How do you balance the level of complexity / granularity of a roadmap? What is just enough fix and flex?

What is shared on the roadmap is all about who the audience is you are talking or preparing it for review and what incentives they have. Some things I have found success with are:

• For the executive team the focus should be on a few large items or themes that have clear ties to business outcomes. If the business focus is on new revenue focusing on the high level items that are intended to drive new sales with high level explanation of how (It serves a new buyer persona, it is a new usage based add on, etc.

• For a delivery team the roadmap might need a lot more granularity and may need to be a lot shorter in time horizon. The team cares about what they are working on right now with a glimpse of the future. I find it is really important to remind the team of an overall vision, why it is important we are going there and how the most recent work keeps us moving in that direction to keep them motivated and focused on what we are doing.

• For fellow product managers you might focus on how your upcoming deliverables are impacting the larger KPIs or how you are building features they might leverage to improve their own KPIs.

There are many other stakeholders you could be building a view for at any time. Unfortunately there is not a one size fits all roadmap format for them because their incentives are different and you want to show them what you are working on as it contributes to those incentives.

Your roadmap should have just enough details on the top level that will explain the below three things:

• WHAT?

  • Summary of the problem, high level potential solution and the link to resources (documents, diagrams etc)

• Why?

  • Value prop and mapping with the business goals and priorities

• When?

  • Delivery time

  • It's great to break down the delivery time into smaller chunks and have clear milestones for the phases.

The rest of the details and granularity should be out of the roadmap and into execution process/tools.