Business roadmaps can take on countless forms—depending on the business function the roadmapper is in charge of.
To help narrow the scope for any business planning their own growth, we’ve outlined 9 business roadmap examples below that are aimed at organizations looking to scale. (Btw, all of these roadmaps are available in our template library which you can check out here!)
We’ll also be offering examples of each type of business roadmap that fall under two general formats: Timeline roadmaps (roadmaps planned with specific dates in mind) and Swimlane roadmaps.
Timeline View roadmaps are, as the name suggests, roadmaps that define dates and a specific timeline for a plan or strategy. These roadmaps usually highlight time-based elements per each initiative on the roadmap (like milestones, key dates, and dependencies). Swimlane View roadmaps, on the other hand, offer fuzzier “buckets” of time for initiatives on the roadmap like backlog / in progress / completed.
Searching for the right tool for your roadmapping needs? Let our roadmap tool guide help you.
1. Business roadmap
For a company that needs a flexible document that effectively presents key business goals, dates, and plans of action relevant to all the stakeholders.
What’s a business roadmap?
A business roadmap is a visualization of your company’s major objectives and strategies. Stakeholders use business roadmaps to illustrate initiatives and deadlines happening in different departments.
Like a business plan, a roadmap gives the long view of where your organization is going and how it will get there. For businesses to succeed, stakeholders need a shared understanding of the big picture. Business roadmaps knock down silos between teams and provide a clear vision of the future.
For a more detailed breakdown of what a business roadmap is and isn’t, check out our guide: What’s a Business Roadmap?
Business roadmap examples
A Timeline View of a business roadmap provides a concise overview of major projects and deadlines for each team. Businesses can see, at a glance, each team’s capacity (time and resources) and individual contributions to growth-related initiatives across weeks, months, or a calendar year.
This view also lets teams see how their work is contributing to efforts to grow the business, which in turn can help businesses see and squash any silos between departments and stakeholders.
For businesses that aren’t ready to allocate specific timeframes to every single initiative on their roadmap, that’s where a Swimlane View works really well. By showing each department’s individual projects and strategies, you can have swimlanes dedicated to each team and then organize items by any timeframe.
Think of this type of roadmap as a snapshot of each team’s primary objectives for certain periods of time. Someone should be able to look at this roadmap and quickly understand what each team is trying to achieve in each timeframe.
Align all your stakeholders around the business goals that matter using our business roadmap template.
2. Strategic roadmap
For companies with a strong vision that need a visual blueprint they can follow to stay on top of the goals that matter the most to the business.
What is a strategic roadmap?
Simply put, a strategic roadmap communicates your business’ vision. Outlining the steps to achieve your mission, a business roadmap hinges on long-term objectives and deadlines. The keyword here is long-term. That means it doesn’t include product features and short-term wins; this roadmap is reserved for overarching goals like fundraising rounds and MRR targets.
Generally owned by senior-level stakeholders, this roadmap should be accessible to every employee (not to edit per se, but to view). By granting this access, you align your individual departments on your plans to grow the business and you encourage teams to develop projects that contribute directly to said growth.
Strategic roadmap examples
For organizations planning their business growth strategy over the next few months, quarters, or years, a Timeline View of the strategic roadmap works really well. Businesses can use this time-based view of a business roadmap to track key initiatives and milestones that each of your departments will undertake to contribute to the overall mission.
A Swimlane View of the roadmap is perfect for businesses that are less strict about the “when” of their strategic planning. This roadmap assigns each team an individual swimlane and organizes their respective strategic initiatives by status. This way, any stakeholder can quickly glance and know what strategic project is upcoming, in progress, or completed.
Plan to achieve your big vision with our ready-to-use strategic roadmap template.
3. Startup roadmap
For early-stage companies that need a way to communicate and align on what to build first, in what order, and how to deliver it.
What’s a startup roadmap?
While a business roadmap can be adapted for any size organization, the reality is if you don’t have many teams or resources, the common roadmap template might not be as applicable. That’s why we suggest a startup roadmap for businesses still finding their footing.
A startup roadmap helps smaller businesses plan how they’ll get off the ground running and then scale to a much larger size. Because starting your own business is very much a roller coaster of an experience, a startup roadmap helps bring some clarity to the messy and experimental process.
