A road map is inevitable for any product whether it’s a new mobile app or a piece of software. The reason behind creating an effective and efficient roadmap for your software product is to communicate the purpose and progress of the product development. It helps align everyone involved in its lifecycle, no matter what role they play.
10 Secrets Of Creating A Roadmap For Your Software Product are:
- Every organization finds different approaches to building, tracking and sharing their roadmaps. However, whatever approach you take; be sure that your end goal remains the same: Creating an effective roadmap that drives business value while providing transparency into your product strategy across all levels of management. And keeping this in mind here are ten best practices for building and communicating your product roadmap:
- Product managers should be aware of the circumstances beyond their control, like market conditions and the ever-evolving customer needs. To avoid unnecessary delays and rework, explain to your development team the rationale behind every change you make. Product Roadmaps are built upon time-based data points that must be adjusted accordingly as projects progress throughout their life cycle. As such, it is recommended that you check your roadmap regularly to assess its accuracy against newfound knowledge about your business, technology or resource constraints.
- The best roadmaps speak volumes about a product’s high-level direction without getting bogged down in details until further along in the process – usually around milestone planning . Your stakeholders will appreciate seeing a clear and concise depiction of your product’s progress towards its destination. Allow for discussion about the roadmap so that stakeholder concerns can be brought to the surface in a timely fashion, rather than waiting until Milestone Planning when the issues would become visible anyway.
- Since roadmaps are living documents, there needs to be a mechanism for continuously checking their accuracy against project progress and other information. There is no hard-and-fast rule for how often you should check your roadmap – there are many factors that will influence how often it’s needed: At a minimum, you need to check your roadmap at each major milestone during development or release. You may find it necessary to make minor adjustments between these milestones if new information comes to light. These adjustments should always have a basis in fact – if you’re unsure about how well your project is doing, ask for feedback from the people who are working on it.
- In many projects, team members won’t be closely following progress against the roadmap. In this case there needs to be specific milestones where the entire team gets together and discusses progress. This ensures that everyone has access to relevant information when they need it. The regular time devoted to checking and updating a roadmap also provides a regular opportunity for all stakeholders to check that the roadmaps’s goals match their vision for what your project is trying achieve – if you’re going to invest time into creating a roadmap then make sure you get value out of it by it as part of your decision-making process.
- As a side benefit it also gives you the opportunity to periodically review your roadmap and check that it still matches your vision of where you want to go. You might find that changes in the market or within your organisation have made some parts of the roadmap outdated, now is a good time to update them too! There’s no point having a roadmap which doesn’t accurately reflect where you’re going! Project roadmaps are often used as part of project plans. They give an overview of how each stage will be completed before moving onto the next phase, ensuring all work has been planned out successfully. A project plan may include deliverables, milestones , resource allocations and deadlines . A project timeline can also be included showing how long the project is likely to take.
- Roadmaps are used for large undertakings – they help teams stick together and keep everyone working towards a common goal. It can also help marketing or sales teams work out how to go about launching the product/service, when to do it and what they need to achieve.
- A simple chart is enough if you’re only planning one aspect of the project. If multiple areas are being covered, then you can include them all in one diagram or create an additional diagram for each area. If possible, try using a mind map instead of something more formal – it’s faster and easier to read . Mind maps are great at visualising complex data quickly!
- The most important thing is that they need to be based on accurate research and data. Data visualization can help you in proper research and analysis. There’s no point claiming the product is going to launch in three months if you can’t deliver it within six! At best, creating a roadmap that isn’t realistic damages your credibility; at worst it could lead to delays and even costlier problems later down the line.
- Roadmaps should also be regularly updated. The market changes quickly – don’t let your promotion strategy become irrelevant because of something as simple as a change in release date for a competitor’s product.
