What to ask your agency about roadmapping

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on roadmapping, these questions are worth asking early.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A roadmap is a statement of intent, not a promise. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Review it quarterly or it becomes fiction. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What this looks like day to day

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about roadmapping before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A roadmap is a statement of intent, not a promise — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.