What is a roadmap?
A roadmap is a high-level strategic overview of a major company’s endeavor in the planning or implementation stages. It is used to guide the development of a new product or execution of a large-scale company-wide initiative by defining the goal or desired outcome and listing the milestones and steps needed to achieve it.
Project and product managers rely on roadmaps to create a clear and strategic picture of every step of a project or a product management process. This is because roadmaps help to keep teams on the same page. However, products and project roadmaps differ in approaching timetables and deadlines. A product roadmap timeline is more dynamic and adaptable than a traditional schedule, allowing teams to modify and adapt when priorities shift.
What Do Roadmaps Accomplish
Roadmaps serve as a single point of reference during projects and product development. This is crucial to ensure that everyone in a team understands the objectives and is driving towards the same goal. Moreover, it is easier to adjust or update initiatives and set goals when team players and product managers have a centralized project view.
Benefits of Having a Roadmap
Roadmaps create a similar view of projects and production. This benefits product development teams in many ways, including:
Creating Consensus and Alignment
Roadmaps can create the transparent consensus that teams need to move forward with decision-making around strategy. This covers all aspects, from the high-level business goals to the more refined day-to-day tasks, milestones, and projects.
Communicating Goals
A project roadmap clearly outlines the goals and objectives of your project. This makes it easier for them to focus on specific tasks. It helps product managers and their teams set timelines for the completion of milestones. Furthermore, it reminds staff of the project’s baseline, so they don’t get side-tracked during execution.
Prioritizing Tasks
A project management roadmap helps project managers to identify stages that require the most attention and prioritize those. It also provides an estimated overview of the effort and complexity required to complete these stages.
Communicating With Stakeholders
Sometimes product management teams may develop projects that don’t appeal to the stakeholders. This is because stakeholders may expect teams to accommodate some changes during execution. Failure to accommodate these changes leads to projects deviating from stakeholders’ expectations. However, a roadmap prevents miscommunication between stakeholders and teams by ensuring that everyone is on the same track and clarifying to stakeholders the steps that teams took during project execution.
Disadvantages of Using Roadmaps
● Roadmaps come with many benefits, but if they’re not updated regularly, it causes initiatives to veer off course. Also, it is the only place teams look for directions, so any unanticipated dependencies can lead projects to fall behind schedule.
● When roadmaps are not used as a living document, they may become counter-productive. This is why it’s crucial to use a road-mapping application that makes it easy for you to share any developments with stakeholders in real-time.
● Sometimes teams may focus heavily on research and execution of projects and forget and neglect user testing and giving feedback.
A roadmap should not be confused with a backlog, as a backlog is essentially a to-do list of all tasks required to complete a strategic initiative arranged according to priority. On the other hand, a roadmap is a high-level strategy made from a collection of backlog tasks and ideas. However, the two can work together to create jobs and milestones for a project and keep teams on the same page.
