Verdigris Roadmap Webpage

Roadmaps is a powerful communication tool for teams of all kinds to share their priorities and goals with the rest of the organization. It is an important strategic framework that provides direction and guidance to internal and external stakeholders.

However, while there’s general agreement that preparing a roadmap is important, the reality is that often roadmaps are not as effective in practice.

Unclear roadmap was a big challenge in our company.

We used to use spreadsheets to map out features as a roadmap. It was hard to have a general view for the products development, and it was hard to be read by non-engineers, which caused alignment issues. The main problems were as follows:

[Format] The roadmap in spreadsheets was hard to read;
[Content] It didn't reflect the functions (eg. software, platform, design);
[Content] The status of features were unclear (eg. backlog, in design, in progress, completed);
[Content] It didn't reflect how a product will evolve over time (eg. new features, improvements, user stickiness, testing, and infrastructure);
[Alignment] The design, sales, research, hiring, and finance couldn't align to the product roadmap;
[Alignment] Milestones were unclear.

To solove these problems, I decided to make clear the target audience and how would they interact with the roadmap.

PO: Frequently check the roadmap for sprint plannings;

Team members: Occasionally check the roadmap to see company’s long-term vision and mission, also understand individual’s next work and direction;

Customer account managers/sales: Check the product releasing date and progress;

Customer: Check what’s in plan and what’s in progress.

There are so many types of roadmaps: strategic roadmap, hiring roadmap, product roadmap, project roadmap, innovation roadmap, technology roadmap, marketing roadmap, and etc. I tried to narrow down the essential roadmaps for our company at current stage:

For company wide: Company Strategic Roadmap + Company Product roadmap

For POs: Company Product Roadmap

Built a one-page site to include the latest company roadmaps.

In this project, I was responsible for website design and the static webpage development. Created roadmap charts by using d3.js.