📍 Creating an Actionable Roadmap

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Well, here is a polarizing statement: most roadmaps are trash.

Our brains are wired to do things that are rewarding for us - that’s why we do them.

The trick is to figure out what is rewarding for your startup.

Learn how to differentiate what makes a good or a not-so-good roadmap. You’ll eliminate the noise in decision-making and avoid suboptimal scenarios.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

☝️ Scaled this past week: Colendi

Turkish Fintech Colendi raised at $700M valuation in Series B.

Colendi is the scale of the week!

This signals continued investor fervor for all things artificial intelligence, marking one of the largest funding deals on record for a British startup.

The company aims to become a major digital banking entity and targets a $1 billion valuation.

Colendi also aims to become a public company and pursue a dual listing on stock exchanges in the UK and Turkiye.

🧠 Deep-Dive: Priorities first

Every startup's success hinges on making the right choices at the right time.

There is no roadmap without priorities. What is deemed rewarding or not is up to user interactions. As a rule of thumb, that’s usually the priority.

At different times, your startups priorities will point towards KPIs like these:

• Customer growth

• Volume (in $ revenue)

• Number of downloads / sign-ups

• Funnel conversation %s

• etc.

You should make decisions around your priorities and set the direction of your business according to those.

Jeff Bezos famously splits decisions into two broad categories: reversible (two-way) and irreversible (one-way)

Reversible decisions are a little bit like walking through a door. 

You know that if you walk through it you can easily walk back the other way. If you’re faced with a decision and you know it can be easily reversed, this might mean you can make this decision more quickly.

That doesn’t mean you can be reckless in your decision making, just that you are aware that the impact of a bad outcome as a consequence is limited since it can be reversed.

Irreversible decisions can’t be as easily reversed. For instance, these below are not decisions you can reverse easily:

• Making a decision to build hardware at your startup.

• Developing a mobile app from scratch in house with a newly hired team of app engineers.

• Adopting a vertically integrated e-commerce model to own the end to end process.

👉 When it comes to roadmapping, only make one-way decisions if it’s rewarding for your business.

Hitting your KPIs and the reaction of your users’ to your product determine what is rewarding for your business.

Then, this begs the question: How do we quantify these “rewarding” acts or the amount of commitment we need to put forward to them?

RICE scoring comes in handy here (it’s more like total value per time worked). In a nutshell:

• The product of Reach x Impact x Confidence gives you the value of a given roadmap item

• That goes over the Effort that is required to enable that idea into becoming a reality.

Let’s say you have multiple roadmap items that you assume to be in the right direction, but do not know which ones are the low hanging fruits.

👉 RICE scoring helps you figure out the quick wins among your priorities.

🗺️ Method: Date-agnostic roadmapping

The vast majority of roadmaps are time dependent, without accounting for dependencies in time.

Team members take leave, there are official holidays, this or that happens, it’s life. Therefore, most calendar-focused roadmaps can easily become inefficient unless updated rigorously and continuously.

Here’s a fresh take on what an alternative roadmap can look like:

This template has been in my bookmarks for quite some time.

In a nutshell, what founders should actually care about is what’s immediately ahead of them, and what’s not in a granular level.

• Now: Only items that you can achieve in 1-3 months

• Next: Outcomes you’ll chase in 3-6 months

• Later: Opportunities to consider for the future

• Trash: All the others that you won’t chase for the foreseeable future.

Now, that kind of explains why most roadmaps are trash.

Most roadmaps focus on the "north-start” vision of the product or the business, founders end up dreaming about things that do not even exist that are years away in terms of progress and build 12-18 month roadmaps around those.

Focus on what’s ahead and in front of you, achieve that, then dream big.

👉 You can even combine different items in each category with different RICE scores to segmentize even further.

💡 Spotlight: Aha!

Aha! is a platform that I came across quite recently.

An playful platform to build a ready-to-go roadmap.

Aha! helps you create a roadmap in minutes with their templates.

• Visualize timing for your plans

• Communicate changes in real time

• Share work with presentations that auto-update (particularly good for embedding into pitch decks)

What I absolutely loved about Aha! is their crowdsourcing system. You can crowdsource ideas from customers and employees, then rank them based on their defined value — and promote the best ones directly to your roadmap.

Aha! helps you centralize customer feedback into a single source of truth and build customizable roadmaps with the leading product feedback management platform.

I particularly enjoy easy it is to drag-and-drop and visually interact with components in their platform - worth trying out!

⚾️ Catch: Frontly

This has been ranking quite high in Product Hunt - and it’s a catch!

Frontly is an AI-powered no-code app builder that also lets you build your own AI apps, using the power of OpenAI and GPT-4o

If you are a curious experimenter like me, you can generate apps with AI and edit them in a no-code drag-and-drop interface, it’s pretty neat!

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