STRATEGY & ROADMAP

What is a roadmap?

he basic definition of a roadmap is simple: it’s a visual way to quickly communicate a plan or strategy. At a high level, this broad definition applies to all the roadmaps that can exist at a company, including marketing, IT, sales, finance, project-based teams and anyone whose work has any impact on the business goals of an organization.

Every team has a plan and strategy built around doing what pushes the business goals forward. When you’re busy executing the strategy, you can get lost in the day-to-day task management. A roadmap is one of the most effective tools for rising above the granular details and the chaos. Roadmaps give you a bird’s-eye view of everything that’s happening at your team or company.

And with the right tool, you can roll up all those different strategies into one master view that allows you to see how all these pieces are connected and aligned with the high-level plan of the company.

Ideally, a good roadmap should effectively communicate the following strategic pieces:

• Strategic alignment: Why (and how) the initiatives align with the higher-level business goals or product/business strategy
• Resources: How a team will achieve those goals (OKRs, for example) and what resources are required to achieve them
• Time estimates: When any important deliverables are due (and with the right roadmapping tool, you have the flexibility to define dates according to your delivery needs. Either by defining specific days, fuzzier months, or less specific soon/now/later buckets)
• Dependencies with other teams: The teams and team members that need to be involved and why

One of the most popular types of roadmaps is the product roadmap, and they’re instrumental to product management (it’s why we have an entire library of resources for product managers). Product roadmaps provide a crystal clear way for product teams to visualize how their product will evolve over time. Because a product roadmap is a visual plan, it plays really well in a presentation — making it a great tool for PMs to align all stakeholders on their one high-level product strategy.

Non-product teams have started to catch on to how they can use roadmaps to improve strategic communication and win executive buy-in for those plans. More and more marketing, IT and project-based teams are visualizing their strategies with roadmaps.

What can roadmaps help you achieve?

• Consensus and alignment. Roadmaps can create the transparent consensus needed to move forward with decision-making around strategy (from the high level business goals to the granular day-to-day tasks and projects)
• Better communication. Road mapping promotes and improves communication across teams and departments by creating an ongoing dialogue around strategy and goals.
• A more visual way of seeing a plan. The visual aspect of roadmaps makes it easy to communicate outputs, timelines, projects and initiatives across an organization.
• Breaking team silos. Roadmaps can be the key in creating alignment between resource allocation and a company’s goals, and between the technical side of the company (product, development, engineering) and the business.

In this guide, you’ll find the road mapping basics you need — best practices that are applicable to all types of road mapping teams — like how to create your first visual roadmap, what it should include and examples of beautiful roadmaps to inspire you.

What should a roadmap include?

How to create a roadmap and what to include in it really depends on the type of roadmap you’re creating. But generally speaking, there’s a set of essential elements and qualities that apply to all roadmaps.

• It has to be flexible. If you want to succeed at implementing a road mapping process at your company, you need to treat roadmaps as flexible tools, not static documents. Strategy-setting can get complex, ambiguous and uncertain—so you need the most flexible road mapping tool that can adapt to that reality.
• It has to be collaborative. What’s the best way to gain buy-in and alignment on a plan? Involve your stakeholders early in the roadmap planning process, listen to their objections and concerns and be curious about their reasoning for why some things should be prioritized over others. Learn how to say no, but also take the time to listen and understand where your teammates are coming from when it comes to prioritizing their work.
• It has to be visually beautiful. Good design elements = crystal clear communication. You want to be able to demonstrate to your stakeholders that you’re on top of your strategy. So it’s important that the roadmap meets you halfway when it comes to presenting your reasoning.

Your roadmap should also have these visual elements:

• A clear depiction of dependencies. Projects usually involve more than one team of stakeholders. With projects that involve many moving parts, it’s important to define those dependencies early on in the road mapping process.
• The right amount of detail. Things like key dates and milestones can create a linear visualization for stakeholders to keep track of everything that’s going on at the organization.
• Use color to your advantage. A good roadmap should use color to tell a story and establish relationships between the items on your roadmap. You should use color palettes to establish a visual relationship between the different categories on the roadmap