How to create a game changing Crypto / Blockchain roadmap that will move mountains?

Salahuddin Khawaja

Published: February 27, 2023

Every crypto and blockchain project starts with a vision of creating disruption. How do Crypto projects achieve that very disruption? Through a Crypto Roadmap – a series of points along a journey that shows how that impact will be achieved. A roadmap is an essential part of the Crypto whitepaper (What is a whitepaper? Read our post here).

This post is divided into the following sections:

Benefits of Crypto Roadmap
Examples of Roadmaps
4 Step Process for Roadmap Creation
Typical Milestones of a roadmap

Need help creating a roadmap? Hypermode Crypto Consulting team can help! This post details our approach.

1 – Benefits of a Roadmap

1. Forces Planning: allows a project to organize their efforts and ensures all the stakeholders are on the same page. This allows for optimal execution. Take the example of Axie Infinity – they put “play to earn” on the map. Their revolutionary roadmap ticks all the boxes: simple and direct, visually appealing, clearly shows what has been achieved and what is next.

2. Engages Community: Community is the heart of a crypto project. Crypto enthusiasts understand the goals of a crypto project (“what” the project is trying to achieve) and milestones (“how” it will be achieved). Community members can be:

a. Supporters: the roadmap is a communication mechanism to get enthusiasts to become active members of the community. It allows them to track progress (from tokenomics to IDO to launch). Roadmaps (along with the whitepaper)convey to supporters the incentives of being involved: early minting, whitelisting, air drops, staking, governance privileges etc.
b. Contributors: crypto projects aren’t built alone. Use the roadmap to harness the power of the crowd. Convert community members to contributors. As a team you can cover more ground, scale and grow together!
c. Clients: A roadmap allows clients to understand the product journey and, in particular, the timeline for features to go live. It serves as a great marketing tool to attract new clients.
d. Investors: Roadmap helps investors evaluate the crypto project: the ground covered vs to be covered. This allows investors to track the progress of the project, how efficient the team is while evaluating their capability to deliver what they have promised.

3. Ensures Accountability and Tracking: roadmaps create a sense of self-accountability for the crypto project team to evaluate progress. From that evaluation, the team can adjust milestones and resources.

The net-net benefit of the roadmap is that it brings all the stakeholders together and allow them to collaborate with a coherent vision and timeline.

2- Examples of roadmaps

Lets look at some great roadmap examples.

1) Immutable Roadmap

Immutable is a NFT project powering the next generation of blockchain gaming. The Immutable roadmap illustrates simply what the NFT project is trying to achieve. Roadmap allows the community to understand the timeline of a project. It helps build trust by showing different milestones in the product journey. In its roadmap Immutable lists objectives starting from the Trial of mainnet – that will link to the wallet, then opening the marketplace coupled with improvements in the UX. Afterwards comes the scalability and community management to enhance the overall reach.

2) Cardano Roadmap

Cardano is a Layer 1 chain and their roadmap showcases the key phases of their journey in a crisp way. The phases show key milestone that incorporates all requirement from development to roll out. There is a separate section that shows the status of the milestones.

3) Fandise Roadmap

Fandise is an NFT project and their roadmap communicates the vision and plan for the product. The roadmap mentions the NFT rollout plan which in turn allows the community to track and decide when they want to buy in.

As we can see from the above examples, there are few common themes in all of them. First, roadmaps clearly layout the milestones. Second, roadmaps show an MVP and describes the MVP product as to how it will look and what utility can be achieved in subsequent phases.

4 Step Roadmap Development Framework

To develop a great roadmap, follow these steps:

1) Discover/Research – Identifying the Problem

Start with – what problem is being solved? This forces the focus and the story flow.

In addition, research helps get information. This activity is typically wide ranging: gives insight into competitive analysis, market sizing, what does the community look like, launch strategies and understanding the various potential uses cases. – this shapes the product strategy and leads to the next step.

2) Define – MVP & Use Cases

Once the problem space has been defined, next comes finalizing the scope of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP). What is needed by the crypto product to solve the problem at hand? World hunger is solved by first solving hunger in a city, then state and then country – this example tells how a final goal is achieved by tackling problems stage wise.

3) Develop – Designing the Solution

Once the viable use case has been defined – think of that as the “what”. Then shift to the “how” – design the solution to achieve the “what” and “how” is the part where the functional and technical architecture is defined. This is the designing part where MVP helps draft milestones across different departments that will be visualized through a roadmap. The visualization helps define development objectives, how to solve certain challenges and design solutions through the model. This lays out a product testing structure and when a certain feature will be introduced to the market.

4) Deliver – The Roadmap

Layout all the objectives that are defined in the research section, this includes aligning all the resources required to achieve those objectives.

Efficient resourcing is particularly significant as it allows the team to establish deadlines and goals both internally and externally. This allows the entire community to act in a collaborative fashion and create a sense of accountability and transparency.

Resource alignment is integral part of defining a roadmap. Once there are clear objectives for the product and solution. Roadmap and the timeline helps to answer questions like which resources will be required to achieve the milestones along the timeline?

Sections are the key defining feature and step of creating a roadmap. This is the part that defines how the roadmap will be presented. This is what and how the roadmap communicates everything that has been established for its community.

4- Typical Milestones of a Great Crypto Roadmap:

1) Developmental Milestones: What are the developmental plans? When will a certain set of features planned to release? These are the questions that are catered under this section. This also shows the progress so far made in development.

2) Deployment Milestones: A roadmap like Cardano, and Lisk’s roadmap as shown below are designed in a way where the sections are divided into phases that define where the product is in its respective journey. This allows the community to understand where the product is headed and what kind of versions will be available at what time based on the deployment goals and which part of the product has already been deployed.

3) Feature Availability: This is another common practice when it comes to typical milestones where the different features are listed as per their availability.

4) Airdrops: Crypto projects are hugely dependent on its community. One of the purposes of a roadmap is to engage the community; a timeline helps to communicate with the community is through the Airdrops where the native coin or different NFTs etc. can be distributed among community members as a PR and engagement campaign.

5) Tokenization and Staking: Tokenization is the mother of all incentivization techniques, and a great roadmap uses tokenization as a tool to engage community. Features like staking has recently picked up as one of the community engagements tools to raise funds, thus forming an important part of the roadmap. You can read more on tokenization in our blog here. A good example of a roadmap with this section is of Illuvium’s current roadmap in their whitepaper.

Conclusion:

Roadmap brings in the essence of a crypto project – the purpose here is to understand the sense of how to basically make a strategy for a Web 3.0 venture.
Since these projects are not like any conventional projects, therefore the ingredients for its success are sensitive and needs an agile methodology.

Get in touch with us to develop a crypto/blockchain roadmap that visualizes your vision and shows the impact your platform can create.