Roadmap for Project: how your next plan should look like

A little guide to extending your knowledge about planning

Being agile and visionary is one of the most important criteria for startups that are looking either for investments, either for new teammates to get on board.

A goal without a plan is just a wish © Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Image source: hygger.io blog

It is a well-known fact that absolutely every good project requires a roadmap. Whether you are going to build a huge long-term project (a new company) or small “pet-project”, having a clear roadmap will help you:

• Define long-term goals, track results
• Plan team capacity and resources
• Focus on really important things and define high-priorities & low-priorities
• Keep your team on-track
• Find new teammates and show them how your product will look like in a year or so

Before we start — if your initial question was intended to be “Where can I share my Roadmap with the product community?”. Please, try Projectium.Network and publish your project there. Thanks!

What is the role of a roadmap in a project?

Depending on what is your final goal, your roadmap may look different. In general, the purpose of a roadmap impacts such properties as duration, frequency & details. While duration and frequency describe how long will your timeline be and how many steps it would have (on a monthly or a quarterly basis), it is important to keep good proportions. Speaking about the risks of these two metrics, they include

• A risk of having a too strict roadmap. If you add a lot of milestones with things planned for each day without accounting risks, most likely you’ll result in a roadmap that is far enough from reality. That’s why it is required to have free space for risks/changes and add bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly milestones (not daily).
• A risk of writing the wrong goals. With each new milestone added after a previous one, the chance that these goals will be completed goes down. This happens because milestones in project teams usually depend on the results of the previous milestones and should be taken into account. That’s why it makes no real sense to break goals to tasks for milestones in roadmaps with 2 or 5-year projections. It simply has no benefit as high-level goals will probably change. It is also recommended to keep the planning process regular and discuss roadmap on strategic sessions every 2 weeks (or with another period depending on requirements)

So, the skeleton of your roadmap is defined by the audience (roadmap can be internal or external) and “roadmap goal” — the desired result, “what should change after someone sees it”.

I’ve already mentioned that roadmap can be internal/external — so what does that mean?

• Internal Roadmap (a product roadmap) — a plan that you will show to the project team. Its usual goal is to make a clear step-by-step structure, estimate time & team capacity, prioritize tasks, and clarify blockers. Such a roadmap should focus on short-term operations, priorities, it can have a lot of tech-specific details. It is recommended to focus on several first milestones and decrease the level of detail with each next milestone.
• External Roadmap (a roadmap for customer/investor) — a plan that should be prepared for an interested party who is not involved in the project. Goal: highlight key items in milestones, provide time and budget constraints for plan A (all delivered) & plan B (only important delivered), define a real go-to-market strategy. It is recommended to describe it at a high-level, most likely without engineering, magic & details, focus on key features/activities for each milestone, and provide a long-term path.

Roadmap updates. How frequently should it happen and how?

Keeping your roadmap is important for projects or startup with a lot of changes during their lifetime (*For any startup).

Making updates in time will prevent you from mistakes and improve business goal quality delivered by your team. On the other side, making a quality detailed plan takes a lot of time and at some point, it becomes useless and slows down your progress significantly. That’s why it is important to use an Agile framework and do everything on time.

For internal and external roadmap update period is different. An internal roadmap requires regular updates that should be done with a product delivery team. Usually, it is done on bi-weekly (scrum) planning sessions involving every team member and product owner.

External roadmaps are rather updated on-demand when something particular happens with budgeting, deadlines, new goals, or market change. The nature of the long-term roadmap is driven by the business side, and of course, we should also mention requirements from another side and context.

Tools for visualizing roadmap of a project (depending on what you want to achieve)

1. Miro — when you need to show roadmap internally

Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform
designed for remote and distributed teams.

A tool that is useful when you want to build a roadmap together with your team collaboratively! Simple in usage & fun

*I know this is not a screenshot with a roadmap

2. Projectium timeline — when you want to showcase roadmap to community and project visitors.

A place where you can publish your project with the information that might be interesting to your potential customer/collaborator/investor with an integrated Timeline & microblogging features. Share & Connect!

I hope some of these tools will help you grow your further projects and define achievable goals!

Have a question? Ask me: alex@projectium.network

If you are feeling this article is still missing something important — write it in comments, I’ll try to include it inside this article.