Roadmapping: How Your Product Finds Its Way

Note: This is a guest article written by Andy Singleton. Andy is a career software professional and knows a thing or two about building and launching successful software products. He is currently the president of Assembla which brings open source processes and applications to the world of enterprise software.

Roadmapping: How Your Product Finds Its Way

A startup will often live or die based on its first product release. Did it get released? Did people find it useful? Good roadmapping dramatically improves your chance of getting to “Yes!” on these critical questions.

A roadmap is just a list of the features that you want to build, sorted in priority order. It might be easy for one person to make a list like this. However, it gets a lot harder if you are trying to get an organization, even a small one, to agree on the roadmap. It gets even harder when the stakes are high – when you have only one chance to release a version 1.0 of your product, and you need to make the right decision about what goes in, and what doesn’t go in. You can’t risk bloat, delay, mistakes, cloak-and-dagger politics, or bloody civil war.

I have developed some roadmapping techniques to get through the process smoothly and make the right decisions. I have used this with individual entrepreneurs, my own products, venture funded startups with 50 people, and big companies with separate divisions for product development and marketing.

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