Roadmapping Sessions
Before starting on any journey, it’s wise to plan ahead. We offer our Roadmapping service as a way to assess where you currently are, where you would like to go and then map the best way to get there based on your resources and time frame.
After our session, you’ll have a clear overview of the problems you currently face as well as a plan to solve them. From there you can work to implement the roadmap in-house or continue to work with us, the choice is yours.
Here’s what to expect in our Roadmapping session:
1. DISCOVERY
First off it's all about you. We’ll go into more detail about your brand, your customers, your business model and your goals.
a. Your Brand
At the heart of each brand is a story and a vision. Even if you feel like you've strayed from this or it's in the process of changing, it's good to first get that core-level understanding of what drives the brand and work our way out from there.
b. Your Customers
What type of people will be interacting with this project? We’ll learn about your ideal customers and users, and attempt to gain a better understanding of who this product is intended for. If you have personas or information on your demographics, this will come in handy.
c. Your Business Model
It's useful to know how your business functions — are you driving tons of traffic from social media? Do you have a popular affiliate program? Do you sell courses on a sister site? Do you have a family of brands that integrate together? These all fuel decisions we make later and it's good to have a sense of how your business works.
d. Your Goals
What are your goals for your business? If it was in its ideal state, what would it look like? They don't have to be grandiose, larger than life goals (though they can be) but often it's easier to reverse-engineer small steps from your larger vision than cobble together small steps not knowing where they lead.
2. YOUR PROJECT
Why this project, why now? From there we will discuss the specific project you want to work on together. Keeping in mind the larger business issues surrounding it, we might push you to consider other alternative solutions or reprioritize. We want to establish how this specific project will be beneficial to your business and make sure you're going to get an ROI. We'll also work on defining what success looks like so we can make sure to include those specifics in the plan.
3. TIME / BUDGET / HUMAN RESOURCES
Sure, pie-in-the-sky talk is nice but unfortunately in business there's always some restrictions — whether they're time, budget, and/or human resources — we should discuss what's realistic. Usually there's a solution, whether it's slowing the timeline to fit your budget or outsourcing more to get the project done quickly. It's important to create a roadmap that's achievable.
4. PRIORITIES
It's easy to add on a lot of "nice-to haves" and the core of the project gets lost. We want to clearly agree on what the priorities for the project. Based on these, we can break the project into segments and create milestones for the project.
5. AVOIDING STUMBLING BLOCKS
It's also important to assess potential stumbling blocks. This is a good time to bring forward anything that could keep the project from being successful — have you tried something similar before and run into issues? Is there a skills gap in your team? Is another part of the business potentially holding the project back?
Our goal here is to systematically identify anything that could cause the project to fail so we can address the issues early and mitigate them.
6. REVIEW
It's always good to circle back one more time and review the goals of the project. Have we come up with anything that holds us back from reaching these goals? Are there any closing thoughts or suggestions on how we can solve your problem faster or better?
After the session, we’ll write the documentation for the roadmap that includes a summary of the information covered in the call as well as suggested milestones and timelines with projected budgets. Depending on the specific project, there might be additional materials such as wireframes, information architecture suggestions etc.