What is a business roadmap? Best practices for strategic planning
Last updated: October 2024
Roadmaps make strategy work. This is particularly true at the business level. A business (or company) roadmap visualizes how your organization will achieve its long-term strategic goals. It unites everyone with a clear sense of direction and pride in the journey ahead.
Company and product leaders use business roadmaps to communicate the organization's vision and plans at every growth stage — from lean startups to established enterprises. Everyone benefits when they understand how their daily work ties to meaningful impact. A business roadmap bridges that gap, making the big picture feel tangible.
This custom roadmap created in Aha! Roadmaps shows business goals and initiatives, success metrics, and progress.
Business roadmaps also help organizations of all sizes scale and innovate. No matter the industry or market, leaders use roadmaps to clarify where the company is headed and identify the high-level objectives needed to get there.
This guide will walk you through the essentials of creating a business roadmap, including best practices and tailored tips for startups and established enterprises alike.
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Why are there so many ways to say business roadmap?
The phrasing surrounding business roadmaps can certainly feel like a maze of terms (business roadmaps, business plans, and product roadmaps, not to mention vision, mission, and everything in between). But here is the kicker: They are not just different ways to say the same thing. Each has a distinct role in guiding your strategy and keeping your team aligned. Let’s clear up the confusion and break down what makes a business roadmap unique.
First, a quick primer on the differences between the vision, strategy, and roadmap.
Vision: Establishes where you want to go and why it matters
Strategy: Captures the goals, initiatives, and approach for achieving the vision
Roadmap: Visualizes how you will achieve the strategy along with a time frame for completion
Business roadmaps (sometimes called strategy roadmaps) contain broad goals that focus on your company’s overall success — think revenue growth, market expansion, or talent development. Every functional group within your organization aligns its strategy to support these overarching goals.
Product roadmaps contain measurable goals specific to a product and its users, like increasing the adoption of a certain feature or boosting engagement with a new release. It is the product manager's job to ensure these product goals align with the high-level company goals laid out in the business roadmap.
What about a business plan?
Let’s clarify a common misconception: Although the terms "business plan" and "business roadmap" are sometimes used interchangeably, they have distinct purposes.
A business plan is a comprehensive document created at a company’s outset or during major shifts. It outlines the overall strategy, goals, and operational plans. In contrast, a business roadmap visualizes specific elements of the business plan over time, highlighting current and future work to track progress. The table below summarizes the key differences between a business plan and a business roadmap.
Business plan | Business roadmap | |
Format | A detailed document describing business operations; often lengthy | A visual timeline showing strategic goals and initiatives |
Components | Includes an executive summary, products/services market analysis, financials, and budget | Maps out a company's goals, initiatives, milestones, and dependencies |
Audience | Used by executives and senior leaders; shared with banks, investors, partners, and suppliers | Often an internal tool for senior leaders; shared with teams, investors, and partners |
Benefits | Provides a foundational guide for running and scaling the business; supports decision-making | Helps track progress toward strategic goals; aligns team on priorities |
Startup tip: Nail your vision and strategy first. Secure these approvals early on, then focus on developing your business plan and roadmap.
Pro move for established companies: Stay flexible. Regularly revisit your strategy to tackle market changes and evolving customer needs.
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What to include on a business roadmap
Business roadmaps are broad, capturing the most important strategic plans across the company. Regardless of your industry or organization size, you will likely want to include the following:
Goals: Measurable, time-bound objectives that support your company vision
Initiatives: High-level efforts or themes of work that you will pursue to achieve each goal
Epics: The main areas of investment needed to accomplish the initiatives
It is important to include a timeline for completion, which will vary depending on the goals. For example, a long-term roadmap might span three to five (or even 10) years and include high-level forecasts for revenue, marketing and sales, staffing, operations, and new product or service development.
Alternatively, a shorter-term roadmap can focus on a year or six months at a time. This type of roadmap might detail corporate-level goals and initiatives along with more granular plans from specific teams, illustrating how everyone will contribute to overall business objectives. You might even maintain both long- and short-term roadmaps simultaneously to capture different planning horizons.
To make the most of this adaptive planning approach, it helps to use a shared strategic planning tool like Aha! Roadmaps. With real-time data updates, every roadmap reflects current progress. This aligns your organization around what you aim to achieve and how you will collaborate to get there.
Startup tip: Focus on immediate impact. Prioritize features that drive user adoption and revenue. Be flexible and let your roadmap evolve as you learn more about your market and customers.
Pro move for established companies: Do not overlook your flagship products. Balance innovation (new products, market expansions) with ongoing improvements to keep loyal customers happy.
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How to build a business roadmap
Ready to build your business roadmap? The process can vary based on your company’s size, industry, and strategic focus, but the key steps remain the same. Here is a general approach to get you started:
Set goals: Establish what you want to achieve, from revenue to hiring.
Gather information: Seek input from organizational leaders and research your market.
Organize into themes: Identify patterns in your inputs.
Prioritize initiatives: Use those themes to define initiatives, making sure each one supports a specific goal.
Add time frames: Forecast resourcing and evaluate when each initiative should be completed.
Review and revise: Evaluate your progress against the roadmap often so you can spot challenges and adjust as needed.
Creating a business roadmap on your own can feel like a lot, especially if you are new to the process. That is why many organizations turn to purpose-built tools like Aha! Roadmaps. You can set your strategy, connect features to your goals and initiatives, and easily create and share different types of roadmaps with both internal and external stakeholders.
