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Nine business roadmap examples for scaling your organization

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Business roadmaps can take on countless forms—depending on the business function the roadmapper is in charge of.

To help narrow the scope for any business planning its own growth, we’ve outlined 9 business roadmap examples below that are aimed at organizations looking to scale. ( Btw, all of these roadmaps are available in our roadmap template library, which you can check out here! )

We’ll also be offering examples of each type of business roadmap that fall under two general formats: timeline roadmaps (roadmaps planned with specific dates in mind) and swimlane roadmaps .

Timeline-view roadmaps are, as the name suggests, roadmaps that lay out a specific timeline for a plan or strategy. These roadmaps usually highlight time-based elements per each initiative on the roadmap (like milestones, key dates, and dependencies). Swimlane-view roadmaps, on the other hand, offer fuzzier “buckets” of time for initiatives on the roadmap like backlog / in progress / completed.

Searching for the right tool for your roadmapping needs? Let our roadmap tool guide help you.

1. business roadmap.

For a company that needs a flexible document that effectively presents key business goals, dates, and plans of action relevant to all stakeholders.

What’s a business roadmap?

A business roadmap is a visualization of your company’s major objectives and strategies. Stakeholders use business roadmaps to illustrate initiatives and deadlines happening in different departments.

Like a business plan, a roadmap gives the long view of where your organization is going and how it will get there. For businesses to succeed, stakeholders need a shared understanding of the big picture. Business roadmaps knock down silos between teams and provide a clear vision of the future.

For a more detailed breakdown of what a business roadmap is and isn’t, check out our guide: What’s a Business Roadmap?

Business roadmap examples

This view also lets teams see how their work is contributing to efforts to grow the business, which in turn can help businesses see and squash any silos between departments and stakeholders.

For businesses that aren’t ready to allocate specific timeframes to every single initiative on their roadmap, that’s where a swimlane-view works really well. By showing each department’s individual projects and strategies, you can have swimlanes dedicated to each team and then organize items by any timeframe.

Think of this type of roadmap as a snapshot of each team’s primary objectives for certain periods of time. Someone should be able to look at this roadmap and quickly understand what each team is trying to achieve in each timeframe.

Align all your stakeholders around the business goals that matter using our business roadmap template .

2. Strategic roadmap

For companies with a strong vision that need a visual blueprint to stay on top of the goals that matter the most to the business.

What is a strategic roadmap?

Simply put, a strategic roadmap communicates your business’ vision. Outlining the steps to achieve your mission, a business roadmap hinges on long-term objectives and deadlines. The keyword here is long-term. That means it doesn’t include product features and short-term wins; this roadmap is reserved for overarching goals like fundraising rounds and MRR targets.

Generally owned by senior-level stakeholders, this roadmap should be accessible to every employee (not to edit per se, but to view). By granting this access, you align your individual departments on your plans to grow the business and you encourage teams to develop projects that contribute directly to said growth.

Strategic roadmap examples

For organizations planning their business growth strategy over the next few months, quarters, or years, a timeline-view of the strategic roadmap works really well. Businesses can use this time-based view of a business roadmap to track key initiatives and milestones that each of your departments will undertake to contribute to the overall mission.

A swimlane-view of the roadmap is perfect for businesses that are less strict about the “when” of their strategic planning. This roadmap assigns each team an individual swimlane and organizes their respective strategic initiatives by status. This way, any stakeholder can quickly glance and know what strategic project is upcoming, in progress, or completed.

Plan to achieve your big vision with our ready-to-use strategic roadmap template .

3. Startup roadmap

For early-stage companies that need a way to communicate and align on what to build first, in what order, and how to deliver it.

What’s a startup roadmap?

While a business roadmap can be adapted for any size organization, the common roadmap template might not be as applicable if you don't have many teams or resources. That’s why we suggest a startup roadmap for businesses still finding their footing.

A startup roadmap helps smaller businesses plan how they’ll hit the ground running and then scale to a much larger size. Because starting your own business is very much a roller coaster of an experience, a startup roadmap helps bring some clarity to the messy and experimental process.

Startups tend not to be heavily process-oriented. As a result, startup roadmaps lean more on the high-level and flexible side, so as to adapt quickly to the often chaotic startup environment. The roadmap is a small business’ way of zooming in on its end goal (hint: business growth) and mapping out a feasible plan to achieve said goal.

Startup roadmap examples

The truth is, as a startup, you’re probably not too strict about timelines. So, that’s where a swimlane-view of the startup roadmap is most useful. For startups that just aren’t as confident (or trusting) of their timelines, apply a Swimlane View for your business where the focus is on the status of the project, not when it’s getting pushed out.

Startups, we got you. Chart your growth with our customizable startup roadmap template .

4. Business development roadmap

For companies that need a way to organize teams around a market-share growth plan.

What’s a business development roadmap?

For super-speedy businesses barreling towards major growth by the end of the year, a business development roadmap is an ideal asset for your toolkit. This roadmap highlights the essential tasks that contribute to rapid revenue and market-share growth, often in a one-year timeframe.

Sales, marketing, and product teams champion this roadmap, as they use this tool to plan and communicate their business development projects that play a hand in aggressive business growth. For example, sales can use this roadmap to visualize their “land and expand” strategies, while product can outline initiatives like a referral program or live chat that will capture more customers—and ultimately rake in $$.

Business development roadmap examples

Milestones can clearly highlight the KPIs the business wants to hit during this growth period, thereby giving your teams specific goals (and deadlines) to strive towards. On top of that, you can also explicitly communicate external factors, like changes to privacy laws or updates to a certain OS, that could muddy the “biz dev” waters.

For the less deadline-oriented businesses, a swimlane-view lets you bucket your business development tasks into loose buckets such as quarters. It’s a sweet and simple way to manage all the teams’ expectations on when certain things must get done.

Reach your biz dev goals (even) faster with our business development roadmap template .

5. Business intelligence roadmap

For managers and their teams that need a tool for keeping track of and visualizing the different areas of BI everyone is working on.

What’s a business intelligence roadmap?

For business intelligence (BI) teams that want to maximize their effect on organizational decisions and growth, enlist a business intelligence roadmap. Owned and operated by BI managers and their teams, this type of roadmap visualizes and communicates all aspects of BI, from data mining and analysis to querying and reporting.

BI managers can use this roadmap to plan how their team can optimize internal business processes to be more efficient, which leads to better-informed decisions by the business. An added benefit of this roadmap is that it helps BI managers inform the rest of the organization and C-level executives about what BI is doing and how they plan on being a part of the business’ bigger picture.

Business intelligence roadmap examples

The swimlane-view of the BI roadmap hones in on the BI team’s higher-level goals versus the dates that they’re hitting. Assigning BI tasks to different business verticals like data governance, process improvement or architecture & infrastructure, this roadmap then organizes tasks based on BI goals like strategy, growth and efficiency.

Build your own business intelligence roadmap with our ready-to-use template (just like above ☝️).

6. Data strategy roadmap

For teams that need to communicate how a company’s data operations will evolve over time, as well as what resources will be required to achieve them.

What’s a data strategy roadmap?

A data strategy roadmap tells the rest of your organization how you’ll improve your business’ data operations—such as data collection, storage, management, and application. Well-planned and properly stored data = better business decisions = better organizational growth.

This roadmap tends to fall into the hands of your CIOs, CTOs, and data teams. These data-leaning individuals use this roadmap to ensure their business’ data strategy fits nicely with not only their business processes, but security and information management best practices.

Think of this roadmap as a way to answer any pressing questions—internally and externally—regarding how your business handles data. Are you legally (and ethically) collecting the right data from your users when they visit your website? Are you storing any “unclean” data that should be expunged from your records? What security protocols are in place in case of a data breach?

Data strategy roadmap examples

For more flexibility with your data strategy, apply a swimlane-view . Rather than mapping data initiatives across an extensive timeline, the team’s activities and tasks are sorted into smaller time frames like months or quarters. This way, the team (and organization) can see which types of data security initiatives are getting priority and when.

Get your data strategy in order with our data strategy roadmap template .

7. Enterprise architecture roadmap

For enterprise businesses that need a way to communicate—and align stakeholders on—a plan for evolving the organization’s infrastructure.

What’s an enterprise architecture roadmap?

Enterprises need a roadmap to bring clarity to the chaos. Designed for your big corporations and complex, towering businesses, an enterprise architecture roadmap presents how an enterprise will evolve its own infrastructure in the coming years.

Focusing on organizational agility, efficiency, and stability, this business roadmap illustrates the steps that will be taken to evolve the enterprise’s architecture from status quo to end goal. Mapping and planning this evolution communicates to the rest of the organization how the enterprise will stay competitive and brace itself for changes in the market.

Enterprise architecture roadmap examples

For enterprises that want to provide a quick summary of their business growth, a swimlane-view may be more your speed. Charting enterprise architecture projects across flexible timeframes like months or quarters, this roadmap provides an overtly transparent depiction of which project will be completed when.

Start planning how your organization's infrastructure will evolve using our enterprise architecture roadmap template

8. eCommerce roadmap

For eCommerce businesses that need a way to visually map and communicate future growth, customer acquisition strategies, and optimization efforts.

What’s an eCommerce roadmap?

An eCommerce roadmap aligns the various marketing, design, merchandising, and development initiatives involved in sustaining and growing an ecommerce platform. Milestones come in handy by marking common deadlines, such as collection launches and important seasonal retail dates.

This type of roadmap can help an organization plan the development of an online business, coordinate cross-departmental efforts, and better identify business opportunities.

eCommerce roadmap examples

And with the swimlane-view , you can get a high-level, less time-sensitive version of your ecommerce strategy.

Keep your stakeholders aligned on how you plan to grow your eCommerce business using our enterprise architecture roadmap

9. Capability roadmap

For teams that need a way to visualize the plan around resources for big, future projects.

