October 2021

Executives and cross-functional teams can easily understand the overall direction and strategy across the IT department, and how projects relate to one another. IT teams support the day-to-day work of nearly everyone in the organization — it is a huge responsibility. It means managing more requests for improvement than you can realistically deliver on. And it requires a deep understanding of what your users need, beyond what they ask for.

Product managers work with internal teams and stakeholders to build a crystal-clear roadmap that clearly communicates deliverables and the expectations for where the product is going and why. This is why many teams use purpose-built roadmap software like Aha! Instead of constantly updating your roadmap or worrying about version control, you can quickly create, customize, and share beautiful views of your strategic plans.

Simply put, a strategy roadmap communicates your organization’s vision. Usually championed by senior-level stakeholders, strategy roadmaps focus on mission-critical business objectives, and usually emphasize long-term timelines and deadlines. Unlike product roadmaps, which often show which features and initiatives will be executed in the short-term, strategic roadmaps illustrate the long game. One of the most popular types of roadmaps is the product roadmap, and they’re instrumental to product management (it’s why we have an entire library of resources for product managers). Product roadmaps provide a crystal clear way for product teams to visualize how their product will evolve over time.

Roadmaps allow all involved parties to evaluate the competitiveness of a strategy, raise issues and reveal gaps, correctly prioritize resource allocation, and set realistic targets based on market data. They provide the framework for interdepartmental collaboration. Without roadmaps, every venture is a journey into the unknown and the risk of project failure grows higher.

This way, they can adjust and improve any technology glitches. Features are the new or updated functionalities that teams make to the product. These features will add value to your product and give better results to your target audiences. Your theme is a broad strategic view of your product that your team must fulfill by the end of the product deadline. A roadmap is a guiding tool that provides visibility into the project without revealing the tasks in detail. “Next” refers to the team’s medium-term features, which they will focus on in a few weeks.

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Because so many organizations have many different, intersecting technologies, maintaining the entire system requires knowing all of the ins and outs. An IT roadmap provides the perfect overview, keeping new and old team members on top of their responsibilities. Both a timeline and swimlane visualization are available with Roadmunk.

• A technology roadmap, also called an IT roadmap, is a tool to visualize how IT will evolve to support the business and its core products.
• It can be useful to add status labels, category tags, and other indicators that will help the team draw conclusions about progress and the balance of work.
• Developing a clear and concise roadmap is key to keeping employees focused and motivated.
• An agile roadmap shows major themes of work in a general timeline.
• This can only be accomplished if the entire team understands the product’s role in its development.
• The term epic refers to a significantuser story that cannot be fulfilled within one release.

Multiple features, sometimes known as epics, are delivered simultaneously in a release. Asuccessful product takes a great deal of effort to develop and maintain. This process involves balancing the product’s strategic aims with the needs of its end users and internal stakeholders. The role of a product managers and their responsibilities can vary greatly depending on the size of the organization of which they are part. Let’s assume you want to customize this technology roadmap template to make it a little more ‘you’. The first thing to do is to begin adding any outstanding tasks or trackable events using the ‘Add item’ button at the top.

Decide on a timeframe

This intuitive tool helps you automatically generate clear, stylish roadmaps as PowerPoint slides that you can quickly update as often as necessary and share or present in meetings. Simple roadmap showing the trial phases and key milestones in a drug approval process. Coordination – in large or complex projects, a roadmap enhances collaboration between multiple participants within an organization as it can help track dependencies and identify bottlenecks. To better understand the role of a roadmap, let us review what this strategic tool is and is not.

Join 185,000+ monthly readers learning how to drive software adoption by signing up to receive the latest best practices and resources. — allocate what is an IT roadmap slightly more resources than you think you might need, as there surely will be unexpected issues you’ll need to spend time and money to deal with.

When you have a clear view of your current strategy, you have more space to launch new strategic initiatives. Having your IT projects organized, it’s easier to identify what you’re missing to reach your company’s broader strategic goals and prioritize initiatives accordingly. An engineering IT roadmap is a technical plan outlining a long-term vision for developing software or physical products. In simple terms, it’s a summary of milestones and goals engineering teams need to reach before they complete the development process.

Timeline IT Roadmap

They can make educated guesses, but guesses can’t strategize for a company’s future. Your IT roadmap is a “living document”—it will change as your organizational needs and goals change. The goal is to revisit this document quarterly to ensure all recommendations are aligned with short- and long-term objectives. Your IT provider will want to know how your business plans to expand—how many people, new locations, etc.—to create IT goals that align with those future needs.

