They say all who wander are not lost, but that’s not necessarily true in software development and engineering. Chaos, noise, squeaky wheels, and unplanned sidebars are all out there working to derail your progress. Enter stage right — a strategic product roadmap.
Without a software product roadmap to direct those with an acting role in the process, there is nothing protecting your software development project from veering off path. You need to commit to creating and maintaining roadmaps so you can keep your projects on track, on time, and on budget.
Why Should We Have a Software Product Roadmap?
We talk about roadmaps a lot. Why? Because if your house is on fire, there’s chaos everywhere. You have unhappy teams, business leaders who don’t know what to do, dissatisfied customers, not to mention how your EBIDTA will suffer, which means displeased investors and stakeholders.
The Next Right Thing
A roadmap puts everyone on the same track and helps your team do the next right thing at each turn. Without it, your teams are left to respond reactively instead of proactively, not operating even close to their full potential.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say “you don’t need a roadmap when you’re agile.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. Agile is a no-plan approach. Without a roadmap, you will be making short-sighted decisions that will eventually disrupt your project.
All of this leads to regression — where you fix something and then two weeks later you fix something else and the first thing breaks again. This is a classic hallmark of a lack of strategy and a lack of a technology roadmap when you are building, growing, and enhancing a product.
A Little Game Called Whack-a-Mole
When it comes to building commercial software products and platforms, the work that is done is driven by the pain that is being felt by various teams, end users, and critical customers. The more popular the product, the louder the noise.
The pain as it’s reported by all of these parties never abates. If all you’re doing is playing whack-a-mole on what’s noisy today, when you whack one, another is going to pop up. Eventually you’re going to get tired of the game. A better solution: why not find a way to whack the moles more efficiently and in the proper sequence — STOP, assess, and work smarter, not harder.
What Are the Benefits of a Roadmap and Software Product Plan?
- Clarity and Focus. A roadmap is a product plan tool that provides clear direction and focus for your engineering, sales and marketing teams, building a shared understanding of project goals, milestone sequences, and deadlines.
- Alignment with Business Goals. Having a roadmap ensures that your software development projects align with your broader business goals, helping your projects meet the needs of the organization.
- Improved Communication. A roadmap facilitates communication between team members, stakeholders, and other parties involved in the software development process.
- Risk Mitigation. A roadmap is a software product plan that can help you identify potential risks and challenges early in the development process, giving you time to anticipate issues before they happen.
- Resource Management. A roadmap provides a framework for managing important resources like time, budget, and teams so all resources can be allocated effectively and tasks can be prioritized based on their importance to overall project success.
How Do We Get a Software Product Roadmap?
It doesn’t take long to develop an effective roadmap — we help customers develop a roadmap in two days; an effective, pragmatic roadmap that minimizes risk and maximizes return, and is directly aligned with the goals of the business.
Your roadmap is your true north — it is agile with discipline, not a guessing game. This process opens lines of communication and supports sequencing requests logically and in a way that aligns with goals.
Creating it is one thing, but you need to make a commitment to maintaining it, updating it, and measuring yourself on it.
How Long Will it Take?
At the start of a Roadmap engagement, the CEO needs to commit half a day to lay out critical business objectives for the next 9 – 18 months for the leadership team.
The product owner and engineering team lead will then use the remaining time to collaboratively create and refine the product roadmap that will deliver on the CEOs clearly defined objectives — this is the most valuable time they’ll spend on the process.
Who is Involved With the Roadmap and What Do They Do?
The roadmap is the logic filter between product managers and engineers. It is the buffer between the engineering team and unnecessary requests that can quickly spiral a project. The stakeholders who are typically involved with the roadmap include:
- CEO – They know where the business needs to go. Could also be the Head of Business Unit or the VBU (Vertical Business Unit) Leader.
- Head of Engineering – They do the work. Ultimately, the roadmap is a contract and an agreement between the engineering team and the rest of the organization with the right sequence in which to progress in terms of R&D investment.
- Product Owner/Product Manager – They own the roadmap. They also act as a buffer between the engineers and the source of requests, regardless of how strong the push is, to keep engineers aligned with goals. Plus, they’re responsible for defining product vision and determining the best way to address requests in logical timeline sequences. They work closely with customers, stakeholders, and development teams to identify necessary features and priorities.
- Engineers and Designers – They work with product managers to create UI/UX design. They ensure designs are intuitive, easy to use, and meet customer needs.
- Developers – They’re responsible for writing the code that implements the features and functionality defined in the roadmap.
If the sequencing and the grouping of the requests from all of these stakeholders is off, or if there is no sequence to begin with (e.g., no roadmap), there is going to be chaos. A roadmap is absolutely crucial if you want to minimize the risk of your software product R&D and maximize the return of all of your efforts.
This is all driven by risk and return; the product owner, much like the CEO, must look at engineering through an investor lens, all of the requests, through the investor lens, and that piece is often missing.
How Do We Maintain Our Roadmap?
Creating it is one thing, but you need to make a commitment to maintaining it, updating it, and measuring yourself on it.
Roadmaps should be reviewed and updated at least quarterly, and socialized internally. You can set up monthly internal meetings between the product owner, head of engineering/lead engineer, and other internal representatives such as sales, marketing, customer service, and professional services.
These meetings don’t need to be long, around 30 minutes will do it, but it provides the teams a chance to review the roadmap, demonstrate progress, and update one another. Don’t forget the value of including your sales and marketing leaders in these meetings — having them in on the process is an excellent way to accelerate sales.
Successful roadmaps require continuous communication between teams and stakeholders to ensure everyone is on the same page with changes and updates.
Clear goals and milestones should be set up-front, so you can track progress toward achieving them — this means your team knows if there is a roadblock before it stalls progress, giving your engineers time to come up with solutions.
Final Thoughts – How it All Comes Together.
Roadmaps bring your teams together. When marketing knows a product is coming, they can start planning for advertising.
Professional services can start ramping up training on the new technology and features. Customer service can keep the noise level low and customer satisfaction high when they can tell the customer a solution is coming.
Even if it’s a year down the road, customers feel heard. This kind of responsiveness is a way to do better, deliver more value, and ultimately drive growth.
Thanks to the roadmap, when you deliver a feature set, the rest of the organization can maximize the use of that asset. They’re ready to market it, sell it, support it, and launch professional services around it.
Without this coordinating mechanism, nobody knows what they’re going to get.
If you were building a car, a computer, anything physical and complex, would you make it up as you go along? Absolutely not — it would be too risky and cost too much. It’s the same thing on the software side; it’s a basic discipline of product engineering.
Don’t drive blind and make it up as you go along – start with a roadmap, you’ll thank me later.
If you’re frustrated that you’re making it up as you go along (or know you don’t want your project to start out that way), and you want to do it better and more strategically, let’s talk!