Create Roadmap to Create an Effective Communication in Your Organization
Once upon a time, you just came across one of the brightest ideas that can be found. A solution that answers a problem that has been proven by many people. You managed to gather a team, managed to tell what you want to build, and also a variety of supporting ideas that you feel can be the best way to achieve and build what you want.
The first step is complete, what next? If the idea already exists and you are ready to make it happen, it will be very difficult if in the end you cannot trace or plan it in a form called the road map. What is a Product Roadmap? And how important is the role of Product Roadmap in planning?
According to Atlassian Agile Coach, A product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. It’s a plan of action that aligns the organization around short- and long-term goals for the product or project, and how they will be achieved.
Why is a Product Roadmap important for a company to have?
1. For organizational leadership
This will be used to help pay attention to the tasks and to-do lists of everyone in a company.
2. For product owners & managers
Unify team roadmaps, and also help the team prioritize what each team wants to do.
3. For the developers themselves
A roadmap can explain the ‘big picture’ to everyone involved. That way everyone can work more orderly, towards the same goal, focus on important tasks and also make quick autonomous decisions.
After knowing all this, how do you create an effective product roadmap for your team?
1. Get the vision strategy right before you roadmap
Have a clear vision and the right strategy for you to create a successful product roadmap. You cannot use a roadmap as a strategy or vision. It is a different matter.
2. Realize your road maps are communication tools
The main purpose of a roadmap is to communicate it to everyone; executives, engineers, customers, market, and many more. The roadmap does not deliver business value but helps businesses to deliver real value.
3. Have multiple roadmaps
If you already know that roadmaps are primarily communication tools, then you should create some form of roadmaps to make them more effective. John Carter, advisor to Amazon, Apple, Fitbit, and many more, recommends that you have at least 3 roadmaps:
a. A Strategic Roadmap
The point is to communicate the product strategy components, showing performance gaps/positioning.
b. An Execution Roadmap
Communicate detailed release times to all teams; engineering, marketing to sales.
c. A Sales Roadmap
Communicate general timing for key releases, key outcomes, and support sales efforts.
If you think you need to add additional roadmaps, you are welcome. The sky’s the limit, in essence, the roadmap should make your communication smoother.
4. Select roadmap items based on outcomes and not just features
The best roadmap items focus the team and stakeholders on the outcome that needs to be delivered. Outcomes could be the benefit to the customer, incremental revenue, cost savings, or the strategic value delivered.
5. Carefully consider the right time frame for your roadmaps
In order to have a variety of different audiences, with different situations, in different organizations, you have to be careful about choosing the timeframe for the roadmap.
6. Review & updates at an appropriate frequency
Now that you have a timeframe, you have to determine how often you should update it. Make up your own mind about an appropriate frequency for making product roadmap updates. It might be right that your team does it monthly, you might need to be making it weekly at the moment, but not 2 months from now. You may only want to update it quarterly.
7. Systems and processes lead to good roadmaps
Given the roadmaps themselves are tools for communication, you need to make sure you’re investing in systems and processes that ensure your roadmaps are communicated.
8. Choose a fidelity or granularity based on the outcome
This is about considering each item and thinking about what you want to communicate, with which audience, rather than providing some generic and useless rule of thumb like “at an item should be X weeks” or “an item should be X man-days effort.”
9. Assign appropriate timelines to roadmap items
The main objective of the roadmap is to deliver outcomes. Don’t let you make a roadmap that in the end doesn’t produce any outcome.
10. Focus stakeholders with themes
So that the red threads can be maintained every month, try to make a theme each month. Suppose; for August we’ll focus on customer activation, or this year we will focus on retention.
11. Your roadmap is not your background
Common trap teams fall into, especially those driven by engineering, is to use their backlog as a roadmap or create a roadmap that directly translates into a backlog.
12. Avoid bug fixing and ‘necessary to do business’ items on your roadmap
In a similar line of thought, don’t put tasks that are just part of doing business into the roadmap.
This means don’t put bug fixing on your roadmap. Avoid putting other tasks like interviewing, maintenance, user support on it as well.
13. Don’t use roadmaps for research
The output from the research is the inputs into your roadmap, it’s only through research that you can know the outcome you’ll deliver.
14. Use data to inform your roadmap
A roadmap cannot be made only the origin of the shape, you must have a reason and a foundation that becomes your back up in making a roadmap; market research, competitors, customer insights, product analysis and more.
15. Don’t worry about tooling
If you’re stressing about tooling when it comes to product roadmap best practices, then you’re probably stressing about the wrong thing.
I’ve personally seen highly effective product managers and development teams succeed with excel and powerpoint slides. I’ve equally seen highly effective teams fail with the best tools money can buy.
Later you will find the right tools for it.
Now, time to clean up your roadmap and achieve your destination.