What’s a capability roadmap?

You know those big projects you’ve always envisioned, but they’re so grand they take years to implement? A capability roadmap helps you plan how to execute these projects.

Plotting the large-scale goals a business wants to tackle in the next few quarters or years, a capability roadmap revolves around potential rather than your present projects. It plans the super-ambitious, game-changing goals beyond features and releases. Think launching five product lines in three years, or opening up a global office in Europe, or owning 25 percent of the market share in two years.

Capability roadmap examples

If a timeline is too detailed for your capability plans, a swimlane-view might be more up your alley. Organizing your plans into loose and/or fuzzy time buckets like years or “Future,” this roadmap view offers a digestible snapshot of how and when each team plans on tackling capability initiatives.

Try this template for free + check out the other 35+ roadmap templates in our library and find the perfect roadmap for your organizational needs.

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What is a business roadmap? Best practices to achieve your business plan

A business (or company) roadmap is a tool that outlines the direction you will take to achieve your business plan and meet your long-term strategic goals. Company and product leaders use business roadmaps to communicate an organization's vision and plans at every growth stage — from early-stage startup to established enterprise company.

Build your own roadmap in Aha! Roadmaps. Try it free.

This is a custom roadmap created in Aha! Roadmaps — showing business goals and initiatives, success metrics, and progress towards completion.

Business roadmaps can help organizations of all sizes scale and innovate. Regardless of industry or market, these are essential tools that help everyone in the organization understand key objectives, communicate status, and take action. This guide offers definitions and best practices to help you learn about what goes into creating a business roadmap. The details of your own roadmap will differ based on the unique facets of your company, but there are universal elements that can be applied to any business.

Explore sections in this guide:

What is the purpose of a business roadmap?

Business plan vs. business roadmap: what is the difference, what to include on a business roadmap, how to build a business roadmap, who uses a business roadmap, types of business roadmaps, get started with a business roadmap template.

A business roadmap helps you visualize exactly what is needed to transform a company’s vision into reality and when. You can lay out what will happen in a given month, quarter, or year — or whatever timeline you prefer to visualize when you will achieve your goals. A business roadmap is flexible by nature. It can be as detailed or abstract as you need it to be, depending on the phase of business maturity and the size of your team.

• Roadmapping: Your starter guide
• How to build a brilliant roadmap

You may be wondering about the differences between business roadmaps and business plans. If you already have a defined business plan, why do you need another planning tool? To make things more confusing, some people even refer to your business plan as a type of roadmap.

While there are some areas of overlap between a business plan and a business roadmap, there are critical distinctions. Let's take a closer look at each tool and what makes them different.

A business plan is a foundational and detailed document that is generally created at the outset of any company. It is essential to running a business and is especially useful for new companies. More established businesses benefit from updating their business plan or creating a new one when expanding into new markets or developing offerings that fundamentally change how the business operates.

Now let's focus on a business roadmap. A business roadmap is a visualization of specific aspects of your business plan in a given time frame. It contains active and upcoming work at a high-level and is a helpful way to gauge how well the company is tracking towards achieving its business plan.

Broadly speaking, your business roadmap should include the most important strategic plans across the company. This includes goals, initiatives, and major themes of work from cross-functional teams. Since you will likely need to adjust your roadmap over time, be sure everything you add to it deserves to be there. The more you add to your roadmap, the more difficult it can be to change course when new opportunities arise.

You may find that you create a few roadmaps concurrently. For example, you might create a long-term roadmap that covers all aspects of business planning over the next three to five or even 10 years. This could include high-level forecasts for revenue, marketing and sales, staffing, and operations — as well as new products or services you plan to develop.

Then you could have a shorter-term business roadmap, either a year or six months at a time. This roadmap might include corporate-level goals and initiatives, as well as those of specific functions. You want to show how the entire company will work against overall business objectives.

To truly benefit from this adaptive style of planning, it is helpful to have all teams working within a shared strategic planning tool like Aha! Roadmaps . Since the planning data is updated in real time, every roadmap that the team sees will automatically show progress as it happens. This aligns the organization around what you will achieve and provides clarity into how you will work together to do it.

Creating a business roadmap should be part of your strategic planning process. Most successful companies follow a goal-first approach to roadmapping.

Set goals — Establish what you want to achieve, from revenue to hiring.

Gather information — Seek input from organizational leaders and research your market.

Organize into themes — Identify patterns in your inputs.

Prioritize initiatives — Use those themes to define initiatives, making sure each supports a specific goal.

Add time frames — Forecast resourcing and evaluate when each initiative would need to be completed.

Review and revise — Evaluate your progress against the roadmap often so you can spot challenges and adjust as needed.

These are the key steps for creating a compelling business roadmap.

Anyone with a vested interest in your company’s success will benefit from having access to some version of your business roadmap. Since a business roadmap visualizes the company’s goals and objectives, think of it as a blueprint that all stakeholders can rally around and follow. Here are some of the types of people and teams who can use a business roadmap:

Angel investors

Business owners

Consultants

Entrepreneurs

Marketing teams

Product managers

Sales teams

Startup founders

Venture capitalists

Each functional group should have their own roadmap — from product management to marketing and IT . There may be times when you need different types of business roadmaps or different views for different audiences. Unlike a startup roadmap, these are geared towards more established companies. Here are a couple examples:

Business development roadmap A business development roadmap outlines strategic expansion efforts. This would include things like new partnerships, sales channels, or market shifts.

Business intelligence roadmap A business intelligence roadmap focuses on tracking and planning all business operations . This would include strategic efforts to affect performance, such as change management, process improvement, or adopting new technologies.

• What is the role of a product operations manager?

Objectives and key results (OKR) templates

Templates help you repeat success, standardize work, and save time. Define your strategic planning process and create a format for your business roadmap that works for your company. Then templatize it. Standardizing your business roadmap template will help reduce inefficiencies. When people do not have to guess at how to do their planning, they can spend more time on strategic thinking.

Related: Business model templates

Take a look at this roadmap template that comes in Aha! Notebooks — a digital notebook and whiteboard tool for product teams. You can easily customize this template for use as a business roadmap by adding the relevant goals, initiatives, milestones, and dependencies. This is a simple, lightweight way to get started with business roadmapping. For more robust functionality, Aha! Roadmaps can help you connect your visual plans to actual work.

Start using this template now

Set brilliant strategy, prioritize features, and share visual plans with Aha! Roadmaps — a purpose-built product development tool. Get started with a free 30-day trial.

Additional resources

Business roadmaps vs. product roadmaps

Vision vs. mission vs. strategy

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Four Steps to Creating a Strategy-Based Team Roadmap: Why Starting with Vision Matters

Joni Hoadley Product Manager Coach | Consultant at Product Management Coaching

In my 12 years as a software product manager for Sonos, I benefited from an established company vision and strategy-based team roadmap. As a result, we created innovative and highly successful products. The Sonos vision, which has stood the test of time, is straightforward: to fill every home with music . From there, my fellow product managers and I developed a set of product strategies that allowed us to identify the products and initiatives that would translate to an executable product team roadmap .

What is a Strategy Roadmap?

Before diving in, I thought I’d quickly align on what I mean by “strategy-based roadmap”. This particular roadmap serves as the link between the product strategy and the execution plan. The main content on this roadmap is the key outcomes and the timing around their delivery. A strategy roadmap expands on the “why” around upcoming product changes in order to achieve the strategic vision. I’ll explain how to convey these outcomes on your roadmap further in this blog.

My Experiences With a Strategy-Based Team Roadmap

A vision statement illustrates why the company exists. From the vision statement, product managers can derive specific strategies that cover different areas of the product. For example, at Sonos, one of our product strategies was focused specifically on apps, and we used it to help determine which platforms to support. Keep in mind this was before the days of iOS and Android.

It was a strategy that served us well for many years; however, after the emergence of smartphones, we floundered a bit because that strategy no longer helped us effectively prioritize our customers’ problems. Therefore, it was incumbent upon us to replace that outdated strategy with something that would serve us for the next few years. This is no small feat, by the way. (If you need help defining or redefining your strategy, I highly recommend using Matthew May’s Playing-to-Win framework as a starting point.)

Tweet This: “Grounding your roadmap in strategy can help you grow your team by showing the value each person can add.”

To better illustrate how Sonos’ roadmap was guided by strategy, we structured our roadmap based on its strategies. This allowed us to tell a compelling story about the roadmap that was clearly tied to the company vision and resonated more easily with our stakeholders.

Strategy Based Roadmaps as the Lone Software Product Manager

When I first joined Sonos, I was the only software product manager, and I was responsible for the entire software roadmap. I managed everything from the software running on the speakers to the apps that controlled the music to securing music partnerships and leading them through API implementations.

Over time, we grew the team and decided to hire product managers specializing in specific areas, such as music partnerships. Because we grounded our roadmap based on our product strategies, it was easy to show the value that each new hire would bring to the team. In addition, they would be responsible for a dedicated set of initiatives within our roadmap.

4 Steps to Creating a Strategy-Based Team Roadmap

1. lead with your vision and strategies..

Have you ever seen a group of tourists following a tour guide waving a brightly colored flag? As a product manager, you need to be like that guide. It’s your job to make sure a) everyone following you know the right direction and b) that you’re all moving together as a team.

Learn more about developing and communicating your product strategy in this ProductPlan webinar:

2. Tell your story thematically.

Let’s use an imaginary example and pretend we work at a company that is creating the next generation of car stereos connected to the internet. The company’s vision is “Enjoy your favorite music, everywhere you go.” To achieve this ultimate result, we’ve come up with the following product strategies:

• “Enjoy easy access to all streaming audio services.”
• “Superior sound quality”
• “Smart displays for a better experience”

As you contemplate how to create your roadmap, remember that it should not be a long list of product features. Instead, the roadmap should be high-level, and it should help you tell your product’s story.

