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.
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.
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.
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.
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.