A brand is the reputation you want to earn. It’s about what you say—but even more importantly, it’s about what you do. It’s the experience others have with you. And how you bring your brand to life is critically important.
Worldwide
First and foremost among those roles is to convey a product’s vision and strategy clearly. This means the process of creating a roadmap can’t happen in a vacuum. You and your team can’t simply sit down with the idea of developing a new product and immediately jump into creating a roadmap without clearly understanding that new product’s vision and strategy first.
After all, your roadmap won’t be able to do its job of effectively documenting vision and strategy if those two all-important elements haven’t already been thought through, vetted, and agreed upon.
The early stages of your product development process should follow a clear order of strategic product planning. First, you’ll determine the product’s vision. Then you’ll settle on a high-level strategy for guiding that vision to reality. And finally, you can start creating a roadmap to capture and communicate that vision and strategy.
In this post, we’ll take you through four key things to consider when creating your product roadmap (and will review what oversights to avoid):
1. Make sure you’re using the right roadmap tool.
2. Make sure your roadmap is visually clear and compelling.
3. Make sure a strategic justification accompanies every item on the roadmap.
4. Make sure you are reviewing and updating your roadmap frequently.
There are several benefits to this approach. First, when you set a rule that any item needs to articulate its reason for existing on the roadmap, your team will be more strategic in your product decisions. Second, when you have a clear explanation on the roadmap for why every item belongs there—even if it’s just a single line, i.e., “Research tells us 84% of our customers use mobile apps for work,” to explain the reason for prioritizing a mobile version of your product—you are more likely to earn stakeholder buy-in.
