A roadmap’s purpose is to serve as a communication tool to drive the strategic plan towards the company vision. By nature, it lives in a limbo of constant updates to adapt to the environment uncertainties and opportunities and is particularly attached to the stage of the company. Previously, our biggest challenge was to launch our platform and bring the first live client into it thus our roadmap was structured with that in mind.
However, thanks to the information we collected along the way, we have now reached a new stage as a company where our priorities have shifted to address these new problems and milestones. From our former roadmap to product research to we heard your feedback and took it all in to relaunch an improved public roadmap.
See our relaunched product roadmap here
This is a great opportunity to explain our product communication strategy going forward and the reasoning behind it.
Challenges 🤺
All the cards were features (outputs) instead of problems (outcomes) which meant we had twice the job in maintaining the public and the private roadmap. Yet, we learned that the lack of information on the roadmap meant many people did not quite understand what each of those items actually translate to.
Relaunching the Public Roadmap 🚀
The roadmap is a far more dynamic way for us to communicate, and needs to be updated constantly. It provides an easy way to understand where we are headed and supports our community team in answering all kinds of requests on our channels.
So we decided to change some of the things we were doing with it:
- Linking the Now section with our current cycle. Our “Now” column will directly match the level of detail (smaller scope) that our 5 week cycles have. This is the kind of information and explanations you were used to get from our Product Cycle Updates instead of being higher-level areas of improvement.
- Tagging every product with impact. We now provide tags for every product that each card is related to. This helps different personas focus on just what will have an impact for them. E.g. Now, Integrators can just look for “Merchant’s API”, our client’s support team can look for “Merchant’s Dashboard” and our buyers for “Widget” or “Wallet”.
- Hide brands/partners, announcing the next currency or partner we’re adding is mostly a marketing initiative, and often we choose not to disclose that info. As such, we will be displaying “Add Plugin” and when we get clearance from other areas we can add more details. This way you still understand what’s our focus before we can provide the news 😉
- Change the “future” section to “to discover”, there are multiple great ideas, but we’d like to avoid overcrowding the roadmap. So instead, we will be showing those topics that in one way or another we are committed to explore and research, but still not quite sure of when or if they will be added to the platform.
- Move to Notion, a tool which we are using as a wiki and for our internal processes. Allows everyone in the product management team to take charge of their own parts of the product without needing to go to another tool. Also, it allows us to provide more information on the homepage instead of forcing people to open a specific card with explanation of how the roadmap works.
To understand the roadmap, I will pick a few examples of the topics we have on it.
For instance, “Rebranding First Phase” affects multiple parts of the system such as our Wallet, the Merchant’s Dashboard and the Website. This means almost everyone will notice this type of feature. Mostly it involves changing the most basic elements like logo, fonts and colours.
This is quite different from “Simplify Authentication” on the Merchant’s Public API which allows easier integration and quicker development of plugins, but where the visibility is completely off to buyers.
During the last few months a lot of what we have done might have gone unnoticed. Just picking on some of those, we’d like to show you the skim of what we have delivered at every release.
Here are the release notes and the emojis were based on https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/.
Relaunching Product Roadmap was originally published in UTRUST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.