What is Project Roadmapping?
Project roadmapping is the most valuable thing you can do for your project. It is the best way to figure out what you need to build (and what you don’t) before you get started. With Bixly, at the end of this process you get wireframes, fully defined user stories, a clear roadmap of what the next three months of development will look like, risk assessment, and peace of mind. This is a huge differentiator between working with Bixly and trying to hire developers or find freelancers.
The purpose of project roadmapping is to help our clients achieve success. We help validate their idea to the market. We go beyond timeline and budget, to help identify success criteria. We will research the necessary integrations, whether that’s a third-party database or even hardware integration, to confirm before we get started that these tools can work together well. We also do risk assessment on the project to identify as many potential pitfalls to the project as early as possible. As Cody states, project roadmapping “allows you to test your own business ideas before you go out and actually implement them.” It gives you the opportunity to validate the market and to see if what you want to build is actually feasible with the technology we have today.
What do you get at the end of project roadmapping?
You’re going to get a plan to get your MVP to market in about three months. We do that so we aren’t over-extending beyond budgets and also to be realistically plan for the future. A three month timeline is reasonable to plan for with little to no changes to the plan. Once you start planning years in advance, it becomes much more difficult to plan without inevitable changes. You also get wireframes, which are low-fidelity sketches to outline the user interface. These are great not only for providing you with a vision of what your app will look like, but also so you can share that vision with stockholders and potential users to get feedback. As Andrew says, “It’s very inexpensive to change things on paper. It’s much more time consuming and costly to change things in code.” Getting that early feedback is invaluable. Project roadmapping ultimately brings a lot of peace of mind.
Why did we start offering project roadmapping?
Because we really wanted to begin with the end in mind. By planning together, we can make sure there isn’t any miscommunication. Our clients know what they will have at the end of this project. Without project roadmapping, its easy to get into scenarios where the developer may misunderstand what the client is actually asking for. Project planning helps us to uncover those missed expectations so there’s no surprises at the end of the project.
How does with Bixly differ from working with a freelancer?
When working with a freelance developer, you will go through the process of vetting them, talking through you business idea and dispatching them to work on tasks. Ultimately if you’re working with a freelancer, that’s probably what their specialty is going to be. If you need someone to plan and vet your business idea, you may end up needing to hire someone else, who has that expertise. You may then need to hire another freelancer to do project management, if you’re not going to do it yourself. And then another freelancer to handle design. Ultimately what ends up happening, is you end up having to hire all these disparate people and diverse skillsets to effectively work as a contracting agency, with a huge amount of effort and time and communication overhead required of you.
By contrast, working with Bixly you have all of those facilities all in one place with a cohesive team that communicates well. Project roadmapping is included with the project overhead. It helps our team work more effectively on your project and it provides accountability for what you will get at the end of the project.
How to Do It Yourself
If you want to dive into the project roadmapping process yourself, there are a few questions that you should explore.
- What is my success criteria?
- What is the technology experience of my typical user?
- What are the risks that could potentially derail my project?
- What needs to be in my MVP and what can be saved for later?
If you feel like you would like to leverage our expertise and advice in your project roadmapping process, the first consultation is free! Book an appointment now to get started.
Originally published at https://blog.bixly.com on November 25, 2020.
