Visualizing Roadmaps

There are endless ways to visually present a roadmap. Search engines and commonly used charting software have plenty of examples and tools to create these. However, some established examples exist that are worth mentioning to help illustrate the options.

Gantt Charts are the grandparent of all modern roadmaps, being invented sometime before 1915. They use horizontal bar charts to illustrate time, task durations, and task relationships. The local PMP in your organization knows these inside-and-out as they are the old-school project visualization.

The benefit of Gantt Charts is that they are a well known visual. The downside of Gantt charts is that they imply a level of project management and planning that a roadmap doesn’t necessarily include. Roadmaps are a forecast, often spanning many quarters or even years. Gantt charts were created to track a project that is being actively managed. Each specific roadmap item may be a project! This means that a roadmap could be represented by a series of Gantt charts.

Thus, Gantt Charts are a useful visualization for roadmaps but no matter the audience, it should be made clear and said often that the roadmap is not a project plan.

PERT charts are a lesser known visualization. Developed by the US Navy in the 1950s to help manage exceptionally complex projects, PERT charts can lend help to roadmap construction.

From a visual perspective, PERT charts tend to reply on boxes (milestones) and arrows (activity to reach the next activity). Once the visual metaphor is understood, audiences quickly understand how the roadmap works and can ask questions about it.

However, because PERT charts are not commonly used AND because PERT charts are typically converted to Gantt charts (if PERT is used at all) they aren’t seen in most organizations.

Also, because PERT chart format includes estimates about start and finish dates, it can be seen as a higher-probability project plan rather than a forecast. The upside is that the lower familiarity with PERT can work in favor of the roadmap team as they label things “estimated start” and viewers won’t automatically read that as a “plan” as a Gantt might cause to happen.

A Gantt and PERT chart are both specific examples of the larger category of “timelines” that exists. In general, any graph where the passage of time is represented on one axis can be a timeline. The critical element here is that time is clearly and consistently represented (typically along the x-axis) and that the categories used to differentiate roadmap items (typically the y-axis) are clear, easily understood, and can be explained to the audience.

A “swimlane diagram” is an example of a timeline that can be used to show roadmap items categorized by teams doing work, strategic alignment, customer segments being addressed, or any other number of relevant breakdowns. (Note: each of those examples would be a single swimlane diagram! And it may be a good idea to create several, each focusing on the dimensions a specific audience would understand and be focused upon.)

In some situations, a Kanban board could be useful to show how potential features or projects will move ahead. However, Kanban boards really report on the current status of effort. They do not typically work well for forecasting or showing plans for future releases. (A “pool of ideas” for example is good, but doesn’t help show when that pool will become real.)

Most roadmaps, as discussed in this chapter, are likely the more customized “technology roadmap” that Wikipedia discusses. There isn’t a single way to do this. User Story Mapping could be seen as a technology roadmap that meets all of the elements discussed earlier, although it tends to fall closer to “project planning” than “long-range planning and forecasting”.

The bottom line, and the reason to include this reference to the Wikipedia article is to highlight that roadmaps are not a science. A successful roadmap considers the needs of the organization, the problems being solved, the technologies involved, the people involved in delivering solutions, and any other intangibles that are relevant.

As such, feel free to use whatever timeline approach works and adapt it as needed so long as it helps inspire conversation, identify risks, demonstrate alignment to organizational strategy, and communicate all of this through a few simple visualizations and documents!