Chief Product Team 
This guide will walk you through the steps of developing a product delivery timeline. These steps include:
-Determining your project’s scope and timeline
-Creating a product delivery timeline for each project phase
-Prioritizing and managing your project’s tasks and resources
Read on to learn more.
What Exactly Is a Product Delivery Timeline?
Let’s face it. Few products are fully developed the first time around.
More often than not, products are developed using a process of continuous development and improvement.
For this reason, a product delivery timeline is a plan for releasing your product in phases that include the following:
- A schedule of which features will be released when.
- Details about the features that will be included in each phase.
- A time frame for delivering each feature.
A timeline is an essential tool for managing a software development project. Especially one that is likely to last longer than one or two years.
It’s not just a plan; it’s your plan.
And it’s an essential part of your project management toolkit.
Prepare Your Product Delivery Timeline
You can use a delivery timeline to create a realistic schedule that allows you to:
Develop and implement your project vision and scope
This helps you define which features will comprise each phase of your product release. Your product delivery timeline should reflect this scope. As well as the timelines for each phase and its tasks.
This will help you make better decisions. Especially about how to allocate resources and develop new features in the most efficient way possible.
Estimate the whole duration
With this information, you can estimate how long the project will take to complete. And what resources you need to get it done on time.
For example, if you know there’s one developer who is assigned to work on new functionality during an eight-week sprint, then you’ll know that there are five weeks left. So, you can prioritize tasks accordingly.
This may mean adding more tasks to the sprint’s backlog. Or pushing tasks out of the sprint altogether.
You can also use your timeline. It allows you to communicate with stakeholders and other team members about why certain tasks are taking longer. This allows everyone on the team to make better decisions moving forward.
Communicate!
Also, by communicating specific features, you can also keep customers happy. You can do so by letting them know about upcoming fixes or new features they can look forward to.
In fact, there’s no better way to communicate about the features that will comprise your product release.
While a timeline may seem like a complex task, it really isn’t. Most of the time, it takes no more than an hour or two to prepare. And there are several methods you can use to do so.
Wrapping Up
The product delivery timeline is a great way to improve your software development process. It can help you take a project from inception to completion. And ultimately, help you deliver the product you envisioned.
Also, knowing when the different features are going to be released is essential to team coordination and individual task prioritization.
So, use your product delivery timeline as a communication tool that can help you better manage your time and resources.
How do you use your product delivery timeline? Please share your experience with us by leaving a comment below!
