How to build an efficient roadmap

The oh-so-famous roadmap — regularly heralded as the holy grail by product teams — is known to spark heated debates about delivery dates and give the impression of controlling everything down to the last millimeter. That’s why it’s so important that companies learn to build efficient roadmaps, which require strong commitment, interdepartmental coordination and a careful balance between short-term needs and long-term vision.

Laying the foundations of an efficient roadmap

🔍 First, it is crucial that your roadmap be accessible and comprehensible by all people involved, and that it provides an overview of the main milestones you want to achieve. Choosing the right tool and defining clear milestones along with precise goals makes monitoring and evaluation a lot easier. Here’s a tip: choose a tool which is easy to use and maintain.

🤝 Second, creating a roadmap often starts with a kick-off meeting to bring everyone together. This is the perfect time to lay out your plan, gather feedback and make any adjustments necessary.

📊 Third, it is important to ensure that your roadmap leads to significant results. This means tying each initiative to concrete actions and clear KPIs to measure their impact.

💔 Avoid having a top-down approach when setting goals; the objectives should be understandable and ambitious yet achievable. Imposing goals without consulting all those involved could discourage your team and lead to failure.

🎙️ Four, strong communication is essential to ensure your team’s continued commitment. Regular and open communication regarding progress, adjustments, failures and successes is key.

💡 These four pillars are the foundations for creating a solid roadmap, achieving your goals and keeping your team fully mobilised.

Outcomes over outputs?

Focusing on outcomes rather than on outputs is the key to creating real and lasting impact both on your company and its users. This approach focuses on the tangible and measurable effects your product features have on user behaviour and business goals rather than simple feature delivery.

Keys to focus on outcomes

1. Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): identify KPIs that reflect the strategic goals you wish to accomplish in order to measure the impact of your initiatives. For example: measuring user engagement rather than tracking the number of new subscriptions.
2. Continuous user feedback: gather and analyse user feedback to adjust your product according to your users’ real needs, thereby ensuring that your product development stays in line with market expectations.
3. Adopting a holistic approach to product management: have a good overview and understanding of your company’s various activities in order to fully comprehend how the different initiatives fit into the global strategy; it is important to see and understand the “big picture”.
4. Experimenting and iterating: encourage a culture of experimentation to quickly test hypotheses, measure their impact and fine-tune your initiatives before they are rolled-out on a large scale. I’ve learnt this the hard way these past few months 😅

Iteration-based planning ensures that your roadmap stays relevant in the face of market changes and user feedback, by adopting an MVP approach to move forward in a timely and impactful way.

😍 With outcome-driven roadmapping, you can turn product management into a strategic lever for your company.

💡 The PM or person in charge of the product plays a crucial role as an influential leader, bringing together different ideas and prioritising them to unite everyone involved around a common vision.

Selecting and prioritising initiatives

Each roadmap initiative must be assessed based on its potential impact on two levels:

P1 🚀

• Boosting revenue growth.
• Improving user experience.

P2 🔥

• Increasing operational efficiency.
• Strengthening your company’s competitive position.

Prioritisation is essential to efficiently allocate ressources. Using frameworks such as MoSCoW, the Eisenhower Matrix, or RICE will help you set priorities while balancing business impact, user needs and implementation complexity. Personally, I always try to keep it simple and avoid any overly complex modelling. If you are curious about this, please leave me a comment ;)

To conclude

3 key points to build the perfect roadmap:

1. Keep it dynamic: frequently update your roadmap to reflect any shifts in priorities or market conditions instead of blindingly following a predetermined plan. Nothing is set in stone.
2. Focus on the outcomes: rather than on outputs. Your roadmap shouldn’t be a “feature factory”.
3. Encourage clear and transparent communication: make sure that all involved are fully informed and aligned. On their own scale, everyone contributes to implementing the roadmap.

Here are a few tips for those in charge of the roadmap:

1. Be flexible: be ready to adapt your roadmap according to user feedback, market tests and performance analyses.
2. Listen to your users: incorporate user feedback in your roadmap-planning process. This ensures the evolution of your product in a way that caters to your users’ needs and wants. (Customer service is your friend, folks)
3. Adopt and encourage a culture of experimentation: test out new ideas and approaches before rolling them out on a larger scale. By doing so, you will minimise risks and optimise ressources by fully committing only to initiatives that have demonstrated their value.