Technology Roadmapping Update

The Product Strategy Network seems to be a group with the right idea. This page has tips you can use to guide your organization’s roadmapping practice, whether you’re just starting to think about it or have been in the trenches for years already. I agree with everything written here except:

…the product roadmapping process a company uses can be as important to its business as the roadmap itself
The process is actually the most important part. The roadmap generated by the process is useful but much less so though than the benefits your group receives from the collaboration and communication roadmapping can facilitate.

Secure staff buy-in to the roadmap through participation rather than relying on top-down enforcement to achieve compliance.
While I agree that no initiative can be totally driven from the top-down, in my experience you need more than buy-in from the people on whom the roadmap’s content will depend. A job requirement, including making the successful completion of a roadmap part of each participant’s annual review, is usually also a good idea. Absent that, it is inevitable that the other priorities that are required and evaluated at review time will take precedent. This is obviously not appropriate for every member of the group, but for key stakeholders and those chosen to maintain and manage the roadmaps and the process surrounding them.

If your company is young or creating a new, innovative product, roadmap updates can be as frequently as once a week.
Actually, in my opinion, it is the young innovative company that really doesn’t need a roadmap. They need to be fast, agile and willing to change and making everyone sit through frequent planning meetings would be really bad. I’m not saying long-term planning is bad for these types of operations, but I do believe too much planning could stifle the creativity and innovation they’re supposed to be pushing for.

Also, if the entire group of participants involved will be less than 20 or so people, I’d even question the need for an internally facing roadmap. We usually consider 20 + as the minimum number of people to be involved for a roadmapping process to make sense. Any fewer and they are probably going to be able to manage the planning and communication that roadmapping offers with simple tools and the water cooler network.

As I wrote above, everything else I read here is good advice. Read the other articles and check out their workshops for more on the PSN. In the spirit of good disclosure, I am not affiliated with them and have never directly tried their services. I don’t even know anyone there, yet.