Achieving goals with Quarterly Roadmaps — A Comprehensive Guide
A sustainable roadmap backed by right data is essential for making informed product-related decisions. In today’s scenario, most of the organizations have adopted modern agile methodologies to meet their customers’ needs and to stay ahead in the global competition.
This article explains the importance of having quarterly roadmaps along with some best practices to properly structure a long-term product roadmap and decide how you plan to execute your plan within the quarter.
What is a quarterly roadmap?
Quarter roadmaps are the product roadmaps that give an overview of your product development at least for a span of 3 months. This helps you to look beyond just the now and later stages by overcoming the uncertainties and obscurities about what you will build and how.
This is a good way to connect with your practices during planning stages and refine them. Having well-planned futuristic roadmaps minimizes vagueness and further complexities. This helps you to illustrate the product direction, your target group of users, your stakeholders and where and how to market it further.
Why is it important to have quarterly roadmaps?
Quarterly roadmaps help the teams to focus on the product needs at a specific time. Business goals are usually measured based on various parameters like user retention, conversions, market expansion, etc… which involves a lot of iterations around building and testing. Having a quarterly plan helps better align product planning with the flow of product needs.
This gives the product managers the ability to access various data sources and choose the right data-driven strategies to handle customer feedback and gain the right performance metrics. This is crucial both for developing sustainable products and having better processes in place.
Objectives and Key Results — OKRs 🌱
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) are a notable way for measuring and setting the product market purpose. Combining OKRs with quarterly roadmaps is even great as it helps you to work in a more product-focused way.
This enables the product managers to take definitive initiatives and describe what specific activity the team is working to achieve a particular OKR. This inturn shows the importance of the OKR in the product roadmaps.
This way of clarity in working teams opens up for channels for clear communications, new thoughts & strategies and product market perceptions. Mapping out all these initiatives, thoughts and perceptions on a quarterly roadmap helps the team get a visibility on what they are working on and what they are achieving by this. This also allows your team to fix problems in different possible ways and successfully achieve the objectives.
What do quarterly roadmaps look like in reality? — A step-by step guide
1. Do you have your OKRs ready for the quarter? 📈
Make sure your goals for the quarter are aligned well with your product goals and the overall organizational needs.
Company/ product goals change depending on the clients, market and other internal reasons. Be sure about what you want to achieve in this quarter and add only them in your quarterly roadmap. It is easy for new product managers to become over-ambitious — avoid that and strictly stick to the OKRs for the quarter.
2. Prioritize and align 📝
Start planning. Organize the ideas and prioritize them as defined initiatives. While prioritizing, discuss the initiatives among the team members and see if they are relevant and meet your objectives for the quarter.
See what customer problems you are going to solve. Take the help of prioritization frameworks/ techniques like: RICE or Story Mapping.
3. Identify the bottlenecks and possible ways to solve 🔐
Identify the resources that you have and get a high-level estimate. This helps to avoid misalignments and mis-communications in the later stages. Choose between top-down or bottom-up approaches to have more realistic estimates.
Understand the dependencies and expectations between development, product and commercial teams.
4. Involve your stakeholders in the communication 💬 & create a high-level roadmap
Create different versions of scenario-based roadmaps with clear priorities and share them with your stakeholders. This is a great way to ensure open communications that are aligned with the team’s expectations and product goals. Get as much clarity as possible in this stage.
Things you should be aware while creating your quarterly roadmaps
Being flexible can make you more adaptable for changes
A quarter is really a good amount of time to shift priorities, change goals and to get in new customer requests. Therefore, it is important to be flexible even though a quarterly roadmap is a solid plan that shows further development towards the set objectives.
Ensure that everyone are on the same page
A project is a combined work of various teams. It does not mean that everyone else has to wait until your team finishes your work. Then it is a waste of time. Right? Use the quarterly roadmap to share your priorities and progress, tasks and assignments, releases and feedback. This will eventually become a well-integrated productivity tool.
Use frameworks wherever needed instead of building everything by yourself
For Example, you can build your product roadmaps using many tools like spreadsheets, powerpoint, etc…, but they are NOT dedicated for this purpose. Means, they lack the key features that a proper product tool/ framework is built for. In addition, it takes a really long time to build roadmaps when you use the wrong tools.
Choose the tools that are fast, visually appealing, easily integrated and shareable across your stakeholders. Basically, just right for your purpose.
Quarterly roadmaps can be a powerful tool for your organization to achieve the strategic goals efficiently. They improve clarity in your goal alignments, communications and make you adaptable and ready for changes. I hope you can harness the full potential of quarterly roadmaps to drive your organization towards success 🏆.
