There are literally thousands of technologies and vendors you can consider to improve your ecommerce site experience and capabilities. It can appear overwhelming to try to identify which of these to research, let alone pursue, test, and implement. So how do you identify and implement something successful?
First of all, there are no timelines or dates when it comes to the product road-map. You want to think of your road-map as a release plan that comes AFTER prioritizing and planning your strategy. In the beginning, you want to talk about your ideas excessively, even if the ideas would require too many resources to be feasible. At this point in your journey, the important part is ideation over practicality. You will eventually prioritize with the business and engineering team, so having a broad set of ideas that could match your objective will be incredibly helpful.
Second, the product road-map is meant to communicate strategy - what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how it relates back to the product vision. While a vision defines the goals for a product, strategy describes a way to achieve them and sets main milestones. This must be a clear and practical plan for the teams that are developing the product. Product strategy will likely need to have a set of key indicators that the product will meet and the set of critical business objectives. Again, this is not a map of product execution, but simply the overarching themes and objectives you are going to achieve.
Next, after completing your market research and maybe reaching out to other comrades in the same space to ask for recommendations, I like to get my hands dirty and begin a/b testing to see if the data backs up the technology. The goal is to define the minimum viable product(MVP) and put that into testing scenarios. Depending on the project I will likely be working with a UX specialist at this stage. Some will say that usability studies are also helpful here, but I don't put nearly as much faith behind this strategy as I do for multivariate testing. People who take your usability studies can help identify good ideas to test and help you define the product features later, but nothing is better to assess change then the pure statistical data. I am always surprised what the data tells me; sometimes I have implemented a new feature that was incredibly successful on other competitors sites, but they failed miserably on our platform. Remember that each site is different and has its unique set of challenges. That in part explains why you can't just implement what worked for a competitor and expect to emulate the success.
After that you enter prioritization and actually build for market. In an agile framework you will probably see a good amount of change in your final product, but the key thing is you need to be shooting for the overarching themes from your product road-map. That is why a product road-map can be so important: it gives the broad guidelines and strategy plan for the product and builds your guard-rails that are critical for the success of your final product.
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