How To Communicate Your Roadmap Across The Organization

A well-crafted roadmap is a huge accomplishment. Congratulations. You have a clearly defined plan of action and prioritized opportunities for improvement.

But I’m here to tell you that while you might be raring to take action, there is one more key step to ensure success: sharing the roadmap across your organization.

And by this, I don’t mean sending out a single ‘FYI’ Slack message and calling it a day. I mean real communication that fosters understanding and alignment for what you have outlined in your roadmap. The way you communicate your roadmap could make or break all the incredible product optimizations and plans you have in there.

When cross-departmental teams are on board with your roadmap, there is no question about plans or prioritization. The roadmap serves as a shared plan of action and keeps the organization on track for product goals.

Here’s how you do it.

Give your roadmap a home and start building visibility

The first step in communicating a roadmap across the organization is creating a home for it. It needs to be visible and accessible to your team. Ideally, it lives somewhere that is natural to your internal workflows/tooling and is frequently accessed by your team.

This could mean:

• Uploading to Google Drive or Sharepoint
• Pinning to a dedicated Slack channel
• Creating a shared Airtable or Notion base

For the perfectionists out there, there’s no one right or wrong way to store your roadmap. It will depend on your organizational structure, size, and goals.

Once you have a home for your roadmap, start building visibility. While it’s good for you to know your roadmap like the back of your hand, it’s even better for your teammates to get invested.

A siloed roadmap is a debilitated roadmap, so make sure various team leads can access it.

Tailor the messaging based on stakeholders

A good product leader can bridge the gaps and translate messages across teams. This is a skill you’ll need to leverage when communicating the roadmap across your organization.

The best messaging for sharing the roadmap will likely look different based on the stakeholders you’re working with.

Leadership

Generally speaking, organizational leadership prefers to focus on high-level goals and outcomes rather than the specific features you’ll use to achieve those goals. While this isn’t true for every leader, it’s a good place to start.

Focus on themes in your roadmap to explain to your leadership or external stakeholders what you hope to achieve and your expected performance. How you achieve it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re solving the problem.

Outline what you’re trying to achieve and share what this stakeholder audience will find most relevant. For example:

• Themes
• Objectives
• Initiatives
• General timeframes

Individual contributors

When sharing with individual contributors, you’ll likely want to get into more of the “why” and the “how” than you would with leadership. It may spur some debate, but it will allow your team to discuss tactics within the context of the theme and possibly come up with unique ways to achieve your goals.

More specifics will come in handy, including:

• Specific tasks and milestones
• Detailed timelines
• Ownership

Shoulder teams

There is also value in sharing the roadmap with people who might not always be part of the product strategy or executing the roadmap but can offer a lot of valuable input based on their experience in other areas of the company.

Connecting across departments and getting early buy-in makes teams work faster and ship better products.

The most effective products are built with human-centered product management in mind. This ​​approach creates products and makes decisions based on and for the user, and it also prioritizes collaborating with teams outside of the day-to-day work and connecting with them where they are.

Shoulder teams benefit from knowing more theoretical elements like:

• How the roadmap impacts their roles/department
• Overview of projects
• What benefits and value it can drive

In many cases, working with different experts means learning to speak their language and translating between teams. Getting everyone on the same page can be tough, but it is worth the effort.

Pick the right forum and format

“The medium is the message” is a mantra repeated by communications leaders around the world. The forum in which you share a message is equally as important as or even more important than the message itself. This rings true for sharing roadmaps as well.

A roadmap isn’t just a list of priorities; it’s a story of where you’re going and why. Sharing that story in the right forum builds alignment and trust, while sharing it in the wrong one can leave it overlooked.

So, what are some ways to communicate your roadmap beyond typical sharing methods like a presentation or email?

In our conversations with B2B research leaders, René Bastijans gave some tips on how to circulate research that can be applied to roadmap dissemination as well. Visibility is key to making sure that teams reference the roadmap and use it to help make decisions.

He builds alignment and visibility through what he calls “Learning Lunches,” 25-minute presentations with Q&A designed to share insights and keep everyone moving in the same direction. You can apply the same approach to your roadmap by creating an informal, open forum where teams can ask questions and gain clarity on how the roadmap impacts their work.

Get together to present the roadmap and share updates on progress. This more casual approach to a presentation offers learning opportunities for the team, helps them feel ownership over the product, and, in turn, continued buy-in.

Another effective forum for communicating your roadmap is one-on-one conversations with the team. While you may not be able to get to everyone at the organization, finding ways to share your plan in a more intimate environment fosters trust and helps show more individually what impact the roadmap will have on their role.

At your organization, a presentation to each team or even an email might be the right fit. Just be sure to leverage a dedicated time when your audience is focused and invested.

Make sure your roadmap drives growth

Your roadmap is more than a strategic document. It’s a powerful tool to align teams, prioritize efforts, and deliver better user experiences. But even the most thoughtfully crafted roadmap can only reach its full potential if it’s communicated effectively across your organization.

By giving your roadmap a visible home, tailoring your messaging to different stakeholders, and selecting the right forums to share it, you can foster alignment, buy-in, and momentum for your product vision. Thoughtful communication transforms your roadmap from a static plan into a shared mission.

If you’re looking to build a customer-centric roadmap or need help identifying the highest-impact opportunities for your product, The Good can help. Our team of digital experience experts partners with companies to uncover customer insights, prioritize optimizations, and deliver measurable results.

Let’s work together to turn your product roadmap into a growth-driving force.