Brian de Haaff* says a good roadmap presents a clear vision of what is intended to be achieved — it should never be treated as an ever-changing forecast.
Must-do vs. may-do. A teammate recently shared the system she uses for helping her kids manage schoolwork.
Each week they make a list of must-do tasks. After finishing their must-do, the kids can move on to a may-do list — bonus items for extra credit.
This got me thinking about must-do and may-do tasks at work.
As a project manager, you want to optimise your day for what will bring the most value to your clients and the organisation.
Your roadmap is the tool that helps you stay committed to must-do tasks.
Roadmaps are a promise to yourself, the organisation and the clients — keeping you accountable to the work that matters most.
Project roadmaps highlight the direction for the project and the work it will take to get there.
Some roadmaps communicate high-level themes, such as key initiatives or new areas of innovation.
Others focus on the timeline for delivering new features and the cross-functional work that needs to happen.
No matter how beautiful or well-structured, roadmaps represent a real plan that you should be committed to achieving.
It can rally the team around work that moves project goals and initiatives forward within a given time frame.
After all, what is the use of a roadmap if you do not follow its course?
I have heard plenty of project managers say this is not realistic.
A roadmap is merely a forecast — likely to change.
Development estimates inevitably go wrong; feature-creep happens; deadlines slip.
Adjustments beget readjustments and soon the roadmap becomes a collection of hazy predictions that you aim to reach but perpetually undershoot.
I do not want to suggest that plans cannot change. They can and must — especially when you are presented with or learn something entirely new.
Often the specific details of the features you are building will change. Or you need to be flexible when engineers are pulled to troubleshoot a tricky bug.
However, the overall strategy that you worked so hard to define should not be a moving target.
Clients feel the impact of a flimsy roadmap — even if you do not share a public version of it.
They want to know what is coming next. They notice whether you are responsive to their requests.
So yes, your roadmap is a promise. Looking at it like this forces you to reframe how you think about project planning.
This is real work that you are actively committed to. When you treat the roadmap like a promise, it changes how you deliver on it in these key ways.
You take strategy seriously
You start with a clear vision for what you want to achieve.
You make thoughtful decisions about product goals and initiatives — these are real objectives that can be measured and completed.
Strategic alignment prepares the team for what is ahead and lets everyone focus on the most important work.
You plan with conviction
You connect goals to initiatives, features, and detailed tasks and capture it on the roadmap to show just how impactful strategy is.
You make a real effort to improve capacity planning and compare actual time against your initial estimates.
When new ideas come up, you make space for them while staying committed to what you are building right now.
You honour dates
Deliverable dates and deadlines are not arbitrary.
Rather than seeing dates as a constraint, you recognise that the best releases happen when the team has clear objectives and alignment across the organisation.
This happens when you take a targeted approach and stick to a timeline.
You create excellence
Your roadmap is a reflection of the organisation and the team.
Real people, clients and internal colleagues alike, depend on you to deliver what you say you will.
It is your responsibility to push the team to do its best work. Letting things slip because “it is what it is” is really not an option.
You drive joy
Most of us have been on teams with over-bloated plans that are impossible to achieve.
You either race to keep up (unsuccessfully) or develop an armour of apathy.
Either way, it can be demoralising.
When your roadmap is a promise capable of being kept, the team stays fully engaged.
It pours its energy into bringing joy to clients, and it has more fun doing it.
Keeping your commitments matters — it is how you create value.
No one wants to feel like their plans are not taken seriously, but that is what happens when you and the team do not deliver against them.
Once you reframe your roadmap as a promise you will be more committed.
A roadmap should be a powerful tool that signals what value will be created and when.
Is your roadmap a prediction or a promise?
*Brian de Haaff is the Chief Executive of cloud-based software company Aha! He can be contacted on Twitter @bdehaaff.
This article first appeared on the Aha! company website.
