Product roadmaps today are filled with challenges and obstacles – from properly estimating scope and time to ensuring that all teams involved understand and work towards a common goal.
Craft.io’s Strategic Roadmap puts all of these pieces together by providing you with a long-term view of all of your product plans in one place – systematically setting a vision and objectives, key results and milestones alongside the development work so that everyone is aligned for success.
Craft.io's Strategic Roadmap view is designed with OKRs in mind, but the terms objectives and key results could be replaced to represent the approach you take in your company (Goals and initiatives, KPIs etc).
Accessing the Strategic Roadmap
To reach the Strategic Roadmap, click on Roadmap within the Roadmap section on the main navigation menu.
Strategic Roadmap Components
Your Strategic Roadmap contains the following Craft.io components:
Releases: High-level time containers which house Objectives and Key Results (i.e. outcomes), as well as Epics and Features (i.e. outputs/deliverables).
Releases can be named as Releases or can be changed to quarters/months/versions, based on the planning cadence of your company. Releases are, in many cases, are not aligned to the development release cycles, and are serving as a product time container.Objectives: These are typically intentionally broad and speak of the team’s long-term mission; for example, “Improve the user experience by addressing core product performance issues.”
Key Results: Specific and actionable, Key Results reflect the actions you want to take to achieve your objective; for example, “Decrease average 1st page load time for United States users from 4.62 seconds in Feb 2022 to 500ms in August 2022”.
Epics/Features: These are the deliverables that the development teams will eventually build, either in high resolution (Epics) or low resolution (Features).
Tip: Feel free to change this terminology in your Workspace Settings at any time.
Strategic Roadmap Views
You can organize your roadmap via four different views, each allowing you to view your data through a different lens: Summary View, Epics/Features view and OKRs view. Switch between these views simply by toggling the options in the top toolbar.
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail:
Roadmap View #1: Epics/Features
The first 2 views focus on Epics and Features, providing you with a detailed view of how both fit into a Release. If you wish to go more granular and look at feature level, the parent Epic will be shown above each children group.
Roadmap View #2: OKRs
Using the OKRs View, your team can focus on the strategic picture by looking at the Release name alongside its Objectives and Key Results. This allows you to connect the dots between why you’re developing the product, which problems you’re trying to solve, and how these connect to your individual Releases.
Roadmap View #3: Summary
The last view is the Summary View, which displays the breakdown of your product releases and milestones on the roadmap. This is perfect for when you require a high-level summary of a complex product roadmap. In this view, only Release names are visible, allowing you to stay focused on the bigger picture.
Now, that we covered the basics, head to the Craft.io Strategic Roadmap - Advanced article.