Developing a roadmap for your business is hugely important for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, transparency is key and you can forecast and strategise both clearly and effectively using one.

There are a number of roadmap tool options to develop and they can be used to highlight a number of things.

Roadmaps for business are incredibly useful for employees, clients, and associates as well as the businesses themselves. These roadmaps offer a useful timeline and step by step process across a number of areas from revenue growth to things such as long term goals, changes in business capabilities, and development.

Below you’ll find a series of roadmaps and why they are useful to present to those associated with your business...

Strategic Roadmap

A strategic roadmap is essentially a visual representation of a businesses vision. It will highlight every aspect of developing your business strategy and outline the steps needed to be taken to achieve goals.

You can include both short- and long-term goals, and it is always a good roadmap to share with all employees and companies associated with the business.

You don't have to allow them to edit this roadmap, but if everyone knows the end goals and the timescales in which the company should be achieving, it can bring people together and have the whole business driving in the same direction.

Additionally, it will also help you employ the right kind of staff. For those who aren’t behind your ideas and goals, they won’t join or last within the business. Therefore the staff you do employ will be fully behind you, and you’ll get much more out of them.

Change Roadmap

Businesses are always changing, whether through expansion, adapting to certain laws, or industry trends or simply scaling up or down dependent on the arrival of new work/loss of work.

In the case of the latter, that’s a contingency plan, but for the likes of laws and planned expansion, there are stages and timelines that can be developed to offer clear insight into scaling.

This allows you to get employees and associates clients and companies to really buy into the goals and plans of a business, just as a strategic roadmap does, as well as preparing them for future changes in staffing structure, system overalls and even things such as moves into different office space, for example.

Naturally, change can sometimes happen without forecast due to a whole range of circumstances, so it should always have a degree of flexibility.

Capability Roadmap

As a business it’s likely you’re always looking to expand and at the heart of that is plotting what your company is capable of over a set period of time.

Expansion doesn’t come easy, so planning the stages of development and what you’re capable of at each stage is useful. It’s about forecasting potential and allows you to really monitor your ambition. For example, you may be offering one product or service but over the next five years want to start offering five different products.

A capability roadmap allows you to plot how you wish to do that, highlighting the capabilities of your teams as you build towards that goal. This will give you a good timescale of when you need to be hiring, training and scaling up teams, technology and equipment to build towards that bigger business goal.