audiences, focusing on relevant details. For executives, emphasize high-level outcomes, strategic goals, and business impacts. For development teams, include technical details, timelines, and dependencies. For sales and marketing, highlight upcoming features, launch dates, and how these will impact customer outreach and campaigns.
  
  
• Regular updates: Establish a cadence for reviewing and updating your roadmap to keep everyone informed. This might involve conducting monthly reviews for the 'Now' category, quarterly updates for ‘Next’, and bi-annual revisions for ‘Later’. Regular updates help maintain alignment, adapt to changing priorities, and ensure everyone is aware of the current and future focus.
  
  
• Feedback mechanisms: Encourage feedback from all stakeholders to refine the roadmap continually. Open communication channels allow teams to voice challenges and suggest improvements, fostering collaborative planning.
  
  
• Training sessions: Conduct sessions to educate teams about using the roadmap effectively. This might involve workshops or training materials to ensure everyone understands the framework and its applications.

Remember, your roadmap is a communication tool as much as it is a planning tool. Use it to collaboratively tell the story of your product’s evolution and build excitement about where you’re headed.

The Power of Now-Next-Later

As a product manager, you’re constantly juggling competing priorities, stakeholder expectations, and the ever-moving goalposts of customer needs. This can put you on your back foot, constantly reacting rather than proactively conceptualizing, communicating, and executing your product strategy. 

By adopting the Now-Next-Later framework, you’ll transform your product roadmapping process into a dynamic, adaptable strategy that keeps your team focused, aligned, and proactive. The NNL approach allows you to nimbly balance short-term deliverables with long-term vision, ensuring your product remains competitive and relevant come what may.

The power of this framework lies in its simplicity and flexibility. Encourage open dialogue about roadmap items across all levels of your organization. Use the framework as a tool for fostering innovation within your team, allowing ideas to flow freely between the ‘Later’, ‘Next’, and 'Now' categories as they mature and evolve.

As you implement the Now-Next-Later framework, keep these key principles in mind:

1. Maintain clarity in your 'Now' items, ensuring they’re actionable and aligned with immediate goals.
2. Use the 'Next' category to create a bridge between short-term execution and long-term vision.
3. Let your 'Later' category be a space for big ideas and strategic thinking, free from immediate constraints.
4. Regularly review and adjust your roadmap, moving items between categories as priorities and circumstances change.
5. Communicate your roadmap effectively, using the Now-Next-Later structure to create a shared understanding across your organization.

The Now-Next-Later framework is more than just a way to organize your roadmap – it’s a mindset that promotes agility, strategic thinking, and continuous delivery of value. By embracing this approach, you’ll be better equipped to navigate the complexities of product management, keeping your team aligned and your product on track for success.

Remember, a great product roadmap is never static. It evolves with your product, your market, and your understanding of customer needs. The Now-Next-Later framework gives you the structure and flexibility to manage this evolution effectively, ensuring that your roadmap remains a valuable tool for guiding your product’s development.

What’s Next?

Ready to revolutionize your product roadmap? Start by mapping your current projects and ideas onto the Now-Next-Later framework, then share your experience with this new approach using the #NowNextLaterRoadmap hashtag. 

Join our community of innovative product managers and learn how others are leveraging this framework to drive their product success. Let’s redefine product strategy together, one roadmap at a time.

The journey to mastering the Now-Next-Later framework is an exciting one, full of opportunities for learning and growth. As you implement this approach, you’ll likely discover new ways to adapt it to your specific needs and organizational context. Embrace this process of discovery and refinement – it’s all part of becoming a more effective, strategic product manager.

‍