As a fresh-out-the-gate business, startups tend not to be heavily process-oriented. As a result, startup roadmaps lean more on the high-level and flexible side (as should all roadmaps!), so as to adapt quickly with the often chaotic startup environment. The roadmap is a small business’ way of zooming in on their end goal (hint: business growth) and mapping out a feasible plan to achieve said goal.
Startup roadmap examples
Using a Timeline View of the startup roadmap, a company can clearly and effectively lay out all the future tasks that need to be completed to get the business off the ground. This type of startup roadmap allows you to pivot data based on teams, owners, or themes, depending on how early you are in the startup game. You can also highlight any crucial milestones you’re aiming for, so that you can bring some razor-sharp focus to the up-and-down startup process.
The truth is, as a startup, you’re probably not too strict about timelines, nor are you actually sticking to every one. So, that’s where a Swimlane View of the startup roadmap is most useful. For startups that just aren’t as confident (or trusting) of their timelines, apply a Swimlane View for your business where the focus is on what the status of each project is, not when it’s getting pushed out.
Startups, we got you. Chart your growth with our customizable startup roadmap template.
4. Business development roadmap
For companies that need a way to organize teams around a market-share growth plan.
What’s a business development roadmap?
For super-speedy businesses barreling towards major growth by the end of the year, a business development roadmap is an ideal asset for your toolkit. This roadmap highlights the essential tasks that contribute to rapid revenue and market-share growth, often in a one-year timeframe.
Sales, marketing, and product teams champion this roadmap, as they use this tool to plan and communicate their business development projects that play a hand in aggressive business growth. For example, sales can use this roadmap to visualize their “land and expand” strategies, while product can outline initiatives like a referral program or live chat that will capture more customers—and ultimately rake in $$.
Business development roadmap examples
The Timeline View of a business development roadmap says to the entire organization, “Hey, here’s how each team will contribute to business development over the next year.” Any team at your business can sneak a peek at this roadmap to understand how the rest of the organization will participate in “biz dev” and thus, plan their initiatives accordingly.
Milestones can clearly highlight the KPIs the business wants to hit during this growth period, thereby giving your teams specific goals (and deadlines) to strive towards. On top of that, you can also explicitly communicate external factors, like changes to privacy laws or updates to a certain OS, that could muddy the “biz dev” waters.
For the less deadline-oriented businesses, a Swimlane View lets you bucket your business development tasks into loose buckets such as quarters. It’s a sweet and simple way to manage all the teams’ expectations on when certain things must get done.
Reach your biz dev goals (even) faster with our business development roadmap template.
5. Business intelligence roadmap
For managers and their teams that need a tool for keeping track of and visualizing the different areas of BI everyone is working on.
What’s a business intelligence roadmap?
For business intelligence (BI) teams that want to maximize their effect on organizational decisions and growth, enlist a business intelligence roadmap. Owned and operated by BI managers and their teams, this type of roadmap visualizes and communicates all aspects of BI, from data mining and analysis to querying and reporting.
BI managers can use this roadmap to plan how their team can optimize internal business processes to be more efficient, which leads to better informed decisions by the business and culminates in scaling. An added benefit of this roadmap is that it helps BI managers inform the rest of the organization and C-level executives about what BI is doing and how they plan on being a part of the business’ bigger picture.
Business intelligence roadmap examples
The Timeline View of the BI roadmap allows BI teams to portray how their activities and initiatives will occur over the next months, quarters, or years. With a focus on KPIs and major dates, this view allows BI teams to plan their initiatives to knock down these targets.
The Swimlane View of the BI roadmap hones in on the BI team’s higher-level goals versus the dates that they’re hitting. Assigning BI tasks to different business verticals like data governance, process improvement or architecture & infrastructure, this roadmap then organizes tasks based on BI goals like strategy, growth and efficiency.
Build your own business intelligence roadmap with our ready-to-use template (just like above ☝️).
6. Data strategy roadmap
For teams that need to communicate how a company’s data operations will evolve over time, as well as what resources will be required to achieve them.
What’s a data strategy roadmap?
A data strategy roadmap tells the rest of your organization how you’ll improve your business’ data operations—such as data collection, storage, management, and application. Well-planned and properly stored data = better business decisions = better organizational growth.
This roadmap tends to fall into the hands of your CIOs, CTOs, and data teams. These data-leaning individuals use this roadmap to ensure their business’ data strategy fits nicely with not only their business processes, but security and information management best practices.
