Creating a product profile

A product profile is the "car logbook" for every product you ship — software or hardware. It tracks identity, lifecycle, releases, bugs, specs, and quality metrics in one place.

When to create a product profile

Create one for each:

• Software product or major SaaS module
• Hardware device / SKU
• Firmware that ships independently of hardware
• Major customer-facing platform

Don't create one for:

• Internal tools (use a Plan instead)
• Marketing campaigns
• One-off projects

How to create

Products → + New Product

Required fields:

• Name — customer-facing or internal name
• Code — short ID (e.g., VBU581, NEPS, "core-api-v3")
• Type — Digital / Hardware / Firmware / Hybrid

Recommended:

• Product family — for grouping (e.g., "VBU series")
• Owner — accountable PM
• Lifecycle stage — see below

Lifecycle stages

Roadmap OS supports 8 stages:

1. Concept — being scoped, not yet committed
2. Discovery — researching, prototyping
3. Development — being built
4. Alpha — internal testing
5. Beta — limited external testing
6. GA (General Availability) — released to all customers
7. Mature — shipping product, in steady state
8. End of Life (EOL) — phased out

Each product moves through these stages. Stage changes trigger:

• Notifications to watchers
• Updated lifecycle dashboards
• New required fields appropriate to the stage

Tabs available per product

Once created, a product profile has these tabs:

• Identity — name, code, version, type
• Commercial — pricing, revenue (projected + actual), gross margin
• Lifecycle — current stage, history of stage transitions
• Releases — versioned changelog with features, fixes, improvements
• Bug Tracker — severity, status, linked tasks
• Specs — technical details (different fields for digital vs hardware)
• Quality — CSAT, NPS, support tickets, resolution time
• History — audit trail of every change
• Documents — attached files, linked specs, contracts

Click each tab to fill in. You don't need to fill everything at once.

Hardware-specific fields

If product type = Hardware or Hybrid, the Specs tab has hardware-specific fields:

• BOM (bill of materials) — link to engineering ERP
• Hardware revision (Rev A, Rev B, …)
• Firmware version (current shipping)
• Certifications — FCC / CE / ICASA / etc., with expiry dates
• Units shipped
• Failure rate (returned units / shipped)
• MTBF (mean time between failures)

Certifications can have expiry-date reminders. Set 90 / 30 / 7-day reminders to never miss a re-certification.

→ See: Hardware Specs Deep Dive

Digital-specific fields

If product type = Digital or Hybrid, the Specs tab has:

• Tech stack — languages, frameworks, databases
• Hosting — cloud provider, region
• Uptime SLA
• API version (current)
• Supported platforms
• Active users (daily / monthly)

Watchers

Add team members as watchers. They get notified of:

• Lifecycle stage changes
• New releases
• New bugs above a severity threshold
• Certification expiry approaches (hardware)

Useful for engineering managers, support leads, customer success teams who care about specific products.

Linking to roadmap initiatives

When you create an initiative on the Roadmap, you can tag it to one or more products. The initiative then appears in that product's history.

Useful for:

• "Show me everything that's shipped for VBU581 this year"
• "What's planned for the API platform in Q4?"

Next steps

• Hardware Specs
• Lifecycle Tracking
• Release Notes