The Roadmap serves as a communication tool that helps align stakeholders across the organization. It provides a clear and transparent view of the product's direction, upcoming releases, and key milestones. It provides a visual representation of how the product will evolve over time, outlining key features, enhancements, and initiatives.
Roadmaps keeps the entire organization focused on moving, in unison, in the same direction. There are different types of roadmaps:
A Strategic Roadmap, Product Roadmap, and Technical Roadmap are three distinct planning tools that serve different purposes and focus on different aspects of an organization's strategy and execution. Here are the key differences between these roadmaps:
A Strategic Roadmap outlines the high-level strategic goals, initiatives, and milestones of an organization. It provides a long-term perspective and guides the overall direction and priorities of the business. A Strategic Roadmap focuses on broader strategic objectives, such as market expansion, competitive positioning, revenue growth, or organizational transformation. It may encompass multiple products or initiatives and considers factors beyond the product development process, such as market trends, competitive analysis, and financial considerations.
A Product Roadmap is a planning tool specific to a product or a product line. It outlines the product's vision, features, enhancements, and initiatives that align with the product strategy. A Product Roadmap provides a clear view of the sequencing of upcoming new work, prioritization of features, and key milestones. It serves as a communication tool to align stakeholders on the product's direction, upcoming releases, and strategic initiatives. The Product Roadmap is focused on the product's lifecycle, customer needs, market dynamics, and the value delivered to users.
A Technical Roadmap focuses on the underlying technology and infrastructure required to support the product or organization's technical objectives. It outlines the technological strategies, platforms, frameworks, architecture, and systems that enable the product's development and scalability. A Technical Roadmap addresses aspects such as technology upgrades, system integrations, security enhancements, performance improvements, and technical debt management. It provides a roadmap for the technology team and guides their decisions and priorities to ensure the long-term stability, scalability, and maintainability of the product or technical infrastructure.
All Roadmaps must be in alignment. The Product and Technology Roadmaps are subservient to the Strategic Roadmap in that they are built upon the organizations foundational strategy and strategic themes outlined in the Strategic Roadmap.
These roadmaps are aligned and complement each other, providing different perspectives and guiding different aspects of the organization's strategy and execution.
We believe that the Product and Technology Roadmaps should be aligned into the same physical document so that all development efforts are prioritized utilizing the same constructs. By aligning these together, both Product and Engineering must work together to deliver on both the product and technical aspects of growing a product line.
When Technology Roadmaps are separated from the Product Roadmap and they are tightly held only within Engineering, the two parts of the organization work at cross-purposes to each other. We often see Engineering organizations in this situation trying to “hide” that they are working on technical debt. Empathy and transparency are lacking. Sustained success requires empathy and transparency to be integral to how the entire organization operates and all work to be in alignment to business goals.
For example, if the business strategy has the company projecting 100%+ growth over the next year, then it’s of strategic importance that both Product and Engineering align on ensuring that the product can scale to handle this growth. New feature development must be prioritizes in harmony with strengthening the platforms ability to handle the load.
By placing all technical initiatives onto the aligned roadmap, we get a complete, holistic picture of what Product Engineering must accomplish, together, in order to deliver on the company’s strategic mission.
A Roadmap is of significant importance to a business for several reasons: