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Project roadmaps: Tips and templates that can improve your skills

Today, both project and product owners are turning to sophisticated visualization tools to build comprehensive roadmaps for large strategic initiatives or business activities that require multiple projects running in parallel. Most tools offer technical flexibility and the ability to connect to other management products, making them useful for charting out overlapping short-, medium-, and long-term business objectives.

 

Building a roadmap can be complicated, especially for those who are used to dealing in more granular day-to-day management documents. Here are some tips and templates that can help you build a roadmap that fits your specific need case.

What is a roadmap?

A roadmap is a high-level view at of strategic initiatives or projects, visualized by a series of sequential or parallel milestones tasked to different teams and stakeholders. By marrying team-specific roles with the overall business objectives, roadmaps allow decision-makers to easily keep track of their company’s macro level progress.

 

When providing a roadmap definition, it’s just as important to understand what a roadmap isn’t. For starters, roadmaps are usually not granular process documents — they don’t list out day-to-day or even week-to-week objectives. They’re designed to sit at a higher level, tracking a project or company’s progress across months, quarters, or even years.

 

Part of the challenge in building useful roadmaps is striking the balance between the right information and inhibitive minutiae. Finding that balance takes an honest and ongoing dialogue with the business stakeholders who will be using the document. Their stated needs can help guide a project manager in what metrics to show and what timeframe to track them across.

 

That stakeholder feedback can help guide a roadmap into one of several broad categories.


 

Types of roadmaps

Executive vision roadmaps: This is as macro level as it gets. These roadmaps match product or revenue stream against company growth and market realities, helping senior decision-makers ensure their organization is staying current and competitive.
Product roadmaps: Oftentimes built for external audiences, product roadmaps sit at a very high level and should reconcile a product’s development and direction with the needs of the consumer it’s meant to service. These are usually built for clients or internal decision-makers that are far removed from the day-to-day.
Market strategy roadmaps: Another high-level roadmap variation, marketing strategy roadmaps map the objectives for selling a product to the consumer. These roadmaps can be visualized by industry, audience segment, product version, or even campaign.
Technology roadmaps: A more granular roadmap variation designed for internal audiences, technology roadmaps usually support product roadmaps by showing key milestones for engineering and development teams. In other words, product roadmaps anchor the features that a product will need, and technology roadmaps anchor the steps required to develop those features.
Project roadmap: Built for “product portfolio managers”, i.e. managers who deal with multiple projects that usually go through a standardized process. Examples of such roadmaps include investment project pipeline or construction projects. The roadmap allows managers to plan and prioritize their resources accordingly.

Regardless of what roadmap variation is needed, each depends on the ability to be easily understood, updated, and distributed. Whether you’re dealing with a more granular technology roadmap or a 50,000-foot view executive vision, objectives change frequently. Keeping roadmaps current and relevant is a key task for document owners, as siloed teams aligned on common objectives depend on it.

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Roadmap templates

Looking for a little help to get started on your next roadmap? Here are a few tips and templates for building in a data processor, business presentation tool, and project management tool.

Data processor

Roadmaps are usually highly visual — in many cases, they’re even created by a design resource to simplify the data being presented. By their very nature, however, data processors can work perfectly for data-driven roadmaps. Per-cell functions can help aggregate key data — like total weeks or months, or resource allocation — in a way that is easily understood.

At its most aesthetic use case, a data processor can be leveraged for simple visualizations that show a clear timeline. If you need to break away from the industry-standard timeline approach, work board templates can also be used as a roadmap starting point. Updating data processor roadmaps can be a manual process, however, so choose them thoughtfully.

Business presentation tool

 

A long-tenured gold standard for conferences and slideware, a business presentation tool’s inherently visual nature and widespread use make it an excellent platform for roadmapping. Their animation features and wide design palette allow for both creativity and distinctiveness.

 

Such applications can be a powerful tool for executive vision roadmaps, especially for companies focused on a small number of critical objectives. They can also help with external-facing product roadmaps, which require a balance between aesthetics and high-level information.

 

Project management tools

 

On the whole, a modern project management tool’s adaptable nature and connectedness to various office applications can often provide the best of both worlds: auto-updated data and streamlined visualization options that can flex to meet the needs of any roadmap variation.

 

You can use such tools to both build your initial document, as well as continually update key tasks and milestones. Filter tools give you greater data manipulation abilities, as well. With the right permissions setup, you can even distribute up-to-date documentation with the click of a button.

 

Roadmaps, when deployed correctly, have a powerful effect on products and projects: they establish both a clear vision of success and the high-level sequence of events needed to bring that vision to life. Most importantly, they build a team-wide strategic consensus that can keep a project on track through its inevitable challenges and changes.

 

The artwork of their construction lies in compiling the right information for the job. From executive visions to market strategies, projects and product initiatives can have a variety of complex needs. These tips and templates give you the tools to build the right roadmap for each of them.

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