Let’s Talk Roadmaps: More Than Just a To-Do List

The importance, and eccentricities, of roadmaps in products (and in life).

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Roadmaps have been on my mind for a while. Originally, they were an integral part of my product role at my previous organization. Then, as I took a career break, they became a way to chart my journey forward, and capture the milestones it would involve. As all this was ruminating at the back of my mind, I got a LinkedIn notification asking me to answer a question about product roadmaps.

If you are not yet familiar with such notifications, LinkedIn has “Collaborative Articles” that aim to crowdsource insights across their vast user base. They work as well as you would imagine. You’ll rarely find anything new since most people use them to regurgitate established industry best practices (no offense industry best practices, I love you). Yes, I also ended up contributing because I find it hard to refuse automated notifications.

Coming back to roadmaps, adding my own thoughts bumped this topic up from my mind’s background noise, and I ended up thinking more about it. Especially about the bigger picture here: why do roadmaps matter? Do they work? Is it the same thing as prioritizing a bunch of to-do items?

What (and why) is a product roadmap?

I am not here to write a primer on how to create a product roadmap. There are a variety of articles and videos online that will help you with that, especially from outfits that build related platforms and tools. Think Atlassian, Aha, ProductPlan.

There is also no argument that roadmaps are useful — you can’t have an effective trip without a basic itinerary. You can take a leaf out of the backpacker’s handbook and choose to wing it, but that itself is a planned, conscious decision on your part, and hence part of your roadmap. In fact, in doing so, you would already be roadmapping in a more “agile” way than most organizations. More on that in a bit.

I wanted to move beyond thinking of roadmaps as merely another product artifacts. It’s an important deliverable nonetheless: necessary for internal buy-in across business unit heads, useful to align the organization as a whole, and impactful to demonstrate long-term strategy to existing and prospective customers. However, similar to planning a trip, understanding the vision behind the endeavor is even more critical.

The Importance of Vision

We’re all familiar with people who visit tourist traps mindlessly, ticking them off their checklist. While there is nothing wrong with that, we can all agree that travel is more rewarding when you focus on the experience. The motivation, after all, is to have fun.

Similarly, the product roadmap is effective when it is a means to execute the organization vision, rather than simply being a Gantt chart of features (no offense Gantt charts, I love you). We have multiple examples of failures where companies focused on features — Blockbuster focused on expanding physical rental locations and maintaining a vast inventory, Myspace focused on customizability and gimmicks within personal profiles, Nokia focused on manufacturing a wide range of devices (some of them were pretty cool!). We know which companies ended up taking the lead in each of these categories, and are still dominating their space owing to their long-term vision and agility.

Highlights of an Effective Roadmap

Don’t worry, this is still not a primer, but it’s worth highlighting the key aspects that make a roadmap shine.

• Themes: We talked about vision, and themes break down that vision into long-term strategic goals that bring value to the users. Some good examples of themes, especially in tech products, are accessibility, data privacy, seamless integration, and personalization. As you can guess, thinking about users, and your company’s vision, is at the center of deciding on a strong theme.

• Prioritization: Prioritization is more than applying frameworks (no offense frameworks, I love you) and requires a deep understanding of user problems. Start by identifying how your product solves customer use cases by gathering feedback through analytics, surveys, and direct engagement, which will help you identify areas for improvement and growth.

• Communication: The best way to highlight your roadmap’s value is through storytelling, user feedback, and metrics. This can be written up as a blog and presented in a slideshow. Take your intended audience on a journey, starting with customer pain points — these are what initially guided the features on your roadmap. Describe how you strategically planned these features to maximize user value.

• Validation: Finally, outline how you delighted your users. Showcase their testimonials and tangible improvements in business metrics. It’s not just about what you’ve built, it’s about the stories of success and transformation it enables. If the audience is internal, augment the story to include your company performance metrics like revenue and retention.

Be like Water

This is where the backpacker analogy makes its triumphant hippie return. A true roadmap, product or otherwise, is one that can adapt and improve to changing circumstances. Whether it’s a canceled flight or a market shift, flexibility is crucial for both travelers and companies to survive and thrive. Adobe moving to subscription based model to adapt to the changing software landscape, Instagram introducing reels to compete with TikTok, Microsoft open-sourcing .Net and acquiring Github to embrace collaboration — all these are part of the many success stories that show the importance of staying relevant and continuously growing.

Signing Off with Some Roadmap Wisdom

Crafting a roadmap, in life or for a product, is about more than plotting points on a map. It’s about envisioning a journey worth taking, one that promises discovery, growth, and maybe a little adventure. So as you chart (Gantt or otherwise) your course, remember to listen, empathize, adapt, and above all, enjoy the journey.