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Design Roadmap

Learn how to create a strategic Design Roadmap to plan your team's priorities, align design with business objectives, and communicate your work plan effectively.

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A Design Roadmap is a strategic artifact that visualizes the design team’s priorities and work plan over the medium and long term. It aligns design initiatives with product and business objectives and communicates to the entire organization what the design team will focus on and why.

What Is a Design Roadmap?

Imagine a subway network map. It doesn’t show every street in the city, but it does show the main lines, key stations, and important connections. It gives you an overview of how to get around the city and the major future expansion projects. A Design Roadmap is that map for your product: it doesn’t detail every task, but it does show the major initiatives and how they connect to overall objectives.

Unlike a backlog full of tasks, a roadmap focuses on themes and outcomes.

  • It is NOT: “Design a new blue button,” “Redesign the profile page.” (This is output).
  • It IS: “Improve new user activation rate by 15%” or “Reduce friction in the checkout process.” (This is outcome).

Why Is It Important?

  • It communicates strategy: It is the visual translation of your UX strategy. It shows how you plan to make that vision a reality over time.
  • It aligns stakeholders: It gives the entire company visibility into what design is working on and, more importantly, what it is NOT working on. It helps manage expectations.
  • It facilitates resource planning: It allows design leaders to anticipate hiring needs and assign the right people to the right initiatives.
  • It shifts from reactive to proactive: It helps the design team stop being a “screen-making service” that responds to requests, and instead become a strategic partner that proposes initiatives based on user and business needs.

Common Roadmap Formats

  1. Time-Based Roadmap (Timeline):
    • Organized by quarters (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4).
    • Pros: Easy to understand for stakeholders accustomed to Gantt charts.
    • Cons: Can create false expectations about exact delivery dates. Reality always changes.
  2. “Now, Next, Later” Roadmap:
    • Now: What we are working on right now.
    • Next: What comes next, already more or less defined.
    • Later: Ideas and themes we want to explore in the future, but without detail.
    • Pros: More flexible and better suited to uncertainty.
    • Cons: Can be too vague for some organizations.
  3. Theme-Based Roadmap:
    • Organized by the outcomes to be achieved. For example, themes like “Improve Onboarding,” “Increase Trust,” “Optimize Performance.”
    • Pros: Keeps the focus on value for the user and the business.

Mentor Tips

  • Focus on outcomes, not features (Outcomes over Output): The most common mistake is filling the roadmap with a list of “things to do.” A good roadmap focuses on “problems to solve” or “goals to achieve.”
  • It is a statement of intent, not a blood oath: A roadmap is not set in stone. It is a guiding tool that should be reviewed and adjusted regularly based on new learnings and changing priorities.
  • Base your decisions on evidence: Each initiative on the roadmap should be justified. Why is this important? What research or business data supports it? How does it align with our strategy?
  • Make it visual and accessible: Nobody wants to read a complex spreadsheet. Use tools like Miro or a Google Slides presentation to create a visual roadmap that is easy to share and understand.

Resources and Tools

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ux artifact strategy lead