There are also a lot of templates you can build your projects on. An IT infrastructure roadmap allows you to plan big changes in your tech stack and prevents infrastructural failures as you’re undergoing digital transformation. Any company needs to perform digital transformation at some point – you can’t keep your software stack fixed. If you’re about to go through IT infrastructure https://globalcloudteam.com/ enhancement, you’ll need a roadmap similar to the one we’re providing below. You can’t create a complete project plan from start to finish without knowing what roadblocks you’re going to face on your way. As such, your IT team or operations managers should define measurable, time-bound goals that you’ll need to reach to get closer to your bigger objective.

The best way to uncover user problems is to conduct user interviews. Building a product roadmap requires a clear understanding of your objectives. Similar in nature to a product backlog, but on a more macro scale, a development roadmap can be a huge asset to product owners or managers. We’ll see some technology roadmap examples a little later in this guide, but for now, let’s start with the basics. Now that you’re familiar with what technology roadmaps are and just how wide-ranging their use-cases can be, let’s dig a little deeper.

In short, it says where you are and where you plan on going within the next few years. There are several different types of roadmaps depending on what area you want to chart a course for. How to Create A Roadmap That Helps You Say No Technology roadmaps templates can assist your IT department in determining what features and products to prioritize. 3 Tips to Persuading IT Management to Support a Digital Transformation Product leaders who can get IT to support a digital transformation have the opportunity to better accelerate this transition.

Releases and milestones – stating when work will start and be delivered. Accountability – sharing what needs to be delivered and when, a roadmap makes it easier for everyone to follow through on the plan. Roadmaps are flow diagrams that will show the relation between your tasks and milestones. A goal-oriented map will indicate whether the product can fulfill its promises. The goals explain the rationale behind each feature and help structure the information logically. Maps of this type are intended to illustrate the relative importance of tasks, features, and sprints.

Features roadmap

Companies utilize various technologies to support their employees. The collection of these systems and technologies are often complex and resource-intensive. Therefore, the overall infrastructure must be planned and implemented in an organized manner. Another benefit of having every aspect of your technical environment documented on paper is that you can see what’s working and what’s not.

You need to evaluate an effective roadmapping tool to help you… This is why a strong product roadmap requires a clear and concise strategic rationale for including any feature or epic. If a product manager cannot persuasively make a case for including a feature, she should not include it at all. A backlog is essentially a to-do list of the tasks required to complete a strategic initiative, ideally arranged according to priority. Roadmap planning is often the process of creating a high-level strategy out of a collection of backlog tasks and ideas.

Why is a roadmap important?

This could be a useful roadmap for a department-wide meeting when you want to connect each release or version within a project to an important business objective. Vision – include information about the product’s business model, goals, personas, and competitors to place your strategic plans in the context of the broader product strategy and direction. IT roadmapping software can help you manage projects, releases, and changes. It lays out your long-term goals, the core initiatives you will invest in, and the timing of the work you will deliver. Product roadmap software helps them convey the visions and o objectives of the product to the teams. They can also share the relation of these product visions with the company’s bigger picture and other team members.

Whatever symbols you choose, make sure they are consistent so that your audience can decode them. A variety of professional, stand-alone templates that you can instantly customize into your own beautiful roadmap. Features – showing the efforts that are prioritized based on their overall value.

”, a roadmap clarifies strategic goals and how the involved work is linked to the overall strategy. These become the epics, features, and user stories that will help you deliver on the initiatives. Eventually, you will organize this work into releases and deliver it incrementally. You can adjust them to your IT workflows, methodologies, and teams. For instance, you might have a portfolio roadmap for the entire department that highlights work across each function. Smaller teams — architecture, operations, engineering, and so forth — can benefit from creating their own roadmaps as well.

Choosing the right technology roadmap software

As a high-level plan for how you will accomplish your goals, a roadmap helps you picture the work that needs to be done along with a corresponding schedule. By specifically listing out your company’s technology projects and objectives, you and your IT team can more easily identify technical goals that align with your organization’s overall setup. It’s much harder to identify attainable initiatives when you aren’t looking at the whole picture. By putting everything down onto paper, you can clearly see where your company will benefit the most, what the best short-term goals are, and what goals may take longer to reach.

What Is an IT Roadmap? (+Benefits, Examples, Tools)

With an overview of their strategic responsibilities to the company, your IT department and operations managers will be more likely to follow established processes and achieve consistent results. This article takes a look at a few of the different types of roadmaps and provides some samples that you can leverage in your own strategic planning initiatives. In the example below, each functional group — infrastructure, architecture, services, and DevOps — has a set of initiatives that correspond to team-level goals. Portfolio roadmaps display work across different groups or projects. Viewing the entire team’s initiatives on a single roadmap paints a picture of the department as a whole.

It is meant to help provide you with the direction needed to navigate through muddy waters and help you achieve your overarching business goals. It is a guide that can be adjusted in real-time and as business conditions change, it provides a structure in which to manage those changes, not restrict them or hinder your success. Hopefully, the work that your teams do every day is aligned around creating an impact on those goals the company has defined at the start of the quarter, month, or year.