Roadmap: definition, tools, examples

Capability roadmap

You know those big projects you’ve always envisioned, but they’re so grand they take years to implement? Yeah, a capability roadmap helps you plan how to execute these projects.

Plotting the large-scale capabilities a business wants to tackle in the next few quarters or years, a capability roadmap revolves around potential rather than your present projects. It plans the super-ambitious, game-changing goals beyond features and releases. Think launching 5 product lines in three years, or opening up a global office in Europe, or owning 25% of the market share in two years.

Seeing as this roadmap is meant for planning years into the future, a Timeline View of your capability roadmap just makes sense. Showcasing each team’s planned capabilities for the next few years, the timeline capability roadmap paints the big picture of where your business is going and when they plan on getting there.

If a timeline is too detailed for your capability plans, a Swimlane View might be more up your alley. Organizing your plans into loose and/or fuzzy time buckets like years or “Future,” this roadmap view offers a digestible snapshot of how and when each team plans on tackling capability initiatives.

Turn your big, audacious ideas into a reality with our capability roadmap template.

The technology roadmap template

A technology roadmap outlines how an organization plans to use technology to achieve their goals. And just like the other roadmaps in this list, the goal of a technology roadmap is to show stakeholders what it will take to reach a goal or solve a problem (in terms of team effort, financing and tooling).

What’s a technology roadmap?

This type of roadmap aims to communicate the strategy behind any new complex technological initiatives happening at a company. Using a roadmap to communicate the “how we’ll get there” of a technology initiative can result in a few outcomes:

• Create alignment on what’s happening with IT projects
• CTOS, engineering leads and IT managers can create their own technology roadmaps to align and build clarity around the technical components of their organization
• Efficiently monitor technology considerations and resources within a product’s research and development strategy
• Visualize the administration of internal processes and systems, like information security audits and tracking employee hardware.

Think of ‘technology roadmap’ as an umbrella term with various types of roadmaps falling under it, such as an IT systems roadmap, a development roadmap or a cloud strategy roadmap—just to name a few.

In all cases, a technology roadmap communicates complex initiatives within an easy-to-follow, actionable plan.

For more resources on how to plan, build and communicate a technology roadmap, check our tech roadmapping hub.

We cover 10 more ways to build a powerful technology roadmap in our free downloadable guide..

What’s the difference between a technology roadmap and a product roadmap?

While a technology roadmap can often overlap with your product roadmap, it serves a different purpose. Your product roadmap strategizes your upcoming features and improvements to your product. Your technology roadmap, on the other hand, maps out the strategies pertaining to your infrastructure, platform and security that ultimately support your product strategy.

The roadmunk template

Our technology roadmap’s timeline view enables you to simply visualize timing for all technology initiatives coming up in your pipeline.

Our swimlane view provides a high-level snapshot of your technical priorities, and it tracks the progress of initiatives that are in progress, completed or within the backlog.

Download our free customizable technology roadmap template.

Почему необходимы Roadmap ICO?

Такой документ помогает в составлении прогнозов развития идеи, а также позволяет заранее определить риски и по возможности избежать их. Кроме того, в процессе создания дорожной карты могут возникнуть новые идеи по поводу привлечения внимания пользователей, более быстрого освоения международного рынка, эффективных стратегий развития и т. п. Да и вообще, работа по четкому плану всегда результативнее хаотичных метаний – меньше шансов что-то упустить и наделать ошибок. А для потенциальных инвесторов перспективное видение проекта облегчает принятие решения о вложении (или не вложении) в него средств.

How to Present Your Roadmap in 4 Steps

Creating and maintaining roadmaps takes a lot of effort and attention to detail. But all that hard work might go for naught if the presentation of the final product doesn’t go well. To make sure a roadmap is well received, product managers must lay the groundwork for success.

1. Know your audience

Beyond tailoring the roadmap to the titles and roles of the crowd, product teams should understand their motivations, concerns, and hot-button issues. If the presenter doesn’t proactively address them (either in the roadmap itself or in the commentary offered during the presentation), they’re likely to be brought up and put the presenter on the defensive. It’s best to get out ahead of those things as it speaks to preparation and keeps things from turning negative.