Below is a quick guide to help you turn the general steps outlined above into action using our software. (To follow along, we recommend opening a free trial account of Aha! Roadmaps.)
Steps | Guidance | Extra tips |
Step 1: Define your initiatives | Visit the Strategy tab in Aha! Roadmaps and navigate to Imperatives. Here, you can capture your company goals and initiatives. | You can also define any product-level initiatives and map them to the overall company strategy here. |
Step 2: Link initiatives to goals | After you define your company goals, select the corresponding goal (or goals) that each initiative supports. | Depending on the level of specificity you want to show on your business roadmap, you might want to build out epics or releases that will support the goals as well. |
Step 3: Adjust the time frame | Navigate to Roadmaps, then Strategy to see your business roadmap visualization. Aha! Roadmaps automatically populates your data — goals, initiatives, epics, releases, and more — into the roadmap view. Drag and drop each initiative to update its time frame, adjusting the start date and end date. | At the top of the roadmap, you can also control the schedule you want to display (three months, six months, one year, or custom dates). |
Step 4: Customize your roadmap | You can show progress toward goals with shaded bars and sort initiatives by workspace, start or end date, rank, status, assignee, or name. | Hide releases for an even higher-level view. You can also color bars by status, assignee, type, initiative, or release. |
Step 5: Share widely | Share your business roadmap in a variety of ways. Add it to a whiteboard, presentation, or dashboard, or export it as a PDF or PNG image. | Make your roadmap accessible to leadership, the product team, other groups in the organization, customers, and more. |
A business roadmap for a startup vs. an established company
The process of building a business roadmap is similar for both startups and larger enterprises: Set goals, gather insights from leadership and the market, and prioritize initiatives that align with your strategic focus. From there, add realistic time frames and review your roadmap regularly to track progress and make adjustments as needed. However, the actual content of the roadmap will vary significantly between startups and established companies.
Startups
A startup’s business roadmap tends to focus on early-stage goals like launching a Minimum Lovable Product, gaining initial customers, or raising venture capital. For example, although an established company might aim to expand into new markets, a startup's goals might center on breaking into more niche markets or improving customer retention. To get started, try using a starter roadmap or whiteboard template designed for early-stage strategic planning.
Established companies
Established businesses often need more nuanced roadmaps tailored to different areas of the organization. Each functional group (product management, marketing, IT, and so on) might have its own roadmap to guide specific strategic efforts. For example:
Business development roadmap: Focuses on strategic expansion, including new partnerships, sales channels, and market shifts
Business intelligence roadmap: Centers on optimizing business operations through change management, process improvements, and adopting new technologies
These specialized roadmaps help established companies manage complexity and ensure strategic goals are met across the organization. For more examples, explore different types of business roadmaps.
Related:
Who uses a business roadmap?
Anyone with a vested interest in your company’s success will benefit from having access to some version of your business roadmap. Because a business roadmap visualizes the company’s goals and objectives, you can think of it as a blueprint that all stakeholders can rally around and follow. Here are some of the types of people and teams who can use a business roadmap:
Angel investors
Business owners
Consultants
Entrepreneurs
Executives
Marketing teams
Sales teams
Startup founders
Venture capitalists
Get started with a business roadmap template
Templates help you repeat success, standardize work, and save time. Define your strategic planning process and create a format for your business roadmap that works for your company. Then, templatize it. Standardizing your business roadmap template will help reduce inefficiencies. When people do not have to guess at how to do their planning, they can spend more time on strategic thinking.
Related:
Take a look at this roadmap template built on a whiteboard in Aha! software. You can easily customize the roadmap by adding your own goals, initiatives, milestones, and dependencies. This is a simple, lightweight way to get started with business roadmapping. For more robust roadmapping functionality, Aha! Roadmaps connects your visual plans to actual work. It also includes the whiteboard template below and many other dynamic roadmap views.
FAQs about business roadmaps
What is the difference between a business roadmap and a business vision?
Your business vision is all about defining what lies ahead. It covers why your company exists, where it is headed, and why you believe in that future. Because it impacts your culture, values, and strategic direction, it is important to map out this concept early on and adjust it whenever your future changes. On the other hand, a business roadmap conveys the near-term work you will do to achieve that long-term vision.
What is the difference between a business roadmap and a business strategy?
A business roadmap is a visual representation of your business strategy. It outlines the steps, goals, initiatives, and milestones needed to achieve your long-term plans. A business roadmap is also more tactical, focusing on how you will reach your objectives.
On the other hand, a business strategy defines your overall approach to what you are working toward.
At Aha! we break business strategy down into three components:
Foundation: Vision, business models, and positioning
Market: Customer and competitor profiles
Imperatives: Where you link goals to the releases and features you will deliver to meet those goals
When should you create a business roadmap?
Company leaders typically create a business roadmap early. This might be right after founding a new business, deciding to launch a new offering, or entering a major new market.
For existing businesses and products, it is important to update your business roadmap regularly, either annually or in sync with your strategic planning cycle.
How often should you update your business roadmap?
Your business roadmap should be flexible enough that you can update it regularly and painlessly. As a general rule, adjust your roadmaps whenever your plans (and the details of those plans) happen to change. This keeps stakeholders aligned with what is happening throughout the organization.