Think of this roadmap as a way to answer any pressing questions—internally and externally—regarding how your business handles data. Are you legally (and ethically) collecting the right data from your users when they visit your website? Are you storing any “unclean” data that should be expunged from your records? What security protocols are in place in case of a data breach?
Data strategy roadmap examples
With our Timeline View showcase the data initiatives planned for the future. Splitting the roadmap into three different phases—planning, process and review—the timeline roadmap streamlines your data strategy so that the rest of the organization can easily digest the data plan.
For more flexibility with your data strategy, apply a Swimlane View. Rather than mapping data initiatives across an extensive timeline, the team’s activities and tasks are sorted into smaller time frames like months or quarters. This way, the team (and organization) can see which types of data security initiatives are getting priority and when.
Get your data strategy in order with our data strategy roadmap template.
7. Enterprise architecture roadmap
For enterprise businesses that need a way to communicate—and align stakeholders on—a plan for evolving the organization’s infrastructure.
What’s an enterprise architecture roadmap?
Enterprises need a roadmap to bring clarity to the chaos. Designed for your big corporations and complex, towering businesses, an enterprise architecture roadmap presents how an enterprise will evolve its own infrastructure in the coming years.
Focusing on organizational agility, efficiency, and stability, this business roadmap illustrates the steps that will be taken to evolve the enterprise’s architecture from status quo to end goal. Mapping and planning this evolution communicates to the rest of the organization how the enterprise will stay competitive and brace itself for changes in the market.
Enterprise architecture roadmap examples
For those businesses wanting to explicitly see how the enterprise infrastructure will evolve over a specific timeframe, a Timeline View is your best bet. Not only does this roadmap chart an enterprise’s evolution across different business verticals like product, applications, and strategy, but it also puts heavy emphasis on goals and KPIs that the enterprise is concerned with.
For enterprises that want to provide a quick summary of their business growth, a Swimlane View may be more your speed. Charting enterprise architecture projects across flexible timeframes like months or quarters, this roadmap provides an overtly transparent depiction of which project will be completed when.
Start planning how your organization's infraestructure will evolve using our enterprise architecture roadmap template
8. eCommerce roadmap
For eCommerce businesses that need a way to visually map and communicate future growth, customer acquisition strategies, and optimization efforts.
What’s an eCommerce roadmap?
An eCommerce roadmap is a visual communication tool meant for any organization with an ecommerce platform. This roadmap aligns the various marketing, design, merchandising, and development initiatives involved in sustaining and growing an ecommerce platform. Milestones come in handy by marking common deadlines, such as collection launches and important seasonal retail dates.
This type of roadmap can help an organization plan the development of an online business, coordinate cross-departmental efforts, and better identify business opportunities.
eCommerce roadmap examples
Use a Timeline View of the ecommerce roadmap to hone in on important ecommerce deadlines and dates—and make sure you know how the rest of the teams are ramping up.
And with the Swimlane View, you can get a high-level, less time-sensitive version of your ecommerce strategy.
Keep your stakeholders aligned on how you plan to grow your eCommerce business using our roadmap template
9. Capability roadmap
For teams that need a way to visualize the plan around resources for big, future projects.
What’s a capability roadmap?
You know those big projects you’ve always envisioned, but they’re so grand they take years to implement? A capability roadmap helps you plan how to execute these projects.
Plotting the large-scale capabilities a business wants to tackle in the next few quarters or years, a capability roadmap revolves around potential rather than your present projects. It plans the super-ambitious, game-changing goals beyond features and releases. Think launching five product lines in three years, or opening up a global office in Europe, or owning 25% of the market share in two years.
Capability roadmap examples
Seeing as this roadmap is meant for planning years into the future, a Timeline View of your capability roadmap just makes sense. Showcasing each team’s planned capabilities for the next few years, the timeline capability roadmap paints the big picture of where your business is going and when they plan on getting there.
If a timeline is too detailed for your capability plans, a Swimlane View might be more up your alley. Organizing your plans into loose and/or fuzzy time buckets like years or “Future,” this roadmap view offers a digestible snapshot of how and when each team plans on tackling capability initiatives.
Try this template for free + check out the other 35+ roadmap templates in our library and find the perfect roadmap for your organizational needs.