Even better is previewing the roadmap with crucial decision-makers ahead of time. Getting them onboard and addressing their potential quibbles before the formal presentation can smooth the path for approval and buy-in.

2. Focus on the narrative

Storytelling is an essential part of effective product management. There’s no opportunity more apt for tapping into your inner Mark Twain than during a roadmap presentation.

Providing context, anecdotes, sources of inspiration puts the audience at ease. It also demonstrates how much thought and consideration were invested in the process.

And if there’s a compelling narrative for how each new theme, feature, and epic unlocks new potential for users, all the better.

3. Stay high level

If a roadmap presentation is spending most of its time discussing individual features, things have already gone off the rails. The strategy, goals, and themes are the key messages to convey. Specific features are implementation details that shouldn’t matter to stakeholders. As long as a result is achieving objectives.

4. Add some metrics to the message

Everything in our data-driven world must be measurable, and roadmaps aren’t spared. The items on a roadmap should be improving the metrics the organization values and moving KPIs in a positive direction. When there’s a meaningful, measurable outcome for a particular initiative, it’s far easier to gain support than discussing vague and abstract endpoints.

Product Roadmap Examples: The Roadmap Depends on the Audience

Before setting out to build a roadmap, its audience must be identified — this way, you can tailor the content, focus, and presentation to their needs.

In an executive-facing roadmap, for example, the product vision is emphasized, along with its alignment with business goals. With a roadmap for engineers, however, there’s a stronger focus on specific features.

Here are four examples of roadmap constituencies, and the primary function the roadmap serves for them.

(Note: for these examples, we’ll assume your product is software, but the fundamentals of product roadmaps could apply equally if the product were physical or any other category of good or service.)

Internal roadmap for executives

For this audience, aim to secure buy-in for the product vision and to maintain support and enthusiasm throughout its development cycle.

These roadmaps should focus, therefore, on high-level strategic concepts — such as driving growth, new market penetration, customer satisfaction, or market position.

Although similar to executives, investors and board members also require their flavor of roadmap. The emphasis must be on how the planned work will increase the value of the product (and company). It should illustrate how enhancements move vital metrics that matter most to that cohort.

Internal roadmap for engineers

These roadmaps often focus on features, releases, sprints, and milestones. They’re typically more granular in scope and shorter in duration than executive-facing roadmaps. For those using agile development methods, these roadmaps are often at the epic or feature level. However, product goals and themes should still be a component of these roadmaps.

Engineering roadmaps should include as much granularity as possible. Even though developers will focus less on product vision and revenue potential, it’s smart practice to include relevant milestones and requirements other departments are facing. This way, developers understand specific deadlines and requirements.

Internal roadmap for sales

Sales teams will want to know how the product will help them sell more, so the focus here should be on a combination of features and customer benefits. Focus on how the product will benefit reps directly, as well as the user benefits they can communicate to their customers and prospects. Whenever possible, group similar features/items into themes that sales reps can discuss with prospects.

Use caution when sharing internal roadmaps with Sales. It is not uncommon for sales reps to share internal roadmaps with customers, as a way of closing a deal, generating interest and keeping leads warm. Avoid having sales teams committing a product to a specific release date, by excluding release or launch dates in these roadmaps.

External roadmap for customers and prospects

When designing a product roadmap for customers and prospects, the focus should be entirely on the product’s benefits to them. Because these are external documents, customer roadmaps should be visual, attractive, and easy to understand.

2. What is a Roadmap?

Simply put, a roadmap is a strategic planning technique that places a project’s goals and major deliverables (tasks, milestones) on a timeline, all grouped in a single visual representation or a graphic. You should always remember that a roadmap planner differs from a regular project plan in that it doesn’t contain all the details of a project; instead, it’s a high level, easy-to-understand, strategic tool.

A visual roadmap is extremely useful in high-level meetings with clients and executives because it helps you communicate with stakeholders, present your business strategy, and discuss major steps needed to implement it and move the project forward.

Release schedule¶

The schedule is aligned to produce roughly the same dates for each year given
our four monthly releases with LTRs in late february.

Beginning after 2.12 the development phase is always 12 weeks and the freeze
phase is at least 5 weeks. Remainders are used to extend the freeze phase of
LTR releases.

