You will reduce cross-team confusion and increase clarity by publishing your roadmap right now.
Creative people are notorious for not sharing their work because “it’s not ready yet”. For product managers, they are typically referring to their roadmap. It’s difficult to ship something that you don’t think is perfect – especially when it’s the strategic plan for your squad.
I’m guilty of it, too. It’s a little daunting to think that you will be held to your roadmap. What if it changes? What if we don’t actually get to that work in the second quarter? What if someone doesn’t agree with the order?
But having a roadmap publicly available, regardless of “finished state”, fosters communication and makes it possible for other teams to begin aligning with you – which is a great thing for your product.
How will sharing your roadmap doc help other teams today?
- You drop your roadmap doc in another team’s Slack channel. That team notices that you’re not planning on addressing Feature Z until way later than they were expecting it, so they start a conversation with you.
- You have a 1:1 with your customer support manager about your mid-term roadmap plans. He sees that Feature X is scheduled for later this year, so he instructs the front lines to tell customers that it’s coming later this year. (or better yet, your CSM works with you to campaign for higher priority in your backlog!)
- A PM from another team is surfing Confluence late at night and notices that User Narrative Y is not being addressed on your roadmap, so they tackle it themselves
Without a roadmap, all of these cases end in team mis-alignment, confusion and false assumptions.
Ready to publish your roadmap? Things to remember:
- The content is more important than the format. Get something out there today and format it tomorrow. Here’s my roadmap template that you can copy if you don’t even want to think about format.
- If it’s not discoverable, it’s might as well not exist. Share it wide and share it proud. Drop the link in some Slack channels. Create a video and include it in next week’s Product Update Videos. Link to it from your team’s wiki.
- Your roadmap is almost always a little out of date. Everyone knows it. That’s fine. No PM is going to “hold you to your roadmap” if you’re pro-active about communicating changes to the effected parties. You should always do your best to keep this document as fresh as possible, but I would suggest updating the doc live in your grooming/strategy meetings and choosing “save and notify watchers” when you do make a change.
Go ahead, pull the trigger. Whether it’s Confluence, Trello, JIRA or an Excel spreadsheet, write out your roadmap and start sharing it around. You’ll be amazed how quickly things come into focus.