What Is A Portfolio Roadmap? How To Create Yours In 7 Steps
Congratulations! If you’re reading this guide, then you’re likely starting to work on long-term product planning for your company, which means that management has recognized your strategic thinking skills. Alternatively, you have just started your own stack of products and want to build a comprehensive plan for success.
No matter the case, you have come to the right place. Together, we will conduct a deep dive into portfolio roadmaps, and you’ll learn how to make one for yourself.
What Is A Portfolio Roadmap?
A portfolio roadmap is a visual representation of the results of your strategic planning efforts. It showcases every product that you need to build or improve in order to meet your strategic goals on a time scale.
A typical portfolio roadmap will look something like this:
On the roadmap, you will showcase the different initiatives under each product that you want to improve, along with your key milestones, launch dates, and deliverables for each initiative.
Apart from the mentioned elements, portfolio roadmaps also visualize the resources spent on the entire endeavor broken down by teams and divisions. This helps you to obtain a high-level view of how to allocate resources and use your team’s time and efforts effectively.
What A Product Portfolio Roadmap Should Achieve
Now, let’s talk about the goals that you want to achieve by building a portfolio roadmap. Generally, a portfolio roadmap is meant to assist with the following:
- Communicating your vision with your stakeholders and team
- Creating an actionable plan that your company can execute
- Understanding the timeline and resources required to achieve your strategic goals
Finally, it helps you to prioritize and optimize large chunks of work within the scope of your roadmap.
Benefits Of A Portfolio Roadmap
I would argue that carrying out product portfolio management with a roadmap is among the most impactful tasks that a product management team can do. After all, you are defining the path that the entire company, or a large division, will take in the foreseeable future.
Apart from that, a well-planned roadmap will allow you to achieve the following benefits:
- Better decision-making as you have a high-level visual overview of the entire endeavor
- Better transparency as everyone in your team has a clear understanding of what needs to be done
- Risk mitigation as you can track the progress of your teams and review the plan when something unexpected happens with their progress
- Increased focus as the entire company or division will work on tasks that contribute to your roadmap objective
Of course, we should not forget about the ease of communication with stakeholders. It is much easier for people to perceive the plan when it’s presented visually as opposed to a long document with thousands of words.
When Is A Portfolio Roadmap Useful?
Should you prepare a portfolio roadmap for every product in every company? No!
Building and maintaining a portfolio roadmap takes a considerable amount of time. This effort is worth it only when you have multiple teams working towards a common goal.
If you are in a small startup with a single team of 5 members, most of the benefits of a roadmap will be irrelevant to them. Since the team is so small, they don’t need to align their work with many others. Thus, in this situation, sharing a product vision will be much easier with a simple presentation along with a basic roadmap instead of spending weeks preparing a complete portfolio roadmap.
How To Build A Portfolio Roadmap
While it takes considerable time to complete, the process of building a portfolio roadmap is fairly straightforward as it consists of only seven easy-to-comprehend steps.
Step 1: Identify Your Primary Objective
Every successful endeavor in business (and anywhere else) starts with a well-defined goal.
What is it that you want to achieve as a result of utilizing teams to build multiple interrelated products? A clear answer to this will help you align the efforts of all your product teams toward your goal and successfully achieve it.
Traditionally, your primary objective is either your product vision or a clear big step taking you towards your vision.
Let’s imagine it’s 2015, and you’re working for Tesla, planning the efforts of your teams for the next year or so. You would first look at your vision – affordable electric cars for everyone. Then, think about the next big step you need to take toward it. Maybe it’s about finally dropping the price of Model 3 to $35k without any tricky workarounds?
That looks like a clear goal. Yes, it’s a hard one to achieve, but it’s clear. The hardware and software development teams working on different products in your company will now see the big picture and strive towards it.
Step 2: Gather Project Information
Our next step after setting a goal would be to understand the scope of the work necessary to achieve said goal.
You will usually break your eventual goal down into smaller pieces (e.g., a $35k Tesla requires cheaper batteries and an integrated production cycle) and understand:
- The product lines involved (e.g., battery production)
- Individual products that need development, including existing and new products
- Customer feedback on existing products to evaluate whether or not something needs improvements
- The scope of the work under each individual product
This phase will involve a lot of collaboration with your project managers, product team, engineers, designers, as well as your leadership.
Step 3: Understand Your Key Deliverables and Milestones
Similar to how we need to set a global goal for the entire endeavor, we will define goals for each sub-product and team as well.
Specifically, at the more tactical level, we will focus on clearly defining the deliverables for each team. These deliverables, of course, need to be aligned and contribute in reaching our main business objective.
An example deliverable in the Tesla case would be to build a new battery factory in Mexico to cut production costs or to sign a partnership deal with Panasonic to access their battery technology.
Apart from deliverables, we will also need to set key milestones that will help our project managers coordinate the work needed from our teams.
For our Tesla example, a good milestone would be shipping 10,000 batteries per month by the end of the year.
Step 4: Handle The Allocation of Resources
I don’t ever remember a case when a company had unlimited resources to spend on a project. Most of the time, it will be the exact opposite of that – too many product development endeavors to handle with not enough resources.
So, you have no choice but to be extremely cautious with the usage of resources in your portfolio roadmap planning. Again, we will need the help of our project, product, and engineering teams to give us an estimate on the number of teammates required for our plans as well as the approximate time frames required for each part of the plan.
My suggestion here is to look at three core criteria when allocating resources: alignment with long-term product strategy, added value, and amount of resources required.
Step 5: Find Interdependencies
When planning a large product plan consisting of multiple sub-products and the work of numerous teams, you are very likely to face cases when one team cannot start its work without the other finishing theirs.
For this, you will have to map out all of the dependencies between teams and large epics, then arrange the work of your team members in a way so that none of them are blocked.
Luckily, modern portfolio management and roadmapping tools have native features that help to automatically arrange the work based on their interdependencies. Advanced Roadmaps in Jira is an example of this.
Apart from the auto arrangement of epics and support for agile backlogs, it will also give you alerts every time you manually place an epic on its timeline (even if it’s on a different swimlane) before a dependent one.
Step 6: Make It Visual
Your end goal with the portfolio roadmap management is to communicate your plan with your stakeholders and your team. Yes, you will use it later on to track progress and have a high-level view of the alignment of your strategic roadmap with the current reality. However, communication is the first and most important part you must handle.
Sure, you may create visuals by manually drawing on your roadmap using PowerPoint or Miro, but I wouldn’t recommend that. Instead, I suggest using a specialized product roadmapping software that comes with an integrated Kanban board, Gantt chart, support for different types of roadmaps, product idea management, metrics/KPI tracking, and other features.
Step 7: Communicate Your Roadmap
Once the visual representation of your roadmap is ready, it’s time to schedule a big meeting with all of your stakeholders to present it and gather their feedback.
If you have over 10 people to share it with, you may want to rethink holding a single presentation. After all, the theoretical maximum number of participants in an effective meeting is no more than 10.
So, when there’s a larger number of people, consider having separate meetings with relevant groups (management, development team, product team, etc.).
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A portfolio roadmap is a fantastic tool for communicating your vision with everyone in the company and ensuring their efforts are focused on your strategic goals. While it takes some time to build one, the benefits you get from it vastly outweigh the resources you spend.
Having a product portfolio roadmap is great, but it’s only one of the many deliverables that product managers need to prepare. To learn about the rest, sign up for our newsletter.
