Strategic Roadmap

What is a strategic roadmap?

For product managers, the strategic roadmap is a source of big-picture insight and alignment that other tools simply can’t deliver. The strategic roadmap delivers benefits such as greater focus (goodbye, scope creep!), user-centric development, increased efficiency, and better team-wide communication.

Sharing your strategic roadmap is essential if you want to keep all stakeholders working toward the same high-level goal. The airfocus tool for strategic roadmaps makes it easy to share and update strategic roadmaps as needed.

The strategic roadmap is just one type of roadmap that product teams use (or should use) on a regular basis. Other roadmap formats include:

• Product roadmap

• OKR roadmap

• Feature-less roadmap

• Tactical roadmap

Let’s take a look at the difference between strategic vs tactical roadmaps and strategic vs product roadmap in a bit more detail…

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Difference between strategic vs tactical roadmap

Tactics and strategies. Strategies and tactics. Is there a difference?

When it comes to roadmaps, there definitely is.

A strategic roadmap:

• Maps out the long-term and high-level goals of a business

• Contains more general objectives versus specific ones

• Is reviewed every half or quarter year.

The tactical roadmap on the other hand:

• Is created after the strategic roadmap is in place

• Outlines the specific steps required to work toward the strategic business goals

• Typically takes a shorter-term view and is reviewed more frequently.

Essentially, tactics are the actions you take to achieve your overall strategy.

Difference between strategic vs product roadmap

Now let’s look at the difference between a strategic vs product roadmap — as well as what the strategic product roadmap is.

As product managers, you’ll no doubt be with the product roadmap. A product roadmap directs a product's course throughout time. It conveys what teams are building and why, and who is needed when. It serves as both a high-level summary and an actionable plan, but rather than supporting a company’s overall goals, it’s designed on a product level instead.

A strategic product roadmap is something of an in between — it’s a more in-depth document that outlines the philosophy or vision driving your product and directs the course you take for the duration of the project. It describes what you are building, why you are creating it, who is needed when, and how the end-user will benefit from it. 

In order to remain focused on creating a user-centric product, creating a strategic product roadmap is essential. Try out the airfocus for strategic roadmaps to make your product development more robust today.

How to create a strategic roadmap step-by-step

You can make building a strategic roadmap easier by breaking the creation process down into manageable steps. This will also help you and your team better understand what is required to reach the final product. 

1. List your challenges

Determine why you’re pursuing this task. What are the challenges you’re trying to solve with your strategic vision or goals? Have a good discussion with your team and take customer feedback into consideration when building your list of challenges.

2. Set your objectives

Lay out the tasks you need to complete in order to address your list of challenges. Linking each objective to a challenge on the list will help narrow the project scope and avoid distractions. 

3. Assess your resources 

Now you know what needs to be done, you need to figure out how you can achieve your goals with the resources you have available. During this step, you may find that your current resources aren’t matching the needs of your objectives. If this happens, you can use change indicators to show what is required for each objective. Change indicators are usually represented as:

• N: No change

• L, M, H: Low, medium, or high-level change

• New: New resources are required

4. Define needed actions

What activities are required to achieve the objectives? You can also look at assigning actions to team members at this stage. 

5. Group related actions 

Identify any dependencies and group those activities. This will make it easier to assign tasks and track progress.

6. Add all this information to your roadmap

All that’s left now is to place everything onto your roadmap and get to work!

How to incorporate OKRs in strategic roadmap creation and implementation

OKRs are incredibly useful even at the roadmap stage. Combining OKRs with your strategic roadmap will allow product managers to ensure their team is working on goals that align with the overall business objectives. Incorporating OKRs into your roadmap may seem odd at first, but the trick is to focus on outcomes. You can use OKRs to set specific objectives for each development phase during the project. The objectives need to be measurable and aligned with the overall business goals. For example, your objective could be to build a new feature that can increase new users by 20% over a 6 month period. 

Product managers can break down objectives into more manageable tasks by including OKRs on the roadmap. This will help with prioritization efforts while enabling easy re-prioritization down the line. You should hold regular meetings to assess progress on both the roadmap and the OKRs. Performing these review sessions will identify any roadblocks early on and allow PMs to address any issues before they become too problematic.

Outcome-based roadmaps are a great tool to help align your strategic roadmap. An outcome-based roadmap helps teams outline the potential scenarios for the product. This helps with communication and collaboration, and linking the two roadmaps can provide an easy way to see how the product will directly affect business objectives. 

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Leveraging
Product Strategy

Read now