Business roadmap template

What is a business roadmap?

A business roadmap enables you to plan and communicate your business strategy and vision. 

Are you a new startup? Then now is just the right time to start building your business roadmap! And it couldn’t be quicker or easier to get started than with the airfocus business roadmap template.

Visualizing mapping your goals and how to achieve them keeps your stakeholders aligned, and when your team is all aligned and pushing towards the same goal, your business will get further, faster. 

What’s more, the powerful prioritization system inherent in most business roadmap templates helps you to avoid expensive mistakes and decide which projects should make it to your to-do list.

What are the benefits of a business roadmap?

It’s not just startups that can benefit from using a business roadmap, organizations of all sizes can use a business roadmap template to:

• Be crystal clear on which actions need to be taken to transform abstract company visions into reality

• Create well-defined timelines and give an idea of where the MVP will be in a couple of weeks, months, days, etc. 

• Cater to the needs of each department specifically: marketing, product development, management, and so on can all see the information that’s relevant to them. For example, a business development roadmap will outline strategic expansion efforts with linked sections: partnerships, sales channels, market shift. And the business intelligence roadmap will focus on tracking operations. Using a business roadmap template like ours makes adjusting these various views simple and easy.

Why use a business roadmap instead of a business plan?

It doesn’t need to be a case of business roadmap vs business plan. It’s simply a matter of what you need to get from the document and who you are creating it for. 

Let’s take a look at the major differences:

1. The volume. A business plan is usually a very comprehensive document. Even when it’s as concise as it can be, it still has to cover a lot of data that can’t be reduced. A business roadmap, on the other hand, is presented as a timeline that visualizes individual aspects of the business plan in swimlanes. To see swimlanes in action, check out our business roadmap template.

2. Components. Business plans typically include an executive summary, products and services, market, marketing strategy, acquisition strategy, financials and budget. Business roadmaps usually include goals, initiatives, milestones, dependencies (this is not an ironclad set of elements, of course — if you use our business roadmap template, you can add or remove whatever you want!)

3. Audience. A business plan is aimed at internal executives, senior leaders, and some other stakeholders. Meanwhile, the business roadmap is targeting a functional team to inform them about the overall planning efforts.

How do you create a business roadmap using the airfocus template?

1. Try the business roadmap template here — everything is already sketched out for you there.

2. Set your specific goals. What revenue do you plan to get, who you need to hire, etc.

3. Add in the data. Now’s the time to feed in everything you received from the upper management, web analytics and other resources. 

4. Prioritize your initiatives. Decide what is the most important for today. Our business roadmap template has a custom prioritization framework for you to use!

5. Specify the time frames. Certain dates for each goal are preferable.

6. Share with the team and get started.

The airfocus business roadmap template includes:

• A ready-to-use timeline view

• A backlog with a custom prioritization framework

• A 4x4 priority chart to visualize your low-hanging fruits and don’t dos

Get started with it today!