How To Create a Software Engineering Roadmap

When you use Google Maps, you can usually trust that each turn will ultimately take you to your final destination. However, sometimes it’s nice to see the bigger picture – to look at the entire map and understand how each direction fits together to take you from point A to B.

The same idea applies to software engineering roadmaps. These visual planning tools are more than timelines. They provide teams with the high-level view needed to make sure everyone knows where they’re going and how they’ll get there. They show a clear framework for what to build and when, and help teams to prioritize effectively, navigate roadblocks, and deliver exceptional results.

This guide walks through the fundamentals of building an engineering roadmap, from defining objectives and gathering crucial input to visualizing progress and leveraging powerful tools like Jellyfish to streamline execution and drive product success.

What Is an Engineering Roadmap?

An engineering roadmap is a high-level visual plan that outlines the technical steps and milestones required to develop a product, feature, or system. It concentrates on the technical “how” and “when” of product development and details the engineering work needed to realize the final product vision.

Most engineering roadmaps will include information such as technical dependencies, architecture, infrastructure components, code-level tasks, and detailed timelines (often in sprints or short cycles).

Due to the nature of this content, most engineering roadmaps are targeted at technical teams (engineers, developers, technical leads) and product managers, rather than C-suite executives or other department leads.

Understanding the Difference Between an Engineering Roadmap, Product Roadmap, and Technical Roadmap

You might hear these terms used interchangeably. However, there are key distinctions between each and their various purposes. Understanding these differences is crucial for effective planning and communication across teams.

Let’s clarify each type:

• Engineering Roadmap: This is a detailed, visual plan outlining the technical steps, tasks, and timelines needed to build and deliver a product or feature. It focuses on the “how” of implementation, addressing specific engineering challenges like code modules, infrastructure setup, and technical dependencies. Primarily for software engineering teams, it ensures everyone is aligned on the technical execution of the product vision.
• Technical Roadmap: This roadmap takes a broader perspective, outlining the evolution of the technology stack and infrastructure over time. It focuses on strategic technology choices and platform upgrades, and their impact on the product and business goals. Used by both technical and business stakeholders, technical roadmaps make sure that technology strategy supports the overall product vision and business objectives.
• Product Roadmap: This high-level roadmap defines the “why” and “what” of the product from a business perspective. It outlines the product vision, strategy, key features, and release timelines, focusing on user needs, market trends, and competitive analysis. Used by a wide audience, including marketing, sales, and executives, a product roadmap communicates product direction and how it will achieve business goals.

To sum it up, you can think of an engineering roadmap as a more tactical guide for a specific project for the engineering team to follow, whereas a technical roadmap considers your tech stack strategy and your product roadmap details your company’s product vision for wider audiences.

When Do Engineering Teams Need a Roadmap?

You might wonder if an engineering roadmap is really necessary. While each company and engineering team has its own processes and preferences, here are some key scenarios where a roadmap might come in handy:

When Building New Products or Features

The most obvious use case for an engineering roadmap is when you’re building new products or features. You might consider an engineering roadmap in these instances to help with the following:

• Provide a clear direction: A roadmap helps define the technical vision and outlines the steps required to bring a product or feature to life. This ensures everyone on the team is aligned and working towards the same goal.
• Facilitate strategic planning and prioritization: Roadmaps help break down complex projects into manageable phases, prioritize tasks based on dependencies and importance, and allocate resources effectively.
• Manage expectations: By visualizing timelines and milestones, engineering roadmaps set clear expectations for stakeholders about when certain features will be delivered.

When Dealing with Complex Systems or Architectures

One of the biggest benefits of using an engineering roadmap is that it can make an overwhelming or highly complicated project feel more manageable. Use an engineering roadmap to deconstruct your project into bitesize projects and decisions. For example, use a roadmap to:

• Emphasize technical dependencies: A roadmap helps visualize the relationships between different components and systems, making it easier to identify potential bottlenecks or integration challenges.
• Guide architectural decisions: Roadmaps provide a framework for making informed decisions about technology choices, infrastructure setup, and system design.
• Reduce risks: By identifying potential technical hurdles upfront, the roadmap allows teams to proactively mitigate risks and avoid costly delays.

