- A UX roadmap is a strategic living artifact
that aligns, prioritizes and communicates
a UX team's future work and the problems they need to solve.
Successful roadmapping includes six key high-level steps,
establishing goals, gathering inputs, creating themes,
prioritizing those themes, visualizing and sharing,
and finally, revisiting and updating.
Now, let's walk through each of these steps
and how to do them.
Before you even begin, I want you to establish your goals.
Roadmaps must have a clear purpose, stakeholder support,
and buy-in in order to even be effective.
I want you to focus on two key things in this step.
First, determining your objective.
Why are you spending time roadmapping?
To be clear, this isn't the goal of your project,
but rather, why you are spending resources
making this artifact.
This may be something like increasing team awareness,
managing bandwidth and resource allocation,
or just communicating to stakeholders.
This is also the time to identify your scope.
What type of roadmap are you making?
Establish your core team,
the people who are going to participate in this process.
Next up, gathering inputs.
Once you have your roadmapping objective and core team
gather potential roadmap inputs.
Your goal is to acquire any information that helps you
identify and prioritize potential problems to solve.
These potential inputs come in all shapes and sizes.
Don't worry too much about what each input means
for your roadmap just yet.
Gather what you have.
Past artifacts, like previous or higher-level roadmaps,
journey maps, service blueprints,
as well as existing research,
like qualitative or quantitative data related to your scope,
voice of customer feedback, or even market research surveys.
Step three, creating your themes.
Now that we have all of our inputs,
our goal is to start creating the themes for our roadmap.
Themes are high-level bundles of future work.
We can do this in a three-step process.
First, inventory your problems to solve
based on the inputs you collected.
The goal in this stage is to uncover potential problems
from various inputs and consolidate them into a single list.
Next, from this list,
we're going to assess patterns in it and form clusters.
Name each cluster in a way
that summarizes the larger problem.
From here, once you have your clusters,
the goal is to organize and label them into proper themes.
This means identifying the beneficiary,
the recipient of the work and their need,
the problem that you will solve.
And then, last, the business objective,
the potential outcome, from the business's point of view.
This portion of the process will take time.
If you're creating a roadmap collaboratively,
discuss as a group each theme's beneficiary need
and business objective.
Now that we have our themes,
the next step is to prioritize them.
There are several established methods
to prioritize and determine which themes
have the highest importance.
For example, RICE, Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort,
or critical path, prioritizing tasks within a primary flow,
or the Kano model,
ranking items against users' perceived value,
or even MoSCoW, must have, should have,
could not have, and will not have.
You can also create your own scoring framework
by establishing criteria,
and then determining a scoring scale for each criterion.
Once you have a forced rank,
collaboratively plot the top themes
to the closest time horizons, now or next.
Themes with lower score
should be assigned to later time horizons,
future, or future plus plus.
Loosely map each theme to a corresponding time horizon,
then take a step back and assess that outcome.
The next step of the process is deciding
how to visualize and share our roadmaps.
The final fidelity of our roadmap
should mirror what we want to achieve and who will see it.
The more specific your roadmap and smaller the audience,
the lower fidelity your roadmap should be.
Don't spend too much time polishing it, it's not worth it.
Pick a tool that everyone can easily access,
probably a spreadsheet,
a digital whiteboard, a slide deck,
and make edits within that tool.
And then last up, revisiting and updating.
Roadmaps are living artifacts.
Thus, they have to be revisited
and updated on a regular basis.
Upon creating your initial roadmap,
establish a routine cadence for revisiting and updating.
At a minimum, most roadmaps be revisited every month.
Move finished themes from now to completed.
Update themes that have had progress made,
and potentially add further clarification
to future themes where preliminary work has been done.
As you revise and edit, be sure to save past versions.
They come in handy when showing
stakeholders progress over time.
To conclude, don't be afraid
to adapt this process to your needs.
Switch it up as you go, make it a workshop,
create a hypothesis roadmap on your own,
and then vet it with peers,
or do one step a week over the course of a month.