When considering, planning, or building a software application, either aimed at a mobile device, website, or desktop computer, you should include a “Project Roadmap” and more importantly you should own your roadmap and use it as both a benchmark and planning tool to drive your software development.

What is a Project Roadmap?

A project roadmap, at its core, is just what is says, a map of the road, but in this case it is a map of the road ahead. In terms of a software development a roadmap is an identification of key areas of future development, how they relate, and when they are scheduled for availability.

A project roadmap is particularly useful if you are planning to utilise external partners to help build your application as a carefully considered roadmap can help provide focus, whilst avoiding unnecessary feature creep, and more importantly it can save you money.

One of the starting point when designing an application is to start with a “must-have” feature list. You may already have an extensive list and you may add to it whenever new ideas comes along. Upon finding a development partner this feature list will likely be provided to the developers who will work through it (most likely in the order it is presented depending on the developer). If the feature list is haphazardly arranged it can lead to developers shifting from area to area as they work down the list and this can really affect the project planning which, in turn, is likely to lead to higher costs.

If, instead, you arrange the features on the list into high-level groups of related functionality and put dates against these groupings you have the makings of a good project roadmap.