When Working in Agile Environments

The fast-paced, iterative nature of Agile development means that sometimes it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees. Here’s how engineering roadmaps allow teams to maintain a quick, iterative development process without losing sight of overall project goals:

• Provides context for sprints: While agile focuses on short-term iterations, a roadmap offers a broader context, ensuring that sprint goals align with the overall technical direction.
• Supports iterative development: The roadmap can be adjusted based on feedback and changing requirements, allowing for flexibility while maintaining a clear vision.
• Improves communication and collaboration: It serves as a shared reference point for engineers, product managers, and stakeholders, fostering transparency and alignment.

When Scaling Products or Teams

An engineering roadmap can serve as a north star if your team is dealing with growing pains as it scales. Here’s how:

• Facilitates onboarding: A roadmap helps new team members quickly understand the technical landscape, existing systems, and future plans.
• Coordinates multiple teams: When multiple teams work on different parts of a product, the roadmap ensures their efforts are synchronized and contribute to the overall goal.
• Supports long-term strategic planning: It allows for strategic thinking and resource allocation to support future growth and expansion.

How to Build Your Engineering Roadmap with 5 Key Steps

Building a robust engineering roadmap doesn’t have to be too complicated. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started.

1. Define Big-Picture Goals and Scope

First, think big. You want to identify your overall product vision and goals before you start to think about the steps needed to execute the work. Document the following:

1. Understand the product vision. Start by identifying the overall product strategy and goals. What problems are you trying to solve? What are the key features and functionalities? This will help you understand what will make this project successful and how to prioritize work.
2. Identify technical goals. Next, translate product goals into specific technical objectives. This is where you start to make the process tactical. For example, what architectural changes are needed?
3. Determine scope. Clearly define the boundaries of your roadmap. Which engineering projects and initiatives will be included? What initiatives are outside of scope? What’s the timeframe?

2. Gather Inputs and Requirements

The next step is all about information gathering. Your goal is to gather information on team capacity, skillsets, tools, and more to see what resources are available and where you might have gaps.

1. Involve key stakeholders. Consult with product managers, engineers, designers, and other relevant teams to gather diverse perspectives and insights on what resources, steps, or tasks need to be included in your plan.
2. Conduct technical assessments. Evaluate existing systems, infrastructure, and technologies to identify strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks.
3. Analyze user needs. Consider user feedback, market trends, and competitive analysis to inform your technical decisions.

3. Break Down the Work

Now it’s time to define the individual, tactical steps that your team will follow to meet your product goals. Consider the following:

1. Identify key milestones. Divide the project into major phases or milestones, representing significant achievements or deliverables.
2. Define tasks and dependencies. Next, break down each milestone into smaller, manageable, weekly, and day-to-day tasks. Don’t forget to outline any dependencies between tasks in the software development process.
3. Estimate timelines. Assign realistic timeframes to each task and milestone, considering potential challenges and risks.

4. Visualize the Roadmap

The key characteristic of an engineering roadmap is that it’s visual and easy to understand at a glance. Spend time thinking about what visual format and information should be presented to best convey how work on the project will progress.

1. Choose a suitable format. Select a visual representation that best suits your needs. Popular options include Gantt charts, timelines, Kanban boards, and mind maps.
2. Highlight key information. Display milestones, timelines, dependencies, and assigned teams. Use color coding and visual cues to enhance clarity.
3. Keep it concise and focused. Avoid overwhelming the roadmap with excessive detail. Focus on high-level information and essential elements.

