Business management

What Is a Roadmap and How Can It Help Your Business

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The roadmap is a sample of how a product will address market needs and business objectives over a period of time.

Also known as hoja de ruta in Spanish, it focuses on the product and the description of the product strategy.

It is used as a reference by agile development teams, where they define a list of features/functionalities that are implemented by specific dates.

A roadmap is a development plan.

They are often presented with a timeline, albeit with large segments (quarter, years, etc.).

Some terms that are applied when implementing it, could be for example:

We are working on this right now,
The next one is not less than 6 months from now and up to 18 months from now,
Later than 18 months,
The time frame of the roadmap itself depends on the company, the product, the market, etc.

For example, given longer cycles, the roadmap for a CRM such as efficy, will be a decade with annual updates and perhaps a major update/redesign of the tool during that period of time. As time moves on the roadmap, it is also done in a specific way.

For example, we know exactly what we are working on now, we have a rough idea of what we are going to do next, and we are still investigating ideas for the next time slot.

The following diagram shows what the roadmap looks like for a business/product and their respective launches:

Business Objectives are defined as the goals, e.g. revenue growth, customer acquisition, market expansion, etc.

The Business Strategy shows how these goals will be achieved. This can be taken to mean revenue growth would come from geographic expansion or from partner-driven profits in regions where you do not have a presence.

An example could be to increase revenue by 50%, reduce staff turnover, increase user participation, etc.

The Product Strategy (as in the Business Strategy) takes into consideration the above mentioned objectives.

This part includes working with partners, price adjustments, new packages, licensing, product enhancements, etc. And so we come to the roadmap where the focus is on the description of the strategy.

For example, it is about what is going to be done with the product to help achieve the product's objectives.

Let's go back to the efficy example: The roadmap for 2022 is to focus on new customers in Latin America and Europe, thus offering multilingual support, with a much more global marketing strategy.

It is important that a roadmap includes important elements that support the above strategies and objectives.

Of course, it will not incorporate every single feature that may be added in the future, i.e. which ones are most important to the business and require significant investment or potentially have significant risk (technical, commercial, time, resource, etc.) associated with them.

Implement your roadmap in your CRM.

With the Project Module in efficy you can be more productive when managing any plan or negotiation you have.

In addition, you can: >> Connect all your teams in one place (sales, marketing, human resources, etc),

You can manage any document related to any of your projects, and you have a real-time view of each project, allowing you to make strategic decisions that benefit your business.

Why don't you give it a try?

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