3 Roadmap tools for a Startup in early stages

Roadmap tools for startup: In this article, we talk about a few roadmap tools that you can use as a startup. During the early stages of entrepreneurship, our primary focus was to bootstrap and save money. This naturally meant that we used some softwares that didn’t attract any additional costs or had a free trial option unto a certain number of users. I recall that our first ever roadmap was using powerpoint and excel. But they become inadequate soon. In this discussion ,we will talk about a few tools that you can use as a founder to build your roadmap.

Short Term, Mid Term and Long Term Roadmap

I’m not a big fan of writing deadlines on a roadmap, particularly in a startup. A roadmap is an indicator to inform people about your strategy. During early stages of a startup, our roadmaps are high level – to indicate when we’re aiming for different versions of our product or modules. The simplest roadmap I can recommend is using a Near Term, Mid Term and Long Term approach.

A sample roadmap using the Near, mid and long term approach looks like this below. You will find that some popular enterprises will also use this type of roadmap to provide an indicator to clients about their strategic journey. Note that this roadmap is not feature focused or technical. These items are just indicators for clients or users to understand what your next release will contain.

Although this is a great strategic tool and can provide strategic insight, investors will be interested in your timelines. As much as I like this approach, I have found it difficult to explain to investors and board which demands certainty in roadmap planning. Timelines often provide information about this certainty and also helps other teams to plan their activities accordingly.

What should I have in my startup roadmap?

Once you’ve started working, it is easier to define the output of your sprints. You’ll have developed a rhythm and a certain cadence of delivery to be able to define these sprint outcomes clearly. Does this however work for a startup? And should you go into the detail of sprint planning in investor or early stage conversations? Let’s have a brief look at pros and cons below.

A sprint roadmap is brilliant and works very well for people interested in project planning. It has deadlines, including production, testing timelines and beta customers etc. Does it cover the situation of a startup where you’ll mostly merge these timelines to deliver a product quicker? Maybe not, but perhaps defining the roadmap in this manner will help you educate the investors and board if they’re new to the software deployment experience.

Remember that in startup planning, you’re dealing with a lot of unknowns making it difficult to follow the ideal approaches which most educational material talks about. You can take some shortcuts, but make sure that you still have some flexibility and lead time so that you don’t fall into the deadline trap.

Roadmap tools for startup

After this long introduction, let’s talk about some of the tools used for roadmap planning in startups. If you’re going by the ethos of how to run a business with no money, bootstrapping and using only excel/ppt for early roadmap planning might work well. You might even be able to use google slides for freeware. However, it is best to combine roadmap planning tools with your weekly plans to be able to manage the startup operations. I’ve found some of these roadmap tools for startup to be quite useful and have an onboarding or reduced charges for small teams. A good place for you to identify resources required for product management is productverse

Jira

Most of my experiences have been around Jira and you’ll find majority of engineers have experience with Jira in agile product management. I like the new templates which make it easy to project the roadmap. However, its extension to marketing and sales departments can be a bit limited, but it still makes a fantastic tool during starting stages.

Trello

Trello is great to work out your short term, mid term and long term roadmap. It doesn’t go into the details of sprint planning, but can be a good tool to start mapping out various blocks of activities and modules for your startup journey. I believe the starting version is free which makes it worth a try.

Aha for Roadmaps

I liked using Aha because of the way you can connect your vision, initiatives to your startup deliverables. It has a lot of flexibility in being able to tie the roadmap to other teams and provide strategic clarity. I’ve had more success with this tool, but can be expensive compared to the above two. But note that Aha is a tool for Roadmaps which are customer centric allowing you to gather customer feedback, voting for most requested features etc. This is not available in the above two.