5. Review and Iterate

Think of your engineering roadmap as a living document. While the overarching product goal is unlikely to change, the individual tasks and steps you need to take to get there might. Use the following best practices to ensure everyone stays aligned even if things take an unexpected turn:

1. Share with stakeholders. Present the roadmap to relevant teams and stakeholders for feedback and alignment.
2. Incorporate feedback. Revise the roadmap based on feedback, ensuring it accurately reflects the project’s goals and priorities.
3. Integrate with project management tools. Connect your roadmap to tools like Jira, Asana, or Trello to synchronize tasks, track progress, and ensure seamless workflow between planning and execution. This helps maintain consistency and keeps everyone informed.
4. Regularly update. As the project progresses, update the roadmap to reflect changes in timelines, priorities, or scope.

Building Better Engineering Roadmaps with Jellyfish

Creating and maintaining a robust engineering roadmap is essential for any successful product development initiative. But without the right tools and insights, it can quickly become a complex and unwieldy manual process. That’s where Jellyfish comes in.

Jellyfish is an engineering management platform that can provide structure and visibility into engineering work that’s needed to streamline roadmap creation.

Here’s how Jellyfish can help you build better roadmaps more efficiently:

Centralized Visibility and Planning

Rather than consulting various platforms, dashboards, and spreadsheets, Jellyfish serves as a single source of truth for all your engineering data and work. Here’s how that benefits engineering roadmap creation:

• Aggregate data from various sources: Jellyfish integrates with tools like Jira, GitHub, and GitLab to provide a consolidated view of all engineering work, including progress on individual tasks, sprints, and projects. This comprehensive overview helps you create a realistic roadmap based on actual data, not just estimates.
• Track progress and identify roadblocks: By visualizing the progress of different teams and projects, Jellyfish lets you track how well projects are adhering to your roadmap in real-time. It also helps you identify potential delays, bottlenecks, or resource constraints early on, so you can proactively adjust your roadmap.
• Facilitate resource allocation: Jellyfish provides insights into how engineering resources are being utilized across different projects and initiatives. This data-driven understanding helps in allocating resources effectively, ensuring that critical roadmap items are adequately staffed.

Alignment with Business Objectives

With Jellyfish, it’s easier to keep your final destination in mind. Jellyfish helps engineering leaders measure how engineering work ladders up to strategic goals, so you can make sure projects are going in the right direction no matter what tactical twists and turns your team takes. With Jellyfish, you can:

• Connect engineering work to strategic goals: Jellyfish helps align the engineering roadmap with broader business objectives by providing context around how engineering initiatives contribute to overall company goals. This ensures that the roadmap prioritizes work that delivers the most value.
• Track and measure engineering impact: By tracking key metrics like cycle time, velocity, and code churn, Jellyfish helps quantify the impact of engineering efforts. This data can be used to demonstrate the value of the engineering roadmap to stakeholders and justify resource allocation.

Improved Communication and Collaboration

When everyone is looking at the same data, it’s easier to have productive conversations on key decisions and next steps. Here’s how Jellyfish can improve communication and collaboration around engineering roadmaps:

• Enhance transparency: Jellyfish provides a shared platform for visualizing the roadmap, progress, and key metrics. This transparency fosters better communication and alignment between engineering teams, product managers, and other stakeholders.
• Facilitate data-driven discussions: By providing access to real-time data and analytics, Jellyfish enables more informed discussions and decision-making around the roadmap. This helps in resolving disagreements and building consensus around priorities.

Continuous Improvement

Software development is all about iterating. With Jellyfish’s historical data and real-time updates, you can learn from past projects and adjust on the fly to changing priorities or unexpected bottlenecks. Here’s how you can optimize your processes with Jellyfish:

• Analyze historical data: Jellyfish allows you to analyze past performance data to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. This historical context helps in creating more accurate and realistic roadmaps in the future.
• Adapt to changing needs: With real-time visibility and data-driven insights, Jellyfish enables you to quickly adjust the roadmap in response to changing priorities, market conditions, or customer feedback. This agility ensures that the roadmap remains relevant and effective.