How to build a technical roadmap

There’s nothing more exciting yet more intimidating than a blank piece of paper, especially when it’s your job to fill it with strategic activities for company growth and fulfilling activities for your team, alongside ideas that will change the face of your industry and make positive impacts for your customers.

Despite these challenges, technical and product roadmap planning is my absolute favourite part of my job… who doesn’t love trying to predict and build the next big thing??Here’s how I go about it.

1)???Start with a retrospective

Sit down and really challenge yourself on how the roadmap panned out last year.?

• How did it impact your customers??Did you deliver everything they needed?
• Did the team find delivering it fun??Stimulating??Challenging??Too challenging?
• Did it positively impact company growth or direction??Were your stakeholders happy with the direction it took the company??If not, why not?
• What was the mistake you made that wasted the most time??And what was the number one discovery you made that took the company to the next level??How can you avoid those pitfalls and recreate that success this quarter?

A thorough retrospective will help you sift your thoughts from your fears, be honest with yourself, and not believe your own hype.

2)???Go through customer feedback and group it

I took over 200 pages of handwritten notes in 2021.?I note-take obsessively as it’s absolute gold-dust for planning the future.?It’s essential to deep dive through that feedback, especially the stuff that hit hard at the time.

For me personally, I start by going through the feedback from meetings we had that went well but didn’t advance, and even the ones that never got off the ground.?Get out your notebooks and read the notes and the questions that you wrote down in the moment.?I get all of the negative feedback onto a big sheet of paper, and then begin to look for common themes.?These form the points that I consider addressing for the year ahead.

I then do exactly the same with a giant piece of paper for the meetings that went well and turned into customers.?What did they love about the product??What did they see in us that they hadn’t seen in others??These form the themes of things that we should make sure we don’t lose, but also building blocks for successful future products.

3)???Set themes and assign them T-shirt sizes

Now you have grouped feedback, it’s your job to sift the good from the bad.?Listen, consider, and then decide whether to act or not.?I look at the themes, discard some, include others, and then add the ones that have been rattling around my brain for a while so that it becomes a combination of future-gazing and customer driven development.?I pull these into actual projects, rather than themes, I then assign “T-shirt sizes” – is this a S, M, L, or XL project??This gives me a sense of the size of the project without having to ask the tech team to fully scope everything (the joys of being a technical founder!).

4)???Rank the ideas

When I have my t-shirt sizes, I can weigh up the cost of delivering a project vs the business impact.?For instance, if something is an XL but it’s a hunch from me, I’ll put it on the back-burner for this quarter but garner opinions from potential customers to see if it makes it into the next one.?If it’s S but it’s been asked raised over five times in meetings, it’s a no-brainer.

Once I’ve gone through this process, I end up with an ordered list of where the roadmap could take us for the year.?I pick the top projects for Q1 from this ranking, and that sets our direction for the quarter.

5)???Be transparent

The final stage is the most important; communicating the roadmap properly with the team.?I'm about to do this tomorrow with Team Snap Vision.?I take them through the whole methodology; with the agenda being:

• 2021 retro – what we did well / not so well as a team and as a company
• Customer feedback – a temperature check for how people are feeling about us and our products.?These are exact quotes from x,y,z (insert company names here!)? This gives everyone insight into the themes that the feedback have produced
• ?Q1 projects – which themes have translated into these projects for Q1.?I describe where we’ll be focusing now, and what we expect to come in to Q2.
• Company values and behaviours – running through our company values, and calling out particularly good examples of when we’ve seen them in action

So, that’s it. ?Technical roadmap planning is the bedrock of a good tech company, and I’ve found that breaking out in this way makes it manageable and enjoyable.?What do you think?