Roadmap Audience Canvas
Justin and Phil recognised the importance of creating the right artefact for the right audience and so wanted to help teams tailor roadmap content to ensure alignment, clarity, and engagement with each audience. The Roadmap Audience Canvas started life as a simple workshop exercise designed to help teams better understand their roadmap's audience. It's been through a few iterations, and we now have v2.0, which has matured into our secret weapon for creating the best roadmaps targeted at an audience.
How to use the canvas.
Add the basics
Add the name of your audience and describe them. This simple step helps you start to empathise with them. Common audiences include:
Senior Leadership
Development and Operations
Customers and Account Management
Prospects and Sales
Partners
Focus on their jobs!
The audiences has needs that they use the roadmap to fulfil, these are the jobs that they have and hire the roadmap to help them with. If your roadmap doesn’t help them do these jobs then no wonder they complain about it all the time!
What are the inputs and outputs?
Related to those jobs there is information the audience provides and information they receive. It might be feature requests from customers. It might be what problems we are planning to solve to engineering.
Capture that information flow. Identify what format or forum it is shared in. Don’t forget the frequency. Then how you close the loop with feedback, if you don’t that might be a problem!
Where is the pain?
Lastly, what you have today probably isn’t working perfectly. Your audience will have pain points. Maybe you aren’t helping them with one of their jobs. Maybe they don’t feel listened to. Maybe you aren’t sharing the right information or simply not sharing often enough. Highlight these issues. You should then revisit the elements above to refine them.
Now create the right roadmap!
Now look at your roadmap and refine it for each audience you have identified. Using the Roadmap Audience Canvas as a lens to filter and adapt the design and content. Maybe check out the visual patterns here as inspiration.
Shhhhh it’s a secret!
The Roadmap Audience Canvas isn’t rocket surgery; it’s the straightforward application of product thinking to your roadmap. You are basically creating a prototype persona for the audience. Like any persona, it is only as good as your understanding of the users it represents, which means it should be research-backed and validated. Creating a first draft collaboratively as a team is a great start, so don’t forget to do the discovery work to validate or correct what you write down!