97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know

Chapter 4. Building Effective Roadmaps

Travis Donia

Effective roadmaps help a cross-functional organization make deliberate choices about a product’s development. Whether you’re writing a roadmap or reading one, you have a stake in making sure the roadmap answers the questions on which you need stakeholders to provide consensus. Here are some questions that good roadmaps answer.

What Impact Will This Have on Users?

Outcomes are more important than outputs. When building a product roadmap, it helps to be explicit about the types of behavior that you intend to encourage. In Agile development, this intent is codified in user stories: As a [type of user], I want to [activity]. In other development methodologies, use cases perform a similar function. Regardless of how it works in your organization, the goal is the same: put the user first and speak to the behavioral impact that you want to create, not just the outputs that must be built.

How Will We Measure Impact?

It also helps to know how you will measure that impact—especially if your team will need to implement the metrics. Work with stakeholders to get consensus at the outset on how you’ll measure and have them ballpark the impact they expect a feature to have. Document your hypotheses. Prior to implementation, those estimates will provide a gut check for the roadmap—is this outcome realistic? Post-release, comparing the ...