Point releases will happen every month on the latest release branch and the LTR
branch, if there are backports.

In the first four months after its release, a new LTR is also the current LR.
In this phase, the new LTR doesn’t replace the previous LTR in the LTR
repositories. This happens as soon as a new LR is released.

The 2.18 release will replace the 2.14 release as LTR, but not replace 2.14 in
the LTR package repositories before 3.0 is released.

This schedule is also available as “iCalendar”.

Schedule:

Event legend:

road

rəud noun
1. a strip of ground usually with a hard level surface for people, vehicles etc to travel on. pad طَريق път estrada cesta, silnice; silniční die Straße; Straßen-… vej; vej- δρόμοςcamino; carreera (maan)tee راه tie route; routierכביש सड़क cesta, kolnik (köz)út jalan vegur strada; stradale 道路 도로 kelias ceļš jalan wegvei, gatedroga لاره estrada drum дорога; дорожныи cesta; cestný cesta put gata, väg ถนน yol 道路 дорога, шлях سڑک đường giao thông 道路

2. (often abbreviated to Rd when written) used in the names of roads or streets. Weg إخْتِصار لِكَلِمَة: طريق улица rua třída die Straße vej; -vej; v. οδόςcalle tee, tänav خیابان tie Rteרחוב सड़क, राजपथ, राजमार्ग cesta út Jalan -vegur, –gata via ～通り 가(街) kelias, gatvė ceļš; iela nama jalan -weg -vei, –gate ulica سړک rua stradă; şosea улица trieda cesta put väg, gata ถนน … sokağı 路 дорога گزرگاہ phố 路

3. a route; the correct road(s) to follow in order to arrive somewhere. pad, roete طَريق، مَسْلَك път caminho směr, cesta der Weg vej διαδρομή, πορείαcamino tee مسیر؛ راه reitti route, cheminדרך मार्ग, सड़क, किसी का मार्ग या जाने का रास्ता put, ruta útvonal jalan leið, vegur strada 道順 진로 kelias ceļš; virziens laluan wegvei, rutedroga لاره ، مسیر caminho drum, rută направление cesta pot put väg เส้นทาง yol (正確)路線 шлях, маршрут راستہ tuyến đường 途径

4. a way that leads to something. op pad على طَريق السُّقوط والدَّمار път caminho cesta der Weg vej δρόμοςcamino tee راه؛ طریقه tie chemin דֶרֶך ל- पाने का उपाय या रास्ता, प्राप्ति का मार्ग put út jalan menuju leið strada, via ～への道 (…에의) 길, 방법 kelias ceļš laluan ke arah wegveidroga لاره ، طریقه caminho cale (spre) путь cesta pot put väg วิถีทาง yol 走向…的道路 шлях امن یا بربادی کا راستہ con đường dẫn tới 走向…的道路路

ˈroadblock noun a barrier put across a road (eg by the police) in order to stop or slow down traffic. padblokkade حاجِز طَريق барикада barricada zátaras, překážka die Straßensperre vejspærring οδόφραγμαcontrol policial teetõke سد راه؛ راه بند tiesulku barrage routierמחסום मार्ग-रोक zapreka (barikada) na cesti, pregrada i kontrolno mjesto na cesti útlezárás rintangan jalan vegartálmi blocco stradale 交通止め 노상 바리케이드 kelio užtvara ceļa aizšķēršļojums, barjera sekatan jalan raya wegversperringveisperringblokada د لاری خنډ ، بنده لاره barricada baraj rutier; punct de control (pe o şosea) заграждение zátarasa, prekážka (cestna) zapora zapreka na putu vägspärr สิ่งกีดขวาง barikat, yol engeli 路障 загородження на дорозі سڑک بند کرنا rào chắn 路障

4. IT roadmap template

Another frequent type of roadmap you may be creating is an IT roadmap, which is basically an overview of the way your organization uses IT systems to achieve its business goals. For example, an IT roadmap can show the strategic plan created to migrate your organization’s data or adopt a new tool.

You can include various IT initiatives like apps, internal processes, or new technologies and you can use color-coded swimlanes to represent each initiative or goal. You can use the IT roadmap to show current capabilities or the developments that are planned.

