Roadmapping Software

Getting everyone on the same page is critical for large, complex organizations in order to make effective decisions, quickly and confidently. Roadmapping software brings consistency to planning by creating a common language across teams. It enables clear comparisons, shared understanding, and greater visibility into what’s happening in other areas of the organization.

Product teams use SharpCloud to visualize product development roadmaps, gain clear visibility on user stories, tasks, features, epics and how they're all connected, all in one view! The developers can continue working in places such as Azure DevOps and Jira, but the key data is integrated into SharpCloud, ensuring the high level picture and reporting can be visualized and interacted with in an easy and intuitive way.

Spreadsheets are amazing tools - with great flexibility and common use - creating a consistency across companies that everyone can get involved with and make their own. The challenges really present themselves when trying to handle complexity regarding complex planning, relationship mapping, and showing a timeline/Gannt chart in a palatable and presentable way.

We constantly see people, who are experts in their respective space, manage an unwieldy and difficult spreadsheet. They spend valuable time exporting and reformatting data into PowerPoint - only for key information to be lost or overlooked in the process. Roadmapping software allows team members to easily engage with information via an intuitive interface and understand what the key points are. They can see how data is connected, helping provide context before making a key decision. 

There are many features a perfect roadmapping tool could have, but it all depends on your roadmapping maturity and requirements. If you're just starting your roadmapping journey, we would recommend getting the foundations right. Focus on flexible visualizations, control over who can edit certain parts of the roadmap, and - most importantly - the ability to create and manage relationships between items.

Being able to connect a project to another project/program easily is key for all roadmapping. Then as the maturity increases, having a flexible data structure to create your own data elements and taxonomy to fit around your business process would be highly recommended. And finally, integrations/connectors. Instead of shifting all the work from one place to another, keep people working where they are best, so you can leverage that data and benefit from the great work they are doing.

When you create product roadmaps for example, there is an outcome to achieve (the roadmap) itself, but the art is in the roadmapping process - the decision making and discussions around which areas to move forward with and where the links/relationships exist. Being able to bring in strategic drivers and initiatives to the roadmapping process allows you and team members to make decisions that support those initiatives and more importantly, question why something that doesn't support the wider business goal. Once the roadmap has been communicated and is a document that is updated as you move forwards, execution becomes clearer.

We have a lot of integrations and connectors available to use natively within the platform to help speed up the process of building an impactful roadmap. We have connectors to common platforms such as Excel, Jira, Azure DevOps, PowerBI and many more. We also have API's which can be leveraged to bring data in from external sources.

Our end-goal is not simply "creating a roadmap", we understand that roadmaps are a lot more than a document that gets presented once a year and then produced again the following year. In today's world, the roadmap needs to move at the same speed as the individuals in the companies driving the decisions. We support you in your roadmapping journey, from product ideas, project prioritization, and product development, to connecting the landscape together using relationships.

We are very unique in how we visualize relationships between projects, and our exploration of those connected sets of data is something all other tools struggle to do. Our customization options can solve most challenges for our users, being flexible and agile to show the data in a consumable way to different audiences, without having to start from scratch every time. Instead of spending a lot of time building presentations that get thrown out and restarted again and again, build a story once and then keep using and updating it.

The platform is highly customizable, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and use-cases. Users can tailor the platform to their specific needs by configuring different visualizations, and controlling and renaming different element types and their attributes, ensuring it matches the current data and processes in place. Whether it's to manage your product strategy, track progress of projects, initiatives or create roadmaps, SharpCloud can be customized to fit your needs and existing process.

SharpCloud roadmap templates comes with several out of the box visualizations including timelines, strategic layer views, table and grid views. On top of the standard views, there are an extensive set of plugins which are used to extend SharpCloud's core functionality and views, including radar charts, heat maps, bubble charts and network diagrams. Further, if needed, users can implement their own code using either JavaScript, HTML or CSS to produce their own plugins to produce the custom visualization that's needed.

Agile roadmapping is a flexible, iterative approach that allows for frequent adjustments based on team and/or customer feedback and changing conditions. It focuses on short-term objectives and delivers value incrementally, making it ideal for environments with high uncertainty and rapid change. Traditional roadmapping, on the other hand, is more rigid, focusing on long-term planning with a fixed sequence of milestones and deliverables. SharpCloud is agnostic to methodology but is designed more with supporting your process and helping you deliver the outcome you need.

Read this blog for more information.

Roadmapping is a crucial tool for supporting digital transformation by providing a clear, actionable plan that aligns digital initiatives with business goals. It helps organizations identify the technologies, processes, and skills needed for transformation, prioritize investments, and manage the complex interdependencies between various digital projects. By visualizing the path to digital maturity, roadmapping ensures that all efforts contribute to the organization's long-term vision, enabling a smoother, more effective transformation journey.