Technology Roadmapping Update

Depending on how you found this site, you may or may not be wondering what roadmapping is. Let me break it down for you. You know how whenever you’re planning to take a long trip in the car to a place you’ve never been before, you pretty much have to have a map? Without that map, you would almost certainly get lost, or at least, take a lot longer than you should to get to your destination. Now imagine how important that map would be if you were trying to find a way to get 50 teams of 50 people each to all meet up at a destination that none of them had ever been to before and the future of your company depends on the success of that operation.

Well, that’s what enterprise-scale product planning is like today and that’s why roadmapping has become an important part of many companies’ planning processes. With a carefully constructed product and technology roadmap, you can be sure that, at least as of today, you know where you’re headed and how you intend to get there. Now you may be thinking here that there are a LOT of existing processes that help manage product and technology planning such as Portfolio Management, Stage Gate, Balanced Scorecard and so on. How is roadmapping different from these other well established disciplines?

The answer is that a roadmap looks at your plans, from which markets you want to be in, and which products you will sell into those markets, down to which technologies you will be building/buying in order to offer those products — expressed on a time line. In other words, most all other well-developed planning and management processes allow you to understand how your many many products and R&D efforts compare but they ignore the element of time. Also, they tend to be focused on “what we are doing”, as opposed to “what are we going to be doing”. In other words, they focus on today, not tomorrow.

So, portfolio management software vendors claims to the contrary, most of the time, their tools are used to compare projects that you’ve already decided to fund, right? Project Management is completely operational, of course. That’s why roadmapping fills a niche that’s really not otherwise covered today. A mature, well-developed roadmapping process, with (I hate to say it but) cross-functional participation and cooperation, allows you to start planning even further out into time than you could otherwise. It gives you as firm a basis as is possible on which to start defining your future, today.

In the next installment in this series, I will talk about the history of roadmapping and how it is used today by companies like Motorola, Corning, Boeing and others. Thanks for reading this far. Please please please provide any feedback you like on where you’d like to see this conversation go next.

Lastly, if you’re a person who loves details and wants them now, you might find reading the Technology Roadmapping page at Wikipedia to your liking.