Consider breaking the phases of your strategy roadmap into themes. As ProductPlan co-founder Jim Semick explains ,

“…by grouping initiatives together into themes, you can organize your roadmap in a way that describes the value to customers and other stakeholders. In addition, themes can help you put together a roadmap that creates a story–the why behind what you’re proposing.”

Themes also allow you to present what your team will deliver. This could enable your marketing team, for example, to plan their stories for driving customer acquisition and user retention.

Have you ever had a conversation with your counterpart in product marketing about some shiny new object your team is building, only to see their eyes start to glaze over as they try to understand why what you’re describing will matter to your customers? Socializing your roadmap based on themes allows your stakeholders to quickly understand the value your team ( and company ) will deliver. Boil your strategies down to their very essence to create a set of themes.

Tweet This: “Boil your strategies down to their very essence to create a set of themes.”

In our example, this could look something like this:

Tips for Creating Themes:

• Limit the number of themes you have. Two is probably too few; seven is probably too many. Keeping it simple and concise allows you to capture what really matters and focus on the higher-level goals. Details such as mock-ups belong in your backlog.
• Involve stakeholders in the process. Of course, you should involve your stakeholders in the roadmapping process but start earlier by including them in the theme identification process. I recommend doing this by first identifying key parts of your product’s experience, such as set-up and onboarding. Include people from your customer success team, too. Often, they can help identify pain points that may otherwise be overlooked.
• Themes should be directly tied to clear outcomes. What are the KPIs you will measure? For example, if your company measures success based on a Net Promoter Score, can you tie one or more themes to that?
• Based on the themes and KPIs, you and your team can work together to identify the tactics. Your tactics could map to your team’s backlog.

3. Focus on problems, not solutions.

Another easy trap to fall into, especially if your company is used to shiny object syndrome, is feature-based roadmaps that focus on the solution, not the problem. Here’s another example of why being a product manager at Sonos was so awesome: we clearly defined the role of the product manager as the one who defines what needs to be solved and why . Our UX team and our software developers were responsible for defining how those problems were solved. Together, we were able to create great products our customers love.

4. For every strategy, a swim lane.

Continuing with our example of smart car stereos, you could create a roadmap with each of the three strategies in its own row (or swim lane, as I like to call them). For example, it could look something like this:

Strategy Based Roadmap Takeaways

Now and then, a tour guide sees something of interest or encounters a roadblock and decides to change direction. One of your many responsibilities as a product manager is to lead teams through those moments of ambiguity and change. Although your company’s vision should be evergreen and serve as the anchor that holds everything together, your strategic roadmap needs to be a living document reflecting current conditions. Things change. Priorities will shift. It would help if you were out in front, leading the way.

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Roadmap: Definition, Tools, Examples

A thorough guide to effectively building and using a roadmap through definitions, examples, tools and tutorials.

• Getting Started with Roadmaps

Strategic planning is an essential part of managing projects or activities of any kind, and it's especially important in implementing your business vision. A simple visual like a roadmap provides a clear overview of your strategic tasks and milestones and helps you define a long-term plan for reaching your goals .

We've put together some resources to make it easier for you to create and manage your project or product roadmap. Here, you'll find all you need to know, from what a roadmap is to useful examples, friendly tools and free roadmap templates  so you don't have to build them yourself. Let's get started!

What Is a Roadmap in Project Management?

Simply put, a roadmap is a strategic planning technique that places a project's goals and major deliverables (tasks, milestones) on a timeline , all grouped in a single visual representation or graphic. You should always remember that a roadmap planner differs from a regular project plan in that it doesn't contain all the details of a project; instead, it's a high-level, easy-to-understand, strategic tool.

• Characteristics of a Roadmap

Defining an overall goal along with the major steps needed to reach it, a roadmap helps articulate the why behind the desired outcome and the plan for getting there within all kinds of strategic initiatives.

To better understand the role of a roadmap, let us review what this strategic tool is and is not.

What a roadmap is

A high-level plan that states an overarching objective and captures the major steps to achieve it – a valid roadmap makes a persuasive case for undertaking any specific action towards the main objective and paints a clear picture of how these underlying activities interconnect to bring the desired outcome.

A communication tool that conveys a product’s/project’s strategy – when using a concise and convincing rationale for taking a certain step/including a specific feature, a roadmap proves essential to the effective coordination of cross-functional teams around a common goal, and for gaining the approval from company leadership, partners, and customers.

What a roadmap is not

Difference between a roadmap and a backlog – a backlog is a to-do list consisting of all the tasks required to carry out a strategic initiative, usually arranged based on their priority; meanwhile, a roadmap translates a collection of backlog tasks and ideas into a high-level strategic vision.

Difference between a roadmap and a project management tracker – a project management tracker is a compilation of all the tasks and associated details (the individual assignments, the staff responsible for each task, planned meetings to discuss major milestones, deadlines for each critical phase, etc.) that are related to the completion of an initiative; in contrast, a roadmap summarizes the main efforts that need to be undertaken in order to achieve the planned results.

Difference between a roadmap and a list of features – when it comes to product development and management, many managers mistakenly confuse a list of features with a roadmap, but a list of features doesn’t articulate the strategic thinking that supports building a product in a specific way, whereas a roadmap shows how all those features come together and yield a product that meets specific company goals.

• Why Do You Need a Roadmap?

Creating a well-thought-out roadmap helps businesses and project/product managers judiciously decide to what they choose to commit. Aligning each work item to the overall objective, roadmaps ensure that time and efforts are invested wisely and provide a strong foundation in terms of:

Clarity – by answering the question “what are you working towards and why?”, a roadmap clarifies strategic goals and how the involved work is linked to the overall strategy.

Communication – sharing the strategy of an initiative, a roadmap shows direction, visualizes timing, and helps drive conversations with key parties around challenges in a transparent manner.

Coordination – in large or complex projects, a roadmap enhances collaboration between multiple participants within an organization as it can help track dependencies and identify bottlenecks.

Accountability – sharing what needs to be delivered and when, a roadmap makes it easier for everyone to follow through on the plan.

Alignment – clearly stating the vision and the objectives of a project, a roadmap aligns teams, portfolios, or areas of the same business.

Impact – highlighting how each area of investment ties to a high-level goal, roadmaps easily illustrate the impact of a team’s progress.

Prioritization – focusing on what is most important, roadmaps help project/product managers make tradeoff decisions and prioritize the work that brings the greatest benefits more easily.

Showing the why behind a planned initiative, a roadmap benefits any type of business because:

It clarifies business strategy .

It communicates company-wide initiatives to internal teams.

It links department goals to those of the business.

It shares general plans with external audiences such as partners and advisory boards.

It tracks organizational performance .

Serving as the reference point for everything a team will focus on, a visual roadmap is extremely useful for product/project managers in high-level meetings with clients and executives because it helps you:

Illustrate how business strategy ties to company goals.

Translate product goals and initiatives into features and requirements.

Communicate with leadership, cross-functional teammates, and customers.

Prioritize new functionalities and enhancements.

Report progress and status as the project is moving along.

• Roadmap Examples

The structure of a roadmap may vary from one project to another, but there are some key elements you should include in all your roadmaps. These are:

Goals and initiatives – defining the value that your product or project brings and how it delivers on business objectives.

Releases and milestones – stating when work will start and be delivered.

Features – showing the efforts that are prioritized based on their overall value.

Dependencies – highlighting interrelated work that might impact delivery.

To briefly recap, no matter the type of initiative it illustrates, a roadmap needs to tie together your strategy (the “why”), the actions that you need to take to achieve your goals (the “what”), and a timeline for completion (the “when”).

Take a look at the sample roadmap visual below to explore these key elements.

Roadmaps have a flexible format for presenting strategic information, so there's no industry standard we should follow. Each strategic initiative - from Marketing to HR, Operations, or IT - can adopt a different approach, but over time we've seen that most professionals use a roadmap creator to build one of the popular types of roadmaps below.

To help you save time, you can download these examples for free (we've built them using PowerPoint and the Office Timeline  add-in) so you can get started right away.

E-commerce program roadmap

High-level roadmap with an overview of project, teams, and activities for an e-commerce program.

Clinical trial roadmap

Simple roadmap showing the trial phases and key milestones in a drug approval process.

Product development roadmap

A colorful roadmap with key milestones and sprint schedule for better planning a SaaS product.

Platform roadmap

Roadmap slide with swimlanes and project details for effective management of a platform development process.

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There are many ways you can use these roadmap examples to make better decisions around your strategic initiatives. Explore the roadmap templates  page to discover which one fits you best, then download and customize them as you like.

• How to Create a Roadmap

Here are the main five steps to building an effective roadmap:

Define your strategy – this step requires you to outline the overall vision, goals, and initiatives. In-depth research into buying personas, product positioning and competitive analysis helps create critical context and the foundation for your strategy.

Review and assess potential features – use a scoring mechanism to weigh potential features and decide which of them bring the most value to your initiative.

Prioritize and determine requirements – break down the activities that best support your strategy into smaller units of work.

Organize work into phases – group your ranked list of features or major efforts into major releases or stages and define their duration.

Choose your roadmap view – decide the level of detail and manner in which you want to illustrate all of the above over a specific time frame. For example, you might want to highlight specific features or cross-functional dependencies that influence the course of your plan.

Once you have covered all the steps above, you can then proceed to actually building your visual either by using a roadmap template or a dedicated roadmap tool .

For comprehensive demonstrations on how to make a roadmap using various office tools, check out our collection of step-by-step tutorials.

Roadmap Templates

• What Is a Roadmap Template?

A roadmap template is a pre-built roadmap sample that can be easily updated with custom data to fit your needs. It provides an already-done framework to specific cases, helping you save time and effort in creating such a visual.

• Why Use a Roadmap Template?

Using a roadmap template makes it easier for you to capture and communicate your product/project plans as it offers a pre-made structure to your own data . Available in a professionally designed format, roadmap templates help you to quickly build a timeline on which you concisely illustrate your goals and initiatives, the efforts that support your strategy and the due dates for work completion. Moreover, you can easily update them as often as necessary and even re-use them for future initiatives without having to start from scratch all over again.

Start building your first roadmap with our free downloadable roadmap templates  that you can easily tailor to your requirements. While some of them allow you to share high-level business goals, others are more suitable for conveying a more detailed view of your initiatives. You can also find examples designed for certain types of industries or organizations.

Simply download your preferred model, input your project/product data, and enjoy a presentation-ready roadmap.

Ready-Made Roadmap Templates

A variety of professional, stand-alone templates that you can instantly customize into your own beautiful roadmap.

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Roadmap Tools

Whether you are starting a business, launching a new product, or coordinating a cross-functional project, a roadmap will enable you to visualize your strategic plan and turn it into reality . It represents the output of your planning process and will serve as the main tool to communicate your initiative to stakeholders in a compelling manner.

This is why it is crucial to use purpose-built roadmap software that will allow you to easily develop and customize high-level visuals that you can effortlessly share with important audiences (executives, team members, other groups in your organization, and clients).

One such dedicated roadmap maker is the PowerPoint add-in called Office Timeline . This intuitive tool helps you automatically generate clear, stylish roadmaps as PowerPoint slides that you can quickly update as often as necessary and share or present in meetings.

CREATE YOUR OWN ROADMAP

• How to Choose a Roadmap Tool

With so much at stake when it comes to creating your roadmap, it's no wonder that deciding which roadmap tool to use proves to be such a challenging task. To make it easier for you to choose a roadmap software, here are the top 5 things to consider when you review the many roadmap tools available on the market today:

Time-saving . Does the roadmap app make it easy for you to create and update your project visual? You may have very little time to prepare your presentation for an important meeting with a client or a manager. That's why you need an agile roadmap maker that helps you automate your work with just a few clicks.

Customization . Each project is different, so is it a good idea to use the same colors and shapes for all of them? Certainly not. Go with an agile roadmap software that allows you to customize every detail: colors, shapes, fonts, date formats, etc. and lets you style your roadmap to make it unique and distinctive.

User-friendly . Most work is collaborative nowadays and you're always in close contact with a client or team. Therefore, you'll need a roadmap tool that works the way your clients and colleagues do, and the resulting roadmaps are easy to view, edit, download, or share by anyone, with their usual office tools.

Integrations . If you use popular project tools like MS Project or Wrike, you'll want to choose a roadmap creator that integrates smoothly with your usual project management software so you can build roadmaps straight from your data. A Refresh function that helps you update your roadmap every time there are changes in your documentation may be very useful, too.

Visuals . We can't stress this enough: you need simple, clear visuals that your audience can understand. So, choose a software that makes roadmaps that have the right blend of professionalism and beauty to help you stand out and impress your clients or managers.

Need more guidance in choosing a roadmap tool? Check out our dedicated section on roadmap tools .

Best Practices for Roadmaps

To serve the purpose for which it was created, a roadmap needs to be:

actionable,

up-to-date,

relevant and easy-to-understand for the intended audience,

and visually compelling.

So here are a series of guidelines on how to effectively update, share and present impactful roadmaps that convey relevant information in a quick and clear manner.

• Tips on How to Share or Present a Roadmap

For product/project managers to efficiently present and share their roadmap, they need to consider their audience – who they are, what they need to know and why. This way, they can adjust the structure and level of detail of their visual so that the right information be conveyed to the right people in a visually appealing way.

Here are the elements that make for an impactful roadmap presentation :

Audience-awareness – customize your roadmap according to your intended public and outcome. Depending on the audience, you will establish what to highlight during your presentation. For example, when you present to executive or advisory boards, your roadmap should focus on timelines of major bodies of work, whereas an engineering or IT team audience will be interested on details about features, requirements, and release dates. A customer-facing roadmap presentation, on the other hand, might show only a general description of features and approximate release dates.

Agenda – once you determine to whom you will present your roadmap, set an appropriate agenda of what core aspects you will capture and discuss. This gives your audience the right expectation for what they will see along the way.

Purpose – a good roadmap presentation needs a goal. To build an informative and well-received presentation from a goal-first approach, answer the questions “why is this information shared with this particular audience?”, “what should be the intended takeway?”, “what feedback would be useful?”

Vision – include information about the product’s business model, goals, personas, and competitors to place your strategic plans in the context of the broader product strategy and direction.

Feedback – presenting a roadmap creates the perfect opportunity for a product/project manager to get valuable insight from both internal and external audiences. Make sure to allot time for questions, answers, and comments.

Shareability – the value of your roadmap goes beyond its presentation as it may act as a reference point for any decisions going forward. As such, it is important to allow the appropriate access permissions and expectations for how frequently it would be updated.

• Tips on How to Use or Update a Roadmap

As a high-level plan that describes the work required to achieve a goal along with a corresponding schedule, your roadmap should include a series of visual elements to be successfully used:

Timeframe – include a timeline to highlight the upcoming work within a relevant time period. If your initiative is planned to happen over a three-month interval, it doesn’t make sense to use a year-long timeframe. For easier comprehension, this timeline is usually presented at the top of the roadmap.

Hierarchy – when working with complex initiatives, take the time to logically organize and break down the work into smaller units that you can then display according to start and end dates, status, priority or that you can group by categories.

Progress – indicate the status of different work items and the overall progress towards goals by using shaded bars, colors, checkmarks or % percent complete indicators.

Colors – assign different colors to different work components (by team or owner, for instance) to better differentiate stages of your initiative and communicate them visually.

Symbols – subtly convey extra details with shapes, arrows, and other custom elements. For example, you can use a diamond to indicate important milestones or an arrow/line/connector to highlight task dependencies. Whatever symbols you choose, make sure they are consistent so that your audience can decode them.

Since plans change and new opportunities or challenges may arise along the way, you will want to create a flexible and dynamic roadmap that you can effortlessly update when such instances occur, not only quarterly or according to release status. To this end, choose an interactive dedicated tool that will allow you to:

quickly reflect ongoing transformations and evolution on your roadmap visuals;

swiftly integrate with other systems used in your organization;

easily share it at a company-wide level;

customize and style relevant details into unique visuals.

Frequently Asked Questions about Roadmaps

Here are the answers to the most frequently asked question about roadmaps.

What is a roadmap?

A roadmap is the high-level, visual representation of the lifecycle of a business initiative , complete with the end goal, steps to take and milestones to reach along the way. The roadmap is primarily used for the strategic planning of projects and the development of new products.

What is a project roadmap?

A project roadmap is a strategic overview of a company-wide operation . It can define the scope, deliverables, high-level scheduling, milestones, challenges, and risk factors. Project roadmaps are slightly less detail-oriented than project timelines. The primary concern is respecting the original deadlines and adjusting deliverables to meet them, when required.

What does a roadmap include?

A typical project roadmap should cover the following elements:

Long- and short-term objectives;

Tasks, milestones, and dependencies;

Resources required and their allocation strategy;

Timeline of the project’s lifecycle;

Risk factors and challenges.

Why is a roadmap important?

Roadmaps allow all involved parties to evaluate the competitiveness of a strategy, raise issues and reveal gaps, correctly prioritize resource allocation, and set realistic targets based on market data. They provide the framework for interdepartmental collaboration . Without roadmaps, every venture is a journey into the unknown and the risk of project failure grows higher.

How do you create a roadmap?

Starting off with a specialized roadmap maker application like Office Timeline can save you hours of work, allowing you to focus on the project specifics rather than graphic design. Here are the basic steps for creating a roadmap:

Define the timeline and project phases.

List the tasks, milestones, and dependencies.

Break down the workstream using logical containers like swimlanes.

Keep updating the roadmap with new developments.

• FAQs about Roadmaps

Roadmaps made easy

Office Timeline helps you quickly turn complex project data into clear PowerPoint roadmaps that are easy to follow, but hard to forget.

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Business Roadmap Template

Establish a clear vision, goals and plans, develop strategies to achieve the key goals of the organization and devise actionable plans to help your team achieve them..

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Business Roadmap Templates to Scale Your Business to the Next Level

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Create actionable business plans with Kanban boards, and advanced formatting options

Start creating your business roadmap with your team to get a clear overview of your tasks and milestones. Use Kanban boards, tables, and shapes to start from scratch, or select a pre-made template for a quick start. Customize text, color, and style to visualize better.

Brainstorm and plan with teams by collaborating and syncing up

Get together with your team to discuss and analyze long-term strategies and approaches. Use whiteboarding capabilities and intergrations to have dynamic discussions. Share the workspace for editing and reviewing with real-time cursors for any number of participants.

Stay on top of business plans by going from planning to execution with task tracking

Go beyond planning to execute business plans with task tracking and smart notifications, all in the same workspace. Assign tasks to team members, set due dates, track progress, and link information.

What is a Business Roadmap?

The business roadmap is a visual representation of your organization’s primary goals, objectives, and strategies. It provides a high-level overview of the big picture without going into finer details while highlighting the tasks, roles and responsibilities, and deadlines. A roadmap is essentially a timeline; you can outline what activities will take place each week, month, quarter, or year.

Another way to look at a business roadmap is as a long-term strategic document that summarizes where the company is heading and the steps needed to get there. One important thing to remember is that business roadmaps provide a certain degree of flexibility. It can be detailed or brief. Activities outlined in the business roadmap can also be changed to reflect current circumstances and the environment better.

Why Do You Need a Business Roadmap?

You may ask why you need a business roadmap when you already have a business plan. The answer is simple. While the business plan is a long and detailed document requiring in-depth reading, the business roadmap summarizes the most critical information needed to understand at a glance. The roadmap gives a general idea about what you should be doing next without any frills attached. Some advantages of using a business roadmap are,

Shows how the company or business will grow

Provides a visual timeline and an illustrative guide on tasks to make progress tracking easy

Acts as a guiding document, helping teams to understand the reasoning behind their work

Helps to keep team members and stakeholders aligned with the company’s vision and objectives

Allows to visualize tasks and deadlines that are relevant to different departments

Helps to analyze the performance of a company for future potential

How Can Teams Benefit from Using Business Roadmaps?

Roadmaps can provide a shared understanding of the project’s or organization’s direction, timeline and priorities. Below are a few ways that a team can use business roadmaps to collaborate.

• Aligns the team around a set of common goals and objectives

A roadmap helps a team to visualize the high-level direction of the project or organization. It can help team members to better understand their roles and responsibilities in achieving the objectives.

• Encourages collaboration

Roadmaps provide a shared understanding regarding the direction of the project/organization and the timeline. To make sure that everyone is on the same page, involve the team members in the roadmap planning process. Working together, the team can develop a shared vision and a sense of ownership.

• Helps to identify dependencies and risks

As the team lays out each and every step, roadmaps can help to identify potential dependencies and risks that can affect the project’s or organization’s success. The roadmap can highlight potential roadblocks and the team can work together to find solutions and mitigate risks.

• Helps to plan, prioritize and track progress of tasks

When strategizing, use a roadmap to plan, breaking down the overall vision into smaller and more manageable tasks and to prioritize what needs to be done. This will also ensure that everyone understands their role in the bigger picture, are on the same page, and will work towards the same objectives.

• Communicates progress effectively

A roadmap is a useful tool to communicate progress to stakeholders and team members. Communication is key to keeping everyone on the same loop about the project’s status and to give a head’s up if any work needs adjustments to meet the upcoming deadlines and goals. Make sure to update the roadmap regularly to include completed tasks and upcoming milestones.

Business Roadmap Examples to Get You Started

Most times, business roadmaps take on a timeline or swimlane view.

1. Timeline view : In a timeline view, the roadmap provides an overview of significant milestones/projects and deadlines by the team. Through a timeline view, you can accurately see each team’s resource and time allocations and how they contribute to the business’s overall growth. Each team will clearly understand how they must structure their work to meet the milestones and deadlines.

2. Swimlane view : The swimlane view is ideal for businesses that don’t want to allocate specific timelines to every task. You can arrange the swimlane view to show projects that are in progress, scheduled, or proposed to see how the business is developing. You can have swimlanes assigned to each department or team while organizing items by timeframes, giving a quick view of the main projects a team is working on at a given period.

There are several different types of roadmaps that you can use depending on your requirement and business function. It is important that you understand which business roadmap is suitable for your business. Some business roadmap examples include,

Business roadmap: The most frequently used roadmap that layout the business’s overall goals, projects, strategies, and deadlines. Most useful for company heads and managers who want to understand how the various departments and allocated resources work together.

Business development roadmap: This roadmap helps to visualize tasks so that you can look at the bigger picture; which tasks contribute to and enhance the business’s growth, productivity and revenue?

Business intelligence (BI) roadmap: Mostly used by business intelligence leaders or managers to visualize BI-related business areas. It maps out the connections between staff, operations, and other internal processes to see what needs to be optimized to grow the business.

Marketing strategy roadmap: Used by marketing teams, the roadmap helps to visualize the connection between marketing initiatives and the organization’s goals/projects.

Project roadmap: Dedicated to projects, this roadmap will focus on one team or a small group of people relevant only to one project. It visualizes the tasks and deliverables with clear timeframes. Useful for project managers.

Department roadmap: This roadmap focuses on a particular department and its goals. Using a department roadmap can help ensure everyone on the team is on the same page and working towards the departmental goals.

IT infrastructure roadmap: Helps to visualize the technology architecture of a business. This is useful for IT teams and professionals to better handle issues and future releases.

How to Create a Business Roadmap Template?

• Start by defining the overall vision and strategy for the business

Define where the business should go. Understand how you plan to build value for your target customer.

Use Creately’s whiteboarding capabilities and intergrations to brainstorm with your team and have dynamic discussions.

• Identify the goals, objectives, and KPIs

Keep your customers in mind when identifying goals, objectives, and KPIs. Use sticky notes and cards to note down important information.

• Prioritize and set strategies and milestones

Devise strategies outlining how you will attain the defined goals. Prioritize according to the importance and include activities and milestones to track progress and success. Strategies can be broken down into different sections as carried out by separate teams.

The team involved in the planning process can come together to dot vote to prioritize on the same canvas. Put together the roadmap template from scratch using tables or Kanban boards or use a premade template. Customize with color themes and styles for better visualization.

• Develop activities and assign tasks, responsibilities, and time frames

Develop your tactics to carry out the strategies by clearly outlining the actions of each department/team. At the same time, generate methods to measure success. Include these activities in the roadmap.

Use the task panel to assign tasks to each department and team member. Set deadlines and include additional information for each activity or milestone using the notes panel. Import documents and images if required.

• Share with others for feedback

Now you can share the workspace with others to review and finalize. Invite your team to contribute. Use in-line commenting to have discussions and follow-ups on the same canvas.

Once completed, share your business roadmap with the rest of your organization. Download it in PNG, SVG, or PDF image formats for publishing.

• Now you can streamline your tasks and track progress

Start tracking the progress and the growth of your business. Use smart notifications to inform about upcoming deadlines and when tasks are completed.

FAQs About the Business Roadmap Template

Yes, there are several differences. Though a product roadmap is sometimes defined as a type of business roadmap, there are some crucial differences between the two. They are,

Business roadmaps are usually developed annually, while product roadmaps are built to accommodate product releases, which could be weekly or monthly

A business roadmap has broader goals, while a product roadmap has goals that are specific and measurable and related to a product and users

Business roadmaps look at work at a higher level with broader milestones and deliverables, while product roadmaps layout day to day work that needs to be completed for each release

To learn more about creating a product roadmap, check out ‘The Quick Guide to Creating a Proper Product Roadmap.’

Make sure that your business roadmap is simple and easy to understand

Include the end goal, short- and long-term goals, milestones, risk factors, timelines, and all steps required to achieve the goal

The roadmap should not be too detailed but should include enough details to understand the direction

Update regularly to reflect the changing goals and environments

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Why is Creately Better for Business Roadmap Templates?

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100+ proprietary features deliver a flexible, no-code visual platform, expertly-tuned for ease of use.

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Real-time Collaboration

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Custom Databases

Create custom databases for any kind of information from tasks, HR personnel records to matters for law firms.

Data driven Docs

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50+ types of standard diagrams with 1000+ specially designed shapes and connectors enable blazing fast diagramming.

Project & Task Management

Use built-in agile project management tooling or integrate with your favourite project management tool to keep work flowing.

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ISO 27001, SOC 2 - Type 2, Data Residency & Up-time SLAs to collaborate securely with your entire organization.

Powerful Visual Modelling

Visuals that are backed by databases, update once, reflect in multiple views type of workflows.

Over 10 Million people and 1000s of teams already use Creately

7 Business Roadmap Examples To Hit Your Goals

You might have heard of roadmaps before—they’re great for planning, communicating, and aligning organizations on key initiatives and strategies. 

But, without the right tools, creating a comprehensive roadmap from your existing strategy and planning documents can take time and effort (and a lot of head-banging). And the human factor means that you’ll inevitably have to deal with inaccuracies and manual updating.

In this article, we’ll give you seven business roadmap examples and templates to get you started on the right foot with your roadmap planning.

We'll also cover the benefits business roadmaps can offer your organization and show you how to build one in 5 easy steps. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• What Is A Business Roadmap? 

Business Roadmap Example

More business roadmap examples and roadmap templates.

• How Do You Create A Business Roadmap?
• Create And Track Your Roadmap With Cascade 🚀  

What Is A Business Roadmap?

A business roadmap is a visual strategic planning tool that presents a company’s strategies, strategic and operational objectives, and action plans in a Gantt chart. 

Business roadmaps serve as a guide, illustrating your business plan from the present to your envisioned success. They provide a holistic view of the organization's business goals across different departments and can be crucial for communicating big-picture initiatives to stakeholders.

They can also help you:

• Keep everyone focused on critical strategic initiatives .
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration by breaking down silos.
• Monitor critical milestones, dependencies between projects, and bottlenecks in your business strategy.
• Identify underperforming areas and risks so you can decide your next move before it’s too late.  

This Business Roadmap Template is a solid foundation to build a business roadmap from scratch. 

It comes prefilled with examples including: 

• Focus areas: The main strategic priorities that you and your teams will be working on. 
• Strategic objectives: The outcomes you want to achieve. 
• Projects: A group of actions to be executed to achieve the desired outcome.
• KPIs: Metrics that will help you measure your progress toward objectives. 

With this template, you can turn your business plan into a comprehensive strategic roadmap that can guide your strategic decisions and efficiently communicate the necessary steps, people involved, and timelines to stakeholders.

💡 Best for: Business owners, entrepreneurs, or leaders who want a solid template to create roadmaps in their business and strategic planning process.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Business Roadmap Template.

💪 Tips to customize your roadmap in Cascade:

1. Get your template and sign up to Cascade for free. The template will be automatically added to your workspace. 

2. Customize your template with your organization’s goals, business objectives, and KPIs.

3. Switch to the Timeline view to visualize your strategic plan as a Gantt-style roadmap.

4. Make adjustments and track progress to keep your business roadmap updated.

5. Bring your team on board to collaborate on your roadmap and ensure everyone is working toward the same outcomes. 

Looking for something more specific? Here are our top picks for other types of business roadmaps you can use to ensure you’re moving forward toward your goals. Each template comes pre-filled with examples and has the key elements of an effective business roadmap. 

Strategy Roadmap

A strategy roadmap helps streamline the strategic planning process, providing a clear and concise guide that helps organizations accomplish their strategic goals effectively. 

Try our Strategy Roadmap Template if you’d like to create a strategic roadmap for your business. It has all the features you’ll need to plan and visualize your business's long-term goals.

💡 Best for: C-level professionals, business managers, and team leaders who want to take a more strategic approach to planning and goal-setting. 

👉 Click here to get your FREE Strategy Roadmap Template.

Business Development Roadmap

A business development roadmap helps to guide your business as it expands and evolves. It assists leadership teams or even sales teams in setting clear overall goals and outlines the strategies needed to win in the long term. 

Our Business Development Roadmap Template is ideal for those looking to develop and execute a strategic growth strategy that is comprehensive but easy to communicate. Use it to clarify your organization's growth objectives, pinpoint opportunities, and craft a strategic approach to make the most of them.

Plus, with Cascade’s real-time dashboards , strategy reports , and data integrations , you can execute your business development plan all in one place.

💡 Best for: Executives , and business development managers responsible for taking their business's growth and development to a new level. Applicable to organizations of any size.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Business Development Roadmap Template.

Project Roadmap

A project roadmap helps teams articulate project plans, achieve goals, and monitor progress. It should guide project teams, ensuring projects remain on track, within budget, and on schedule.

Use our Project Roadmap Template to help focus your planning efforts and ensure smooth and successful execution. It has everything you need to outline scopes, establish goals and objectives, allocate resources, and plot deliverables on realistic timelines.

💡 Best for: Project teams, project managers, and project portfolio managers who want to streamline project planning, management, and execution.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Project Roadmap Template.

Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is instrumental in product management by simplifying the complex product creation cycles and communicating imperatives in your product development process. 

If you're looking for a comprehensive framework to steer teams through your product strategy, our Product Roadmap Template will start you off on the right foot.

Use it to outline your new product vision, set clear objectives, and pinpoint the necessary actions and resources to reach critical milestones.

💡 Best for: R&D teams, product leaders, and product teams looking to enhance their product development and planning approach.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Product Roadmap Template.

Technology Roadmap

A technology roadmap provides clear paths for organizations to achieve strategic technological goals and stay competitive through ongoing innovation. It’s also crucial for giving context to long-term technology goals that are often hard to communicate.

Using a visual tool like a roadmap can assist CTOs and CIOs in identifying, executing, and monitoring their technology strategies to support business growth and innovation.

Our Technology Roadmap Template is a great starting point for planning your technology strategy and making sure it runs smoothly. With it, you can establish clear objectives, prioritize projects, allocate resources, and set realistic timelines.

💡 Best for: CTOs, CIOs, and IT leaders planning their technology strategy.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Technology Roadmap Template.

Marketing Roadmap

Marketing roadmaps help you outline key marketing goals, KPIs, and projects. They can also help maintain a clear project direction and timeline and keep teams focused on results.

If you want to build your marketing roadmap, our Marketing Strategy Roadmap Template offers a comprehensive framework to start with your own. Use it to streamline your marketing planning with a comprehensive framework to guide your team through goal setting, objective identification, and action planning.

With this template, you’ll be able to craft a world-class strategic marketing plan that your organization understands and buys into.

💡 Best for: CMOs, team leads, and marketing professionals who want to build a solid marketing roadmap to drive effective marketing campaigns for their business.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Marketing Roadmap Template.

The Benefits Of A Business Roadmap

A business roadmap or any other type of roadmap tool can make a big difference in your planning and execution. Here are the key benefits business roadmaps offer:

• Improved prioritization: Business roadmaps can help identify and prioritize the most impactful actions. This approach ensures that high-priority initiatives receive attention, driving growth and progress more efficiently.
• Increased transparency: For a plan to be successful, you need buy-in at every level. By visually displaying objectives, initiatives, and progress, a business roadmap opens up your strategy to stakeholders. This, in turn, can help build trust, shared ownership, and accountability among team members.
• Confident decision-making: A business roadmap is an instrumental asset for real-time decision-making by providing valuable metrics and context in one place. With them, you get a 4D perspective on performance and quickly identify what is working and where to optimize.
• Greater adaptability: A well-designed business roadmap allows organizations to respond effectively to market, industry, or internal changes. With all data in one place, you get better visibility into how your business performs at every level. This helps you make the right decisions at the right time. 
• Focused execution: Strategic roadmaps bring structure and simplicity to building strategies by breaking them down into high-level objectives, business metrics , and a series of initiatives, milestones, and programs that are executable and trackable. This drives ownership among those responsible for the execution and business outcomes.

How Do You Create A Business Roadmap? 

If you grabbed one of the templates above , then you’re already halfway there. You just need to adjust the pre-filled “dummy data” to make them your own. Click on any element (like focus area, objective, or KPI) and edit away!

If you want to build a custom roadmap from scratch and truly tailor it to your organization's needs , then follow this five-step approach below.

💡Tip: You can use the same step-by-step process if you want to build your roadmap in manual tools like Excel. However, using Cascade offers additional free benefits such as drag-and-drop dashboards and data integrations to automate your performance tracking in one place.  

1. Create your objectives for each focus area

Start by defining your focus areas , which are high-level categories that group your objectives. For example, you might choose Operational Efficiency as one of your focus areas. 

Then, outline short-term and long-term objectives for each focus area, focusing on specific, measurable, and achievable goals. 

💡A key thing to remember: Less is better. Focus on your most critical strategic objectives . This will set the tone for strategic decision-making and ensure everyone is on the same page.

2. Add KPIs to measure performance

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for tracking progress, evaluating the effectiveness of initiatives, and informing data-driven decision-making. 

In Cascade, you can add KPI to each objective. Define KPIs that are relevant and aligned with your objectives. These will help you monitor progress, identify potential problems, and act before it’s too late. 

3. Assign initiatives and responsibilities 

Successful execution requires action and ownership. In Cascade’s Planner , you can assign key initiatives and projects under each objective. 

This functionality will allow you to co-create project and action plans with your team members and ensure you clearly understand capacities and possible constraints ahead of time. You can also add owners and collaborators to each initiative and KPI to ensure accountability across your organization.

4. Define milestones and a timeline

Milestones and timeframes help set realistic expectations and keep the organization on track. They are also crucial for prioritizing different initiatives in your strategy and ensuring your plan aligns with the company’s broader strategic initiatives .

Establish milestones that mark significant progress and create a timeline to visualize the expected completion of each initiative. 

In Cascade , you can switch to the Timeline View to get a roadmap view of your strategy, planning, and execution. This feature makes it easy to identify which projects are on track and where you need to course-correct.

5. Execute and track progress 

With Cascade, maintaining momentum in your strategy execution couldn't be easier. Use real-time dashboards to track critical metrics and create regular strategy reports to communicate priorities, inform decision-making, and keep everyone moving in the right direction.

Create And Track Your Roadmap With Cascade 🚀 

If you want to get the most out of your strategy, roadmaps are a great addition to your toolkit. 

But creating a roadmap with outdated tools and disconnected platforms is an uphill battle. Don't let multiple spreadsheets, siloed information, and static tools hold you back. You risk running your operations blindfolded and too slow to recognize and seize the opportunity. 

“Cascade provides a readily accessible platform for hosting our strategy and enables us to generate live updates at the push of a button. It has increased transparency and accountability for our strategic priorities and has allowed us to remove silo working and improve alignment. The real game changer from my perspective is the reporting function. Cascade has turned a labor-intensive manual process into something which can be completed in minutes.” - Enterprise customer from Construction Industry  (Source: G2 review )

With Cascade, effective strategic planning and strategy execution doesn’t have to be complex or chaotic where everyone works in different directions. We bring clarity to chaos by bringing together all components of successful strategy execution. 

Ready to take Cascade for a spin? 

Sign up today for free , or book a 1:1 product demo with one of Cascade’s in-house strategy experts.

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What Is a Business Roadmap — How To Set It Up

The 4 main types of business roadmaps 

Business roadmap examples to inspire and guide you, 1. business capability roadmap, 2. business transformation roadmap, 3. strategic roadmap, 4. content calendar roadmap, 5. it architecture roadmap , who can use a business roadmap, business roadmap vs. business plan — what’s the difference, how to define goals for a business roadmap, how to prioritize using a business roadmap template, a quick rundown of business roadmap templates..., how to make a business roadmap with airfocus:, defining kpis for your business roadmap, incorporating customer feedback into your business roadmap, the role of technology in business roadmaps, finally, a business roadmap checklist — are you ready.

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Airbnb is a modern-day success story that has transformed the travel and hospitality industry.

With just a few clicks, anyone can rent out their free space or book a night in a stranger's apartment, treehouse, or even a castle.

In March 2017, Airbnb raised over $3 billion in its last fundraising round, which valued the company at over $31 billion. This staggering achievement is a testament to the effectiveness of their business model.

Airbnb's visionary idea was originally written on a single piece of paper in 2014, and it outlined the company's goals, objectives, features, key dates, and important milestones. This document was half-jokingly referred to as "the infamous paper to take over the world" by Chip Conley, who was the head of global hospitality at the time.

The document condensed months of strategic thinking, business planning, and research into an easily digestible format. This allowed the entire company to stay focused on becoming a billion-dollar unicorn, and it ultimately led to the success of Airbnb as we know it today.

Get started with roadmaps templates

.css-uphcpb{position:absolute;left:0;top:-87px;} What is a business roadmap?

A business roadmap is a long-term strategic planning document showing your company's goals and the steps required to get there.

Unlike lengthy business plans, it does not show the individual items and activities required in fine detail.

Instead, it focuses on the big picture, clearly showing your company's major, business goals and objectives, and the high-level strategies it will use to achieve these — this helps keep stakeholders and team members aligned and on track to succeed.

