Launching a new product is never as easy as it seems. A roadmap, however, is a communication tool that can give you a sense of the realities of where you’re going and where changes may happen. Having a road map will go a long way in keeping you focused on the most important tasks and giving you a schedule to stick to. It needs to provide the answers to the questions: what are you going to do; why are you going to do it and how does it help you meet your goals. So how do you create one? With these six easy steps.
1. Confirm your vision
The first step of crafting your roadmap is to nail down what your ultimate goal is. Take into consideration all the internal and external conditions in which you’re operating and try to come up with a short statement about what you see your project becoming in the long run. You’re looking to define what you’re setting out to achieve, so something like “To be the easiest to use language learning app available” would work great as a starting point of your roadmap.
2. Generate milestones
Now that you’ve set the target, it’s time to break the process down into steps. Try to pinpoint what milestones you need to hit in order to reach the goal you’ve set previously. Creating reference points that will mark major events in the process of carrying out your project is incredibly useful when you’re trying to monitor the project’s progress. A milestone can be many different things, depending on the industry you’re in, but something along the lines of “Capturing 10% of the online language learning market” works great as a shorter-term goal.
3. Break down into even smaller goals
So you’ve given your map its main direction and some of the most crucial points you need to hit in order to achieve success, so what’s next? Well working towards something really big like capturing a big part of the market can be inspiring, but it makes it difficult to know where to start. Therefore, the next step is breaking your plan down even further into manageable smaller goals you can work towards on a daily basis. What you’re looking for at this stage is a task like to “Provide support for the 5 most widely spoken languages”, that you can start working on straight away.
4. Detail out as features
The next step of the roadmapping process is to try to plan out the potential improvements you will need and think ahead about the snags you will run into in the long run. Try to flesh them out as features, by researching and trying to preemptively accommodate the evolving needs and expectations of your customers. Think in terms of tasks like “Launching the Spanish module” or “Upgrading your server to handle traffic”.
5. Assign which KPIs are relevant
So you’ve nailed down how you are going to achieve success, but you also need to have a plan on how you’re going to measure the progress you’re making. Be sure to define what your key performance indicators are, and what the benchmarks are for hitting your goals. Your KPIs will obviously depend on both your positioning on the market and your audience, but some examples of what you should be measuring are: customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, conversion rate, etc.
6. Map it all out in the most useful way for your team
A roadmap's primary goal is making communication with the rest of your teammates easier, as well as making sure you are meeting the expectations of your partners and investors. Keeping everyone’s pace synchronized both internally and externally means that you need to communicate the information contained in the roadmap in a way that makes sense and is useful to everyone involved.
For a more more information on how to launch your project and craft your message, join our CEO Michael Murdoch for a Workshop on telling a memorable story without exceeding the budget at the British Library.
