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By Brant Wilkerson-New
February 11, 2025
What do you do when you are lost on the road? You reach out for your GPS to find a visual representation of directions so you can easily reach your destination. Without a map, you will be going in circles. The same principle is valid for technical writing: it needs documentation roadmaps to create, update, and improve a document over its lifetime.
A roadmap matches documentation work with product development cycles and maximizes resource allocation. The right documentation roadmap boosts task management, supports product strategy and user needs, and makes businesses more goal-oriented, flexible, and dynamic.
Understanding the Purpose of a Roadmap
To create a product roadmap, you need to define its purpose first. Launching a new roadmap is similar to driving when you input the address you want to go to.
Documentation roadmaps align documentation efforts with product development. They help agile teams put strategic goals and decisions in order based on user impact and business objectives. They also provide visibility into progress and resource allocation while helping stakeholders grasp timelines and dependencies.
When roadmap templates are visually appealing and properly implemented, organizations can better manage their product development process and documentation resources, delivering more value to their users.
Initial Assessment
Good preparation will make the roadmap work more efficient and productive. Before looking for new documentation, perhaps you can update a roadmap that already exists. So, start with a comprehensive audit of existing documentation. Now is the opportunity to spot gaps, review user feedback, top customer stories, and marketing case studies, and analyze usage metrics.
Creating a roadmap requires teams to examine support tickets to understand where documentation falls short and assess the overall quality and accuracy of existing content. If a specific feature pops up frequently, this means that extra documentation is required.
It’s also the right moment for product managers to share insights about the product roadmap and for engineers to provide information about upcoming technical changes on a product or project.
Support internal teams often offer various types of roadmaps on common user pain points, and direct user feedback helps identify specific internal and external documentation needs and preferences on the product over time.
The initial assessment is the time when all parties involved brainstorm and show how existing documentation affects and improves their business strategy.
Goal Setting
A successful project roadmap requires clear, well-defined goals, product vision, and strategy.
Organizations should establish practices for creating specific, measurable documentation objectives that fit broader business goals. These objectives may include improving user onboarding success rates, remote product management, reducing support tickets, increasing documentation coverage for key features, etc.
To define your strategy and verify that a goal has been achieved, stakeholders must determine how they will measure time and resources for each documentation project. It is just as important as identifying target audiences with their needs and preferences in mind.
Prioritization Framework
Technical writers trying to achieve effective roadmaps typically prioritize documentation needs based on a structured framework that considers multiple factors. Again, the point is to see how well the documentation is performing with regard to achieving its goals and fulfilling expectations.
- Impact assessment examines user reach, business value, and technical implications.
- Teams should consider how many users will benefit from specific documentation improvements, how documentation projects support business objectives, and whether certain documentation blocks technical adoption or implementation.
- Teams must also overview technical complexity, review processes, and evaluate content creation time, product management, and market research requirements. This assessment balances high-impact projects against available resources and capabilities.
Roadmap Structure
It’s now time to build the roadmap, starting by building a roadmap template. This should be organized into separate timeframes with different planning purposes.
- Near-term planning, covering the next one to three months, requires detailed task breakdowns, specific deadlines, clear resource assignments, and explicit end-goal processes.
- Mid-term planning encompasses three to six months and focuses on major documentation initiatives and expected product changes.
- Long-term planning, usually six to twelve months out, addresses strategic documentation goals and major roadmap software or platform changes.
Implementation Planning
Each work item on the roadmap is matched to detailed implementation planning.
Project scope and deliverables should be clearly defined, along with required resources and skills. A product manager must identify dependencies and prerequisites, establish timelines and milestones, and determine success criteria.
Part of a good roadmap is to anticipate potential risks and develop a mitigating strategic plan even before potential problems arise.
Review Process
The roadmap should be reviewed and assessed continuously. Such continuous evaluation means that minor hiccups don’t grow into major issues.
The review process includes stakeholder reviews and feedback. Leadership provides buy-in, while product teams should validate priorities and confirm resource availability.
Each type of roadmap must meet product development plans and timelines, thanks to stakeholder feedback, which adjusts priorities, timelines, and resource allocation.
Maintenance and Updates
A roadmapping tool should be regularly maintained to remain effective.
Teams must establish regular review cycles, including weekly progress updates, monthly priority reviews, and quarterly strategic alignments.
Changes in the product roadmap, resource availability, business priorities, or user feedback patterns may end up updating the roadmap. Again, to stay on track, any changes should be made early so that the roadmap reflects reality rather than a bygone purpose.
Best Practices
Here are some tips on how to design successful product roadmaps.
- Flexibility is important, as teams must accommodate unexpected work and shifting priorities. It keeps everybody in the loop and adds realistic deadlines to the roadmap.
- The roadmap should be easily accessible and regularly updated. Roadmap designers should communicate changes to all stakeholders to help them keep up with the project.
- The goal of a roadmap is to deliver value or it’s a waste of time and effort. Teams should focus on delivering value and target user needs.
Progress Tracking
All efforts must be evaluated, and this holds true for roadmaps, too. Roadmaps must be assessed and monitored according to clear indicators. Once a stage has been completed, the team moves to the next step.
When stakeholders are updated on new tasks and progress made, they maintain their attention and focus and feel like they are part of the project. They are then more willing to dedicate time and effort.
Tools and Technology
How do we create modern roadmaps? Technology is at our service. Project management platforms such as Jira, Trello, and Asana help track progress and manage tasks.
Specialized roadmap tools like ProductPlan and Aha! offer features specifically designed for roadmap themes, creation, and maintenance.
Visualization tools such as Miro and Lucidchart help communicate related roadmap information effectively to team members in a way that’s obvious, visual, and catchy.
A Roadmap for Your Business Success
A well-designed documentation roadmap is a key stepping stone for technical writing projects.
What makes a roadmap the success it deserves? Careful planning, regular updates, and stakeholder engagement. Teams can create roadmaps that guide documentation efforts and maintain flexibility because situations change constantly.
The roadmap is a living document that evolves with organizational needs and supports your business objectives. It’s your blueprint for success.
If you need help building your company’s roadmap, contact us today to share your project’s goals and find out how we can help. TimelyText is a trusted professional writing service and instructional design consulting partner for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
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Exactly how I’ve told stories has changed through the years, going from writing college basketball analysis in the pages of a newspaper to now, telling the stories of the people of TimelyText. Nowadays, that means helping a talented technical writer land a new gig by laying out their skills, or even a quick blog post about a neat project one of our instructional designers is finishing in pharma.
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