But most importantly, business roadmaps are not set in stone. The activities and priorities outlined in a business roadmap are open to debate and can be reshuffled if needed to better reflect the current environment.

The most common use case for a business roadmap is to show how the business plans to grow. Still, they can be used for other strategic projects, such as change management, enterprise architecture projects, or even by individual departments.

Generally speaking, there are four main types of  business roadmaps . They are:

Department roadmaps.  These are roadmaps that define and explain how a particular department can move forward to address its goals. Defining a department roadmap is one of the best ways to ensure that the entire team is on the same page and working towards the same objectives. 

Business development roadmaps.  On the other hand, business development roadmaps encompass the bigger picture of your business. Rather than looking at various departments' goals, this looks at the larger goal that all departments are working together to reach, and how they'll reach that goal. 

Product roadmaps.  Product roadmaps  are useful for identifying the goals of a particular product and outlining the phases of development that will need to happen to get there. A product roadmap should encompass the entire lifecycle of the product, not just pre-deployment. 

Project roadmaps.  Similar to a product roadmap, a  project roadmap  is a roadmap that generally involves a small group of people, such as one team. The project can be a product to be released, internal app development, redesigning a space, and so on. 

Let's look at some business roadmap examples. Below are some important roadmap examples, some of them are more specialized than others, these can hopefully inspire you to start moving your business forward in a structured, organized way. 

Now that you have an idea of the main types of business roadmaps, let's look at and define the qualities of more specialized roadmaps, starting with a  business capability roadmap . This roadmap is used to outline the large-scale capabilities a business would like to have. 

For instance, if your business is looking to target a specific demographic, break into a particular market, or offer a new service, this would fall under a business capability roadmap.

What can your business do to develop the capability to produce a product or supply a service, and how will it accomplish these tasks?

Example of a business capability roadmap 

It's easy to find tools and examples online that will help you create your own business capability roadmap. These roadmaps take on different forms and routes, though most focus on dividing tasks between departments and teams. 

From there, arrows or some other directional icon illustrate which tasks need to be completed first for the next set of tasks to begin. This can look like a  Kanban board  or a traditional brain-mapping tool. 

Business transformation roadmaps analyze the current state of your business, set goals for how you want to change your business in significant ways, and then outline how you will get there. 

The most common reason for using a  business transformation roadmap  in today's world is digital transformation. That's the process of transitioning traditional workflows and strategies into digital workflows and strategies. 

Example of a business transformation roadmap 

In a business transformation roadmap, the focus will be on transforming each department individually rather than looking at how the changes in each department interact with one another. There will be some overlap, but for the most part, each department will have a unique roadmap. 

That roadmap will involve how various tools and processes can be replaced or replicated digitally. Then, it'll assign that process to multiple department heads and teams. It should also include the allocation of resources required for the transition. 

A  strategic roadmap  outlines a  vision  for your business. It's a mission you want to complete, a value you wish to embody, or a product you want to deploy. Whatever it is, the purpose of a strategic roadmap is to help you get there. 

A content calendar roadmap maps out the content your business will be creating and publishing in a given timeframe. Generally, a content calendar roadmap is reused repeatedly as you build up your content strategy. 

The last roadmap example we'll touch on is an  IT architecture roadmap . This type of roadmap helps your business implement the right types of technology and infrastructure. It's usually very detailed and aims to keep your business modernized and secure.

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a business owner, or a marketing manager, everyone can use a business roadmap to make  communicating complicated business strategy almost effortless.

You can even use a business roadmap to plan your own career path — what do you want to achieve, by when, and why?

By identifying potential opportunities to grow and develop, as well as the partners and resources you'll need to make that happen, you'll be in the driver's seat, whichever industry you work in.

Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, a business roadmap is critical to organizational growth.

You've probably got  a million ideas  and just as many responsibilities, so regularly reviewing your twenty-page business plan simply isn't possible (or advisable!).

Instead, you should create a business roadmap.

At a glance, you can see how your current activities relate to your business's long-term strategic goals and objectives and instantly make changes if required.

As a roadmap is so easy to review, you can share this with new team members to quickly bring them up to speed. You could also use it to get buy-in from investors, quickly illustrating your future growth potential and what their investment would enable you to achieve.

Business owners

As a business leader, you likely have a crystal clear idea of where you want to take the organization in the future. You wake up every morning with a serious mission statement in mind — after all, you built this company with purpose, and that purpose acts as your true north in everything you do.

You  know where you're going… but does anyone else?

For small business owners, a business roadmap and financial capital is essential.

It helps you structure your business vision, reign in your ambition, and see the essential steps required to move forward. You'll also be able to predict risks along the way and what resources you'll need to bring your dream to life. For example, you may have ambitious development tasks up ahead — the remit for which lies beyond your personal technical capabilities. Here, finding an appropriate partner will be necessary to avoid any costly mistakes.

For more established companies and smaller businesses, a business roadmap will help you explore new directions for business operations, identify inefficiencies, and fine-tune your focus as the market evolves.

If you are looking to sell your company, you might not be focused on long-term strategy. However, an effective business roadmap helps and will increase the value of your business.

In this instance, creating a strategic business roadmap will help stabilize and motivate your management team. With a clear direction, your key personnel can continue to do their best work, even if you leave the business.

It will also show real potential for growth, demonstrating to buyers the potential future value of your business.

Business managers

Managers and sales teams are uniquely placed to recognize business needs and opportunities.

You see what happens every day, on the ‘front line,' but you've also got access to the C-Suite to ask for further funding.

Perhaps you've got big ideas on how to achieve your goals and need to convince senior management or executives in your organization. Perhaps you need more team members, resources, or just support for your strategy.

So how do you get it?

Don't waste your time writing a lengthy document or a complicated  presentation

Instead, use a business roadmap.

By boiling down your big idea into key steps, you'll keep your audience engaged and focused on the  benefits  of your strategy rather than the difficult implementation details. 

Historically, business plans have been an essential document for any business.

As little as a decade ago, if you approached someone with a business concept  without  a fully bound, multi-page business plan, you'd have been called naive and underprepared.

However, attitudes are changing. And the entire business world has become more fast-moving and agile. 

Stories of businesses raising millions in investment from just a pitch deck (Uber) or a 1-page document (Airbnb) are now commonplace, and lengthy business plans feel like a thing of the past.

So, let's put a business plan and a business development roadmap head-to-head...

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a document that explains the commercial potential of a business. 

There are no rules for what it should include, but it generally takes an essay format with structured sections that explain what your company is going to do, how it will achieve its goals, what the key risks are, and what the opportunity is. It often includes projected  cash flow  and other financial predictions.

Sure, they might be traditional, but a comprehensive business plan does have its advantages :

It demonstrates to investors, lenders, and other interested parties that you've done the research necessary to build the business correctly.

It shows the financial viability of your company in detail.

It helps get everyone involved on the same page and aligned on the direction of the company.

It might be required to get business loans or government grants. Some traditional investors expect to see a lengthy business plan.

There is hard evidence of the effectiveness of good business plans, too — a  study  by Professor Andrew Burke from the Cranfield School of Management proved that companies that write plans and use them grow 30% faster than businesses that fail to plan.

The problem with business plans...

The thing is, a comprehensive business plan takes time to create.

Choosing the right words, creating countless tables, and doing comprehensive research might reveal valuable insights and tell a compelling story, but it also drags you away from building your product, talking to customers, or getting real market feedback.

In 2018, the  Harvard Business Review  wrote:

  “The real key to succeeding in business is being flexible and responsive to opportunities. Entrepreneurs often have to pivot their business once it becomes clear that their original customer is not the right customer or when it turns out that their product or service fits better in an alternate market. Because of these realities, business plans are written at the start end up nothing more than a fable”.

Enter: the business roadmap and all its benefits!

This is where a business roadmap truly excels. By focusing on high-level steps, the benefits are: 

It can be reviewed quickly and constantly, enabling everyone to check if they are on track.

When the product, market, or  opportunity shifts , the roadmap can be modified quickly.

It keeps the business focused on the big picture, spotting potential roadblocks and obstacles earlier.

So, which is best?

A business plan is still a critical document for many businesses today, particularly those who need one to secure funding, financing, or convince traditional investors.

Yet, modern businesses benefit from increased agility, making a business roadmap a leaner, faster, and more responsive document.

In our view, there's one clear winner: the business roadmap . However, most of the time,  a business roadmap and a business plan work hand-in-hand.

By now, you should have an understanding of what a business roadmap is and how it can be applied in your business to map your strategic direction.

Probably you're pretty eager to get started  building your roadmap now

But, it's important to realize that the strategic thought that takes place  before  you create your roadmap is just as valuable as the act of creating the strategic roadmap itself.

Start with foundations by setting effective goals.

Then, build your business roadmap shows how to achieve these goals.

1. Understanding long-term goals

What specific objectives do you want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years?

These long-term strategic goals that will help shape your business roadmap — if an activity doesn't play a role in helping you reach a long-term goal, then it doesn't deserve a place in the business intelligence roadmap today.

Long-term goals can be associated with:

Revenue:  The simplest to explain but the hardest to achieve, e.g., increasing profits or revenue by a certain percentage within a defined time.

Growth:  Expand the company through new employees, resources, or other key measures.

Service and reputation:  Improve the quality of your services, leading to increased customer satisfaction or customer retention.

Social:  Increasingly, businesses are setting long-term goals to give back to society or the environment.

2. Setting short-term goals

The context set by long-term goals helps you identify what you need to do in the near future to progress along your business objective strategic journey. Short-term goals are ideal milestones or destinations for your business objectives strategic roadmap now.

Remember, the best short term goals are SMART :

Specific . They should be targeted and highly detailed, so they can be easily understood.

Measurable . Set a metric that can be continually reviewed. This will prove progress is being made.

Action-oriented . Specify what actions need to be taken and when.

