Three Reasons Why Your Roadmap is Terrible . . . and How to Fix It

Most product roadmaps are just awful.  Sadly, many people expend a lot of time and effort to create them, but most product managers know the majority of roadmaps are obsolete after three to four weeks.  Here are three reasons why this is often the case.

Misunderstanding the purpose of a roadmap

Open any roadmap, or read any book about roadmapping, and you will see a plethora of dates, information and dependencies organized along a timeline.  Seeing all this information about features and capabilities arranged according to specific deadlines gives the impression that a roadmap represents a series of commitments of how the business will deliver value.  This is especially true when the roadmap has been “touched up” by a graphic designer or represented as a Gantt chart in an electronic tool.

Unfortunately, this perspective is incorrect.  The entire reason why businesses engage in roadmapping is to have conversations about the various tradeoffs they must make to operationalize their strategy.  The best product-led organizations know that a roadmap is a communication tool used by product leaders to develop alignment among their stakeholders (executives, business owners, managers and development teams) on how to direct limited resources towards the organization’s goals.  The roadmap is just the artifact that documents their collective decisions.

Your Fix

Use low-fidelity tools to create, maintain and talk about your roadmap.  I find that the roadmaps I make with low-fidelity tools, e.g., post-it notes and tape on a wall, arranged along a timeline with fuzzy dates works really well to create dialogue, discussion and decision-making.  However, if you must  use an electronic tool, Excel or Miro are fine alternatives but do impede the fluidity I see when using low-fidelity tools.  Remember, the roadmap is a snapshot of how people were thinking at a certain moment of time.  It is not the execution plan; that still needs to be created later!

Created in a vacuum

When roadmaps are created in a vacuum, this often leads to lack of coordination among key roles, introducing unnecessary delays.  For example, at one client, the product team was responsible for creating the product roadmap.  OK….but the product did not synchronize their roadmap with marketing.  As a result, marketing was unaware of product’s expectations until too late, causing the business to delay the product launch by three months.  At another client, the product roadmap and engineering roadmap were distinct from one another and owned by separate departments.  Consequently, this led to the product team being unable to meet their business objectives because they were starved of engineering resources (aka people) that had been assigned to work on the engineering roadmap.

A product manager once shared this insight with me about building a roadmap, “No one person has the complete view of the customer.  But everyone together can bring their individual pieces to create a shared understanding of what the customer needs.”  This is why CXO’s, executive teams, product managers or even project managers fail to create robust, stable roadmaps.  They simply do not have a complete view of what is necessary to operationalize the business’s strategic goals.

Your Fix

The best product roadmaps are created collaboratively with all the relevant stakeholders who are affected by the product, have insight into the market or have resources to share.  This means, at a minimum, you will invite sales, engineering, marketing, architecture, business owners and executive leadership to participate in the process.  Depending on your funding model, you might want to include representatives from key customer accounts or other stakeholders who have useful insights into customer and\or end user needs.

Roadmapping is a “check the box” activity

What do I mean when I say “roadmapping is a check the box activity”?  IME, a “check the box” activity is any activity someone does out of compliance or habit.  So each year, companies go through a lot of time and effort to create, or update, their roadmaps because “it’s part of the [planning?] process” or “that’s how things are done around here”.

However, since annual roadmapping is seen as a “check the box” activity, there is no intention to engage with the activity or try to get better at it.  As a result, the roadmap rapidly diverges from reality because no one takes the time to update it based on new decisions the business makes, market conditions or customer behavior.  Instead of being a living document, it becomes brittle artifact built once and promptly forgotten.

Your Fix

Commit to align and update your roadmap on a regular cadence.  For most US businesses, this will be quarterly aligned with the calendar year.  Other organizations plan around a fiscal year instead of the calendar year and some international businesses work in quadrimesters (four months as opposed to three months).  Regardless of the length of time, you must revisit your roadmap so that it accurately captures how you intend to operationalize your strategic goals.

Want to learn more, explore our resources to find many blog articles related to Agile and Scrum.