Here’s an example of an IT roadmap template that you can download and change the deliverables to make it work for you. There’s an Excel version and a PowerPoint one (with the help of the
Office Timeline Pro
add-in) so you can choose whichever suits you best.

Feature freeze¶

In the feature freeze phase, new features are not allowed in anymore and the
focus of everyone moves from enhancing QGIS to stabilizing it. This also turns
the nightly builds effectively into .

Users should start extensive testing of these prereleases in their
environment to verify that there are no issues, they wouldn’t want to see in
the upcoming release. All such issues should be reported
(see ).
Everything that goes unnoticed, will also end up in the next
release. Only in case of serious problems backports to a latest release will
occur. Therefore testing of the prereleases and reporting issues is very
important.

In the feature freeze, developers monitor the bugtracker and start working on
fixing the reported issues and update the visual changelog with the features
they added.

With the start of the feature freeze, the translation files will be updated so
that translators can start their work. Note that this might be an
incremental process as although the features are frozen, bug fixes might still
introduce translation string changes.

Two weeks before the release, a hard freeze is initiated after which only fixes
to severe problems and regressions introduced after the feature freeze are
allowed in.

Using the Right Tool

One reason so many entrepreneurs, product owners and other professionals responsible for driving large strategic projects mistake the roadmap for something else is that they have historically not had the proper tools.

As a result, they have defaulted to treating other forms of documentation fundamental to the process — a backlog, a project-management tracker, or a list of the features — as the roadmap itself. But as we have discussed here, these documents often fail to capture the key element: strategy.

For this reason, we recommend that for any strategic undertaking — whether overseeing the development of a product or updating your organization’s IT infrastructure — you use a purpose-built roadmap tool. The best of these tools are web-based and dynamic, and they can be created, updated and shared in minutes.

The project roadmap template

A project roadmap can be used by various departments across your organization—sales, customer success, admin, etc.

What’s a project roadmap?

It’s a roadmap that can be applied to a wide range of projects that involve multiple stakeholders and moving parts. It provides a high-level overview of a project’s objectives, initiatives and deliverables.

What’s the difference between a project roadmap and a project plan?

A project roadmap is different from a project plan. While a project plan tracks each and every tactical detail, a project roadmap instead provides an overview of the most important components and milestones (i.e. the big picture). It aligns teams on key milestones and keeps everyone on the right path.

To learn more about why a project roadmap is a good idea, what it should look like, and what it shouldn’t look like, check out this post.

The roadmunk template

Use the timeline view of our project roadmap to see key tasks and deadlines, and how your resources will be allocated over time.

<a href=»https://roadmunk.com/roadmap-templates/project-roadmap» target=»_blank rel=»noreferrer noopener»»>

And with our swimlane view, it’s easy to quickly visualize which tasks are complete, in progress or waiting in the backlog.

Business intelligence roadmap

For business intelligence (BI) teams wanting to maximize their effect on organizational decisions and growth, enlist in a business intelligence roadmap. Owned and operated by BI managers and their teams, this type of roadmap visualizes and communicates all aspects of BI including data mining and analysis to querying and reporting.

BI managers can use this roadmap to plan how their team can optimize internal business processes to be more efficient, which leads to better informed decisions by the business, which culminates in scaling. An added benefit of this roadmap is that it helps BI managers inform the rest of the organization and C-level executives about what BI is doing and how they plan on being a part of the business’ bigger picture.

In our template library we offer two views for your BI roadmap. The Timeline View allows BI teams to portray how their activities and initiatives will occur over the next months, quarters or years. With a focus on KPIs and major dates, this view allows BI teams to plan their initiatives to knock down these targets.

The Swimlane View of the BI roadmap hones in on the BI team’s higher-level goals versus the dates that they’re hitting. Assigning BI tasks to different business verticals like data governance, process improvement or architecture & infrastructure, this roadmap then organizes tasks based on BI goals like strategy, growth and efficiency.

Build your own business intelligence roadmap with our ready-to-use template (just like above ️).

3. Roadmap Examples and Free Roadmap Templates

Roadmaps are a flexible format for presenting strategic information, so there’s no industry standard we should follow. Each strategic initiative — from Marketing to, HR, Operations or IT — can adopt a different approach, but over time we’ve seen that most professionals use a roadmap creator to build one of these popular types of roadmaps below.

