I'd love to know more about your roadmapping process and any tools you use to make it easier to visualize the roadmap and report progress on key initiatives.

I love this question because I have been asking people this same one for ever since I started in Product roles :) It’s also an exhausting question because roadmaps and their processes are so highly tuned to the org/company itself that when we share these with each other it’s hard to not get lost in the "how will this work for me/us?" Here is what’s important in this area IMHO:

Process: Think, plan, and tell the story around outcomes not features

• I’m currently working to drive proficiency and skill development around the Opportunity Mapping approach that Teresa Torres teaches in her book Continuous Discovery. Of all the "process" things to focus on, this one is powerful because it shifts thinking from features to outcomes and gives a pretty easy way to map those out. I highlight this because this leads a product team to create an outcome based roadmap vs. a feature based roadmap.
• Also, our CPO has really pushed us to start our work with a written narrative about the consumer problems, why they matter, and put them in the context of the insights we gleaned via discovery. We often forget that the roadmap is the visual representation of the story we are trying to sell, and putting things on a side isn’t the same cognitive process of putting a written story together. I think that in order to be efficient, product teams around the world have become so hyper focused on the output of the roadmap itself, we lost sight of the "why" behind it, and the written narrative has been a great way to rebuild that muscle
• I call these out as key process upgrades because the purpose of the roadmap is not to make sure a roadmap gets produced, but it’s to make sure we are creating the right outcomes.

Tools: Spoiler alert...

Google sheets and slides.

• I have evaluated a lot of road mapping tools, and I will still evaluate more, but it seems to come down to two things:
• The actual slides / deck of the roadmap (whether for customers, the exec team, the board) always require us to make visual / storytelling choices where we can’t use the out of the box views etc. from the tools. So, no matter what tool we are using, we are always creating a roadmap in slides :)
• Team adoption. I think it’s important to make sure individual teams are bought in to whatever tool we want to roll out. My common experience here is that a lot of these road mapping tools are interesting and a curiosity to teams, but they have something that is "good enough" in place. Long way of saying that its low on the priority list.
• Don’t get me wrong, I think the tools in the Product Stack are critical. However, I think tool selection needs to be aligned to where the teams can get the most value. As an example, right now, I/we are more focused on tools that help product teams conduct discovery and interact with more consumers/customers. I could see opening up the road mapping tools conversation in a future horizon.