Making a roadmap: How-tos, templates, and tips

When working with other people, having a single point of reference is vital. For one thing, it keeps everyone aligned on the same page. For another, it can help minimize repetitive questions and reduce room for misunderstanding.

Over the course of the project, team members can refer to the roadmap anytime they need a refresher on your goals. Instead of waiting for team leaders to dictate what their next course of action should be or determine whether they are still on the right track, members can make the call themselves by reviewing the roadmap. If there is any confusion about the purpose of certain deliverables, they can go back to the roadmap to see if it fits with the plans.

In this way, roadmaps not only lessen the chance of miscommunication within the team but also save people’s time by minimizing the need for alignment meetings.

Roadmaps have just the right amount of information. They are not too high-level that they contain virtually no useful details, but neither are they too comprehensive that they are overwhelming to look at and maintain.

Instead, roadmaps break down big projects into smaller milestones. You can choose to add bite-sized information about timelines (e.g., “From Month X - Month Y”, etc.) as well as short points about relevant plans of action. But for the most part, you can keep things simple and just list down the various milestones leading up to the main goal, thus dividing one big project into smaller, shorter chunks of work.

Think of milestones as stopovers along the way. These are smaller targets achieved in pursuit of a larger, overarching goal. They can be written in terms of outputs produced through the project, such as “Produce XY number of products by YZ month” or “Close AB number of accounts.”

These are the actual tasks or activities needed to move the project forward. Ideally, these are aligned to each milestone to make it easier to understand what needs to be done to accomplish certain objectives.

A key part of project planning is allocating resources. Including details about expected resource needs will help manage expectations for everyone involved. These can cover costs, labor, time, materials, and more.

For projects involving multiple people, it’s best to designate points of contact for each team or item. This will help improve communication lines and boost accountability among the team.

Information about timelines is always vital to any project. Having definitive time periods is helpful, especially if the roadmap document will be circulated as reference material.

In cases where different members or teams are working on different components of the same goal, listing the dependencies is helpful for keeping alignment and reducing miscommunication. This allows people to see the relationship of their tasks to each other so they can manage their own workload and timelines and provide the necessary support.

When it comes to meeting goals, slow and steady wins the race. While it’s nice to aim high and have big dreams, there are times when starting small — then scaling up later — is the way to go. Being prudent with your objectives is especially important when working with a lot of limitations.

Different plans call for different roadmaps. Fortunately, you don’t need to create one from scratch thanks to Canva’s ready-made whiteboard templates. No matter what type of roadmap you need — whether you’re building a product roadmap, feature-based roadmap, business roadmap, strategy roadmap, or goal roadmap — there’s bound to be a template that perfectly matches your preferences.

Simply search for your preferred type of roadmap and take your pick of style, theme, and other categories. All of Canva’s roadmap builder templates are entirely customizable so you can make any adjustments, whether it’s a minor tweak in appearance to match your branding or a major restructuring to accommodate your goals.

After drafting your plans, doing your research, and picking your template, it’s time to populate your roadmap. Plot the information onto the template and adjust the layout accordingly. You can workshop this part with other team members and stakeholders to create a roadmap that works for everyone.

With a Canva account, your progress automatically saves online ensuring you never lose work. Keep working on your roadmap as many times as you need and freely make revisions down the line.

Once you and your team are happy with your plans, the next step is to turn them over to stakeholders and decision-makers for their final approval. Because this part may involve multiple revisions, designing your roadmap on Canva is the way to go. You can share it with stakeholders and allow them to leave their comments. From there, your team can make your revisions directly on the design, with the option to lock certain parts to avoid making unintentional changes to them.

Work doesn’t end once you have a finalized roadmap. To reiterate, roadmaps are a living document. They need to be revisited regularly and updated, when necessary, to account for new, unplanned developments.

Set timelines appropriate to the information on the roadmap. High-level documents like business and strategy roadmaps are better broken down in longer terms like years, quarters, or months. Conversely, detailed plans like product and feature-based roadmaps will benefit from narrower timeframes like days or weeks.

Information should be categorized and displayed intuitively, and formatting should be consistent throughout the document. For instance, if your roadmap follows a timeline format, items should be arranged chronologically from the first target milestone or earliest date to the last objective or latest date.

Depending on the project, adding progress trackers to your roadmaps will help you monitor your goals. These trackers can be a simple marker to indicate if an item is “pending,” “assigned,” “in progress,” or “completed.” They can also be a graph showing the percentage of completion, with each accomplished item having a designated value.

Because roadmaps are generally high-level, they tend to use fewer texts than other planning tools like Gantt charts. Using symbols and legends in place of texts helps you communicate effectively but succinctly. For example, dependencies can be connected with arrow lines. High-priority tasks can be marked with a star. And so on, and so forth.

Circulate your roadmap to everyone involved in the project, from the team members carrying out the tasks to the decision-makers supervising the initiative. However, take care to provide editing access only to relevant users like select team members or item owners to prevent lost data, file damage, or security risks.

One way to group together related information is through color. For instance, you can assign a color for each team involved in the project, making it easy to see what tasks they are handling. You can also color code tasks based on their corresponding milestones so you can make the connection wherever they may be on the roadmap.

Anyone can make roadmaps and plot their goals, but they are especially useful for business owners, project planners and managers, team leaders, and stakeholders. Fortunately, with a roadmap creator like Canva’s, users don’t need to have a strong background in design to create high-quality, effective roadmaps.

Canva’s roadmap software is a fantastic place for create a roadmap online and on-the-go. The platform is free and equipped with a myriad of ready-made, customizable design templates, as well as practical and easy-to-use editing tools.

Build a roadmap that’s perfect for your needs by picking from hundreds of pre-built templates in a variety of styles, themes, and purposes. You can work at your own pace confidently thanks to a nifty auto-save feature that keeps your progress safe. Or, collaborate with teammates on the same working file for faster, more seamless coworking.