To help you save time, for each example we’ve built free templates in Excel and PowerPoint (using the

Office Timeline Pro

add-in) so you can get started right away.

A summary view that presents, at a high level, the vision behind your product strategy or offering.

A general overview of your project that’s used for stakeholder buy-in and communication.

A visual representation that helps you make strategic decisions regarding your technology investments.

A bird’s eye view that outlines how your organization uses IT systems to achieve its business goals.

A more general plan that presents the overall vision for your business strategy.

There are many ways you can use these roadmap examples to make better decisions around your strategic initiatives. Explore the
roadmap templates
page to discover which one fits you best, then download and customize them as you like. If you want to see other free templates we’ve created for you, check out our
timeline templates
and our
Gantt chart templates.

# Инструкции по использованию

Для составления плана развития

1. Скачайте себе карту с полной моделью тимлида.
2. Изучите описание всех веток обязанностей тимлида. Вычеркните те ветки, которые точно не применимы в вашей компании или уже выполняются другими людьми. Оставьте те, выполнение которых от вас ожидается, и те, которые вы хотите изучить.
3. Покажите полученный профиль коллегам, подчинённым или руководителю и соберите обратную связь – чего им не хватает с вашей стороны, или какие проблемы они видят.
4. Проведите самооценку с учётом собственного знания слабых сторон и полученной обратной связи, сопоставляя эти факты с примерами хорошего и плохого поведения в каждой ветке.
5. Составьте приоритизированный бэклог точек роста.
6. Начните прокачивать те ветки, которые помогают закрывать обозначенные точки роста, используя для этого советы и материалы из разделов «Практика» и «Теория», а также консультируясь в нашем чате.

Для знакомства с обязанностями тимлидов

1. Откройте кликабельную версию роадмапа.
2. Переходите на описание интересных вам веток. В базе знаний большинство из них разобраны детально – описание, мотивация к использованию, примеры хорошего и плохого поведения, способы прокачки.
3. Если появляется желание копнуть глубже, используйте секцию «Теория», чтобы перейти к сторонним материалам, раскрывающим эту ветку.

Для определения зоны ответственности в компании

1. Скачайте себе Mindmap с полной моделью тимлида.
2. Вместе с руководителем или другими заинтересованными лицами адаптируйте карту для своей ситуации – вычеркните лишние ветки, выполнения которых от вас не ожидается. Постарайтесь свести количество веток к минимуму и оставить там только те, которые действительно требуются, а не те, которые вам могут пригодиться только теоретически.
3. Используйте получившуюся карту для того, чтобы в будущем запрашивать обратную связь о своих результатах, отслеживать изменение области ответственности и начинать переговоры о повышении зарплаты, объяснять команде и заказчикам, за что вы отвечаете.

Для найма тимлидов

1. Скачайте себе Mindmap с полной моделью тимлида.
2. Оставьте только те ветки, выполнение которых будет обязательным для кандидата, успешно прошедшего интервью.
3. Составьте описание вакансии, которое будет включать в себя названия и описания веток из получившейся модели.
4. Составьте план интервью, в котором вы сможете проверить опыт кандидата в работе со всеми ветками. В этом могут помочь секции «Примеры поведения» и «Способы прокачки».

Советы по использованию

1. В зависимости от компании тимлиду нужно качать разные ветки и обязанности. Мы не считаем, что целью должно быть развитие во всех приведённых областях в роадмапе – в первую очередь нужно ориентироваться на проблемы и потребности своего места работы.
2. Всегда старайтесь подключать кого-то стороннего, чтобы получить обратную связь по вашей собственной модели компетенций. Это может быть руководитель, коллеги или даже сообщество из нашего Telegram-чата.
3. Используйте роадмап не только для себя, но и для других тимлидов в компании. Таким образом, вы все будете общаться на одном языке, и сможете чётко определить область ответственности друг друга.
4. Работа над роадмапом ещё в процессе. Мы будем очень рады вашему участию в проекте. Если вы готовы помочь и поделиться своим опытом – прочитайте инструкцию по быстрому старту. Не стесняйтесь публиковать Issue, закидывать свои pull request’ы и присоединяться к обсуждению в Telegram-чате.