Realistic . Goals should be challenging but achievable. Make your goals realistic by reflecting on your past performance.

Time-specific . Look ahead and set a hard deadline to keep things on track. 

3. Speak with stakeholders

Once you've got a solid understanding of both your long and short-term goals, it's essential to get your team or employees motivated to achieve them.

Involve them in the process of creating your goals and listen intently to their feedback. After all, if they feel they helped shape where the company's vision is headed, they will be more motivated to get there.

4. Identify key steps on your roadmap

Now for the exciting part — the first steps of building your startup roadmap are:

Look at your goals and consider what major steps will be required to achieve them.

Annotate each of those steps with a brief high-level description.

Place these steps into order and consider whether you will have the resources required (such as people and time) to complete them. Make sure you can defend  why  the steps should be completed in this order. 

Critique your roadmap — is this realistic? If conditions change, can your roadmap adapt?

No team has unlimited resources. 

So to help you decide which projects or initiatives deserve a place in your business roadmap, you need to prioritize. This will make sure you get the most impact on your goals with the fewest resources possible.

There are many different approaches to prioritizing a roadmap, but the most quantitative and scientific way is to use a " prioritization matrix " or "weighted scoring model". This is a proven and field-tested framework used by companies like Nike, Shell, and The Washington Post. It will identify key risks and help your roadmap be as focused and successful as possible.

We built ready-to-use  prioritization frameworks within all of our templates , so you don't need to invent your own. But, if you prefer to do it manually, here is a step-by-step business roadmap prioritization guide.

1. Determine choices

Write down all the possible things you could add to  your roadmap  right now. For example, this could be a new sales initiative, a new marketing campaign, or a recruitment cycle.

2. Pick and rate criteria

Next, you need to figure out how you'll decide which item is more important than the others. These will be unique to your organization but could be current business goals like revenue increase, cost to implement, or strategic fit.

You can optionally assign these items a weight, showing how important each of the criteria is to your business.

For example, your primary goal for the year might be to increase revenue, so you might double the weight of this criteria. 

Place these criteria into a table as below:

On a simple 1-5 scale, rate each of the rows in the columns. 5 is most desirable, and 1 is least desirable — for example, for 5 could mean high revenue potential and lowest cost.

3. Calculate

Multiply your scores by their weight. The highest scoring total rows are your priorities. 

Now you understand how to use this matrix, you can plan and explain your prioritization decisions to stakeholders.

To save time, try using the  airfocus  built-in scoring feature and prioritization tool, which does all the hard calculations work for you.

You don't need to start from scratch with your business roadmap.

These templates all allow for unique roadmapping requirements — including a built-in prioritization feature, which can flex to your unique criteria.

For marketing teams, calculate the impact of your work with this  marketing planning and prioritization template . Simply change the value criteria from brand awareness to whatever  KPI  you are tracking.

Business owner, strategist, consultant, or executive? Get everyone on the same page instantly with our  business project roadmap template . Justify your decisions and spend with the built-in prioritization matrix

Startup founder? Build a billion-dollar empire by bringing order to chaos with this  startup roadmap template . It'll tell you in seconds what you should be working on next.

Creating a business roadmap is simple with airfocus.

Start by selecting our business roadmap template . We offer pre-built templates for various situations that are fully adjustable and built on proven decision-making and roadmapping methods. Plus, our templates are fully customizable — giving you the best of both worlds.

Add your projects, features, and initiatives manually or import them from your existing tools.

2. airfocus integrates Jira, Trello , Asana, or CSV as well as 1000+ other tools via Zapier. 

3. Once you've added your items, you can map your priorities on a chart to better understand the most important projects.

4. Next, organize your items into a beautiful roadmap with a simple drag-and-drop on prioritization chart

b. Timeline view

c. Table view

5. In the end, use a share link to communicate your strategy within minutes, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. As your priorities evolve, the shared version will also be updated, ensuring that everyone remains informed.

6. Don't forget to regularly revisit your roadmap to ensure you are on track!

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators , are metrics your business can measure to track its performance in certain areas. Technically, any aspect of your business's performance that you can measure is a "Performance Indicator." 

However, what makes a "PI" a "KPI" is the metric's impact. For example, your monthly revenue might be valuable to a product supplier but absolutely essential for a subscription-based service. 

In other words, a KPI is a crucial measurement of your business's performance, indicating an important trend. 

How to define KPIs for your business roadmap

For businesses in the modern age, picking and accurately measuring the correct KPIs is a crucial step in creating a successful business roadmap. Here are a few important tips for defining the KPIs that make up your business's roadmap. 

Identify your essential metrics

First, you should identify your essential metrics. As mentioned, these are the metrics that represent the biggest impact on your business. You can also think of these as the metrics that indicate trends (positive and negative) for your business. 

For example, a subscription-based business might want to look at monthly users and revenue, while a fast-food restaurant might consider customer retention and order delivery times. 

If you're having a hard time deciding which KPIs are essential for your business, you can easily find recommended KPIs online for your business model. This is usually a good place to start. 

Examine your roadmap

Next, you'll want to examine your business roadmap . How do your outlined steps and goals correlate with your chosen KPIs? Do they directly relate? Are there indirect relationships? 

Connecting these dots can help you determine two important things:

Is your business roadmap truly aligned with your business's strengths and weaknesses? Is it a good outline?

Have you chosen KPIs relevant to your business's goals and strategies? 

Use your KPIs to make decisions 

With those initial steps completed, you can start incorporating your KPIs into your overall strategy . That will primarily mean using your KPIs to make important decisions. 

Thinking about investing in a new service? Launching a new product? Making an acquisition? Consulting your KPIs and your business roadmap can help you quickly say "Yes" or "No" to these types of opportunities. 

They paint a picture of where your business currently is so you can see where you stand without wasting too much time.

Of course, KPIs aren't the only factor you should consider when creating a business roadmap. Another important consideration is customer feedback because it can also help point you in the right direction. 

How to incorporate customer feedback into your business roadmap

Collect your feedback in one place

An important factor in collecting customer feedback is ensuring it's all kept in one place. If you don't have a plan for collecting customer feedback, then you aren't really collecting it — you're just haphazardly hoarding it. 

Using a tool that connects feedback you receive in-app, through customer support channels, and directly on your website will help you stay organized and quickly analyze what your feedback is telling you. It tells the story of your feedback rather than forcing you to dig through it yourself. 

Use feedback to inform current and future projects

Feedback can also be helpful as a tool for informing your current and future projects. For example, you may be working on a feature only a few of your users have seen. If you're mainly getting negative responses, it might be time to rethink this feature. 

On the other hand, if you're getting requests for a new kind of feature, you may want to start moving in that direction. 

Assess your products and processes

Another way to use customer feedback is to assess whether your products and processes meet your users' needs. How are customers receiving your products? Are your processes living up to customer expectations? 

Feedback can be a light in the dark, giving you a solid idea of how to move in a way that will make customers happy. 

Of course, you can also lean on technology when building and refining your business roadmaps. It can help in various ways, some of which we'll cover below. 

How to use technology for your business roadmap

Use roadmapping software 

One of the first and best ways to use technology for your business roadmap is by leaning on roadmapping software . These tools can streamline your process for creating, editing, and sharing your business roadmap. 

airfocus is a great tool for this purpose. Our modular solution has been refined to make your job as simple as possible. 

Use roadmap templates

Business roadmap templates , while fairly "low-tech," can also speed up your process. They do most of the heavy lifting for you, so you just have to focus on filling them. They're a great resource if you're not sure where to start. 

Use feedback management tools

When it comes to collecting, organizing, and implementing feedback, feedback management tools are your best friend. They help structure and bring together all of your customer feedback in a single location, simplifying your job and painting an overarching picture that is easy to understand. 

Use technology to engage with your community

Of course, you don't just want to collect feedback from your community. You want to be interactive and engaging. Technological tools like airfocus Portal , can also help you out here, giving you a tool for directly interacting with customers and effectively closing the loop. 

Use AI to make things simple and quick

AI is already making significant enough strides to help you start refining and creating your business roadmaps. airfocus has AI Assist , a powerful AI tool to help you create high-quality, high-impact business roadmaps.

Don't worry if your head is spinning a little with all this new information.

Once you're in the swing of things, creating a business roadmap will become second nature. 

For now, though, simply follow the checklist to make sure you've crossed all the Ts and dotted all the Is...

Strategy and ownership:

Is your roadmap centered around achieving a clear mission, vision or goal?

Do you have cross-business buy-in from stakeholders to ensure support throughout the project?

Have you secured and funded the resources required?

Have you allocated each work item in the roadmap to encourage accountability?

Scoping and analysis:

Is the roadmap structured around major themes and events?

Is the scope of the roadmap clearly defined, with set timeframes?

Is it obvious what the key milestones are and what success will look like at these stages?

Are your items prioritized, with the reason for their prioritization clearly recorded?

Measurement and communication:

Remember, transparency encourages efficient and honest communication — is your roadmaps easily accessible to stakeholders and implementation teams?

Is it clear who should make changes to the roadmap if and when it's necessary?

Reality check:

Have you allowed for an ongoing review of the roadmap, to check progress and make corrections?

Is the pace of change achievable with the resources available?

Have you accounted for dependencies between items — and conceived of workarounds — to avoid last-minute blockers?

Answered ‘yes' to all of the above?!

That's it!

Now, you are ready to go! 

Don't forget - a compelling business roadmap isn't designed to replace the business plan entirely. Instead, a compelling business roadmap will help you stay on track and quickly reshuffle your priorities — visually communicating changes to all stakeholders whilst supporting strategic decisions with valid data.

If you're totally new to roadmapping, there are tonnes more to learn over on our blog.

airfocus was designed to help managers  get the right stuff done, and to make things easier, you can use one of our business roadmap templates to get started. There are  dozens  to choose from on our website, so  go take a look .

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