4 Useful Tips to Creating an Ideal Strategy-Based Roadmap

Today, every business has to perform in a fiercely competitive marketplace in order to be on the top. It seems easy but in reality, it's a challenging task. For achieving this, every entrepreneur has to prepare a time-based plan which can help them to attain their long-term goals.

This is where strategic roadmapping comes into the picture. It is a comprehensive plan that allows your team to evolve by describing the value every member can add to the business. Let's take a look at the four major tips that can help you in developing the best product strategy roadmap for your enterprise.

1. Be Very Specific with Your Vision & Objectives

First of all, you need to clearly define what are your business goals and main objectives? You should act as a guide to your team and make sure that everyone is on the same page. Also, it's your duty to provide the team with your company’s vision and product strategies before beginning each presentation. It can be a tedious task but it's extremely important to encourage employees.

In addition, you have to find out a specific product strategy by explicitly mentioning who are your target customers? What pain points will it solve for them? and how your product is unique in comparison to other similar ones available in the market. Also, it's mandatory to consider the target users' goals when preparing the final version of your roadmap.

2. Narrate It in The Form Of An Engaging Story

The roadmap is not essentially the list of the features that your product is going to offer to the target customers. But it should flow effortlessly and tell the story around your product in a captivating manner.

For weaving an engaging story, you can divide the entire roadmap into different themes. With the help of these themes, it will be much easier for you to describe the value of your product in front of customers and other stakeholders.

In addition, themes can be used to showcase what your team will deliver ultimately. It will help your marketing professionals to build stories for acquiring and retaining more customers in the long-run. You should also share your roadmap based on themes with the stakeholders. This will allow them to get an idea of the value of your organization and its employees.

How To Create Perfect Themes For Your Roadmap?

1. A) You should not use too many or too fewer themes, but try to balance it in between. Try to keep it as simple and concise as possible. It will let you capture the real essence and the goals at the high-level. You can include details such as mock-ups in your backlog.
2. B) Make sure to involve the stakeholders in the theme identification stage of your roadmapping. You can do this by identifying the core aspects of your product's experience such as onboarding. Also, it's extremely beneficial to let professionals from the customer success team participate in this process so that they can spot pain points easily.
3. C) It's mandatory that your themes should be directly related to the outcomes. For example, identify the KPIs you want to measure. Suppose you analyse the Net Promoter Score to measure success in such a case find out whether you can relate one or more themes to the same?
4. D) By evaluating the KPIs and themes, you can coordinate with your team to work on discovering the tactics. Basically, here you have to cautiously list all the actions that you want your team members to take, implement, and track. It's highly advisable to determine who is going to do what and by when?
5. E) Lastly, make sure to describe each of your themes so that to avoid any misunderstanding. For doing this, you need to provide the stakeholders and other people associated with the product with a brief of what you mean by that particular theme and what you want to mention.

3. Pay Attention To Problems & Not The Solutions

For preparing an ideal roadmap that has the potential to let you realize your long-term goals, it's essential for you to focus on the major problems you want to solve and why. Involve UX designers and engineering at this stage. They can help in identifying the ways in which these problems can be solved. Ultimately, you and your entire team will be able to build a product that is loved by your customers.

4. Try To Provide Each Strategy With A Swim Lane Of Its Own

When you are done with identifying the major vision and strategies the next step that you have to take is that create a swimlane for each one of these individually. This will allow you to present your core strategies in an efficient manner to the stakeholders and targeted customers. Also, you will be able to come up with a time-based model in which you can accomplish every strategy effectively to fulfil your objectives.

These are the four major steps you need to take for creating a strategy based product roadmap. Apart from building this, it's equally important for you to lead your team properly in the situations where they are ambiguous or confused. It's your duty to act as an anchor that holds the entire team together no matter what problems are coming over the horizon. It's a good idea to focus on the bigger picture and ensure that your team is following your footsteps so that to cherish success in the end.

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