The real purpose of roadmaps

“Are we there yet?”?–?Every kid on a road trip (and every boss at a company)

Every product manager needs to have a roadmap, but I’m not always sure they know why. I’m not even sure companies that make roadmapping software know why, because the formats they use are often so complicated they’re inscrutable to anyone outside the team. It’s no wonder most of them get little more than a passing glance.

The standard roadmap is a bunch of horizontal bars à la Gantt chart. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not the only format, and sometimes it’s the wrong one. It’s essentially a spreadsheet with nicer colours and who has time to divine insights from a spreadsheet.

The way to think about roadmaps is not as artifacts to show, but as communication to get across. Action, not thing. Verb, not noun. When you start thinking about roadmaps as communication they start to look very different.

Consider the examples below. It’s hard to argue that these don’t communicate future direction. If that’s the criteria, these are all perfectly valid roadmaps.

Apple’s 1997 product roadmap

Southwest Airlines founding napkin sketch

Twitter’s first UI for tweets

???A roadmap tells people your plan so they can do their job.

Different people need different levels of detail and timescales. Your boss wants to know what’s coming next quarter, a collaborating team needs to plan for next month, and your team wants to know what they’re doing this week.

In my experience I’ve found you need at least three different roadmaps: one for execs, one for teams that you collaborate with, and one for your team.

• Execs orchestrate everyone in the company and look far ahead. They need to know progress on big initiatives in the next 3-12 months.
• Managers of collaborating teams need to achieve the goals of their team and those they work with. They need enough detail to understand what you need from them and when, usually on the time scale of months.
• Your team’s job is to deliver specific functionality. They need the highest level of detail and shortest time scale.

The best part about thinking about roadmaps in this way is it saves you time while increasing clarity, because you’re given people exactly the detail they need in a format they can easily absorb.

For example, if you work in a small startup, your roadmap could be a phone call with the founder; or a WhatsApp message with bullet points to another team lead; or a napkin-style sketch shown to the company in an All Hands.

If people understand what you’re doing, it’s a roadmap. No need to overthink it.