BLOG POST ·
4
min read ·
April 15, 2021

Outcome vs Future-Driven Roadmap – Which One Is Right for My Product?

Today's generation of consumers values customer engagement highly when committing to a service provider. Simplifying customer interactions is a straightforward method of strengthening ties with your customer base. Optimising your website alone won't make you competitive enough to compete against more technologically advanced services. 

Roadmap visualisation

Unlike a website's limitations, you have numerous ways to utilise a device's different input methods and integration with other software. However, before you can optimise your business's processes, you first need to identify how an app can benefit your company. Afterwards, you can proceed to plot an app development roadmap.


Understanding outcome-driven roadmaps

Developing an app should be an answer to your company's or customer's needs. After evaluating data on key metrics, seeing inefficiencies or vulnerabilities in your business can give you the push to develop an app to solve them.

A product roadmap that leans towards a particular outcome requires you to commit to solving problems, whichever method works best. It allows you to be flexible in taking in opinions and suggestions on the right approach to developing your app's features. It's a more experimental method that encourages creativity and innovation instead of focusing on an intended feature as the app's goal.

It's a roadmap process that works great for designers and developers, allowing them to discover innovative solutions instead of focusing on a restricted output. Although your team has more freedom to think outside the box, you should still enforce strict deadlines with concrete and workable plans moving forward.


Comparing feature-driven roadmaps

A traditional feature-driven roadmap usually addresses a sales or customer concern. For example, your app may want to solve complex payment processes or slow collection of customer inquiries. This approach pushes for a user-centred design process. If the data you have explicitly shows demand for a specific feature, your roadmap may lean towards building the app with it in mind. User-centred design should strengthen the current business model you have in place, enhancing how your business can interact with your customers and vice-versa.


Plotting the ideal design thinking process for roadmaps

You have the option of starting with either roadmap, depending on what you can infer from the data you've collected. However, it's best to start with an outcome-driven roadmap before refining it with a feature-driven roadmap. Following your app development process in this way allows you to validate your initiatives and balance out any items in your backlog.

Make sure that your features work against your goals, which is why you must keep your customer's pain points in mind whenever committing to a feature. Otherwise, you'll waste time refining an app feature that does little to solve your customer's concerns.


Conclusion

Designing your roadmap isn't a task you can accomplish by yourself. It's a collaborative process that should involve UX designers and app development teams, especially during the early stages of building your app. Afterwards, you'll need testers to check your app's functionality before releasing it for public use. This is why it's necessary to partner with a diverse team of professionals to dissect, assess, and refine your business's app.


If you need custom software development in Melbourne VIC, we're the right company to call. At Fabric Group, we combine innovative principles in analysis, design, quality automation to deliver custom digital platforms that generate maximum business value for your business. Contact us today to learn more about our services.

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