Roadmap Vision
Brief
I was tasked to help create a UX roadmap vision for a new product consisting of three different technologies handled by three individual teams in India, California, and Florida. As this new product is pretty technical, the VP of design reached out to me to help her digest the problem, and to onboard a third-party agency to help with the design and lead the initial phase of the project.
Role
Product design manager / cross-functional lead
Year
2022
Visualizing the problem
When I realized the system's complexity, I started a visualization to help us understand the project's scope, which I polished for everyone to understand. I started mapping the touchpoints where the products intersect, and eventually felt the need for a 3D isometric illustration to identify each touchpoint in its respective plane.
Understanding the user needs
After sorting out the interdependencies among the different teams, I started my avid reading to get up to speed with the different technologies and worked with our researcher to analyze the existing insights we had. With the help of several PMs and sales engineers, we were able to determine the gaps that were keeping the user experience low and therefore the adoption of the technology, particularly when stacked against the competition.
Our researcher conducted interviews with current and potential customers to understand their particular use cases and validate the solutions that would make up our experience roadmap.
Defining the roadmap
Armed with these insights, we defined and prioritized the critical pain points and gaps in the experience, and I immediately started creating a storyboard to visualize them and make up a cohesive story with a natural flow. After a few iterations, I ended up with 4 "acts" or sections that logically grouped the future work and created characters and a storyline to drive a connecting tissue.
I worked the content for the presentation directly in the storyboard and shared it with the team to get constant feedback while creating alignment at the cross-functional level.
Telling the story
Once the hard work of finding and socializing the insights and potential solutions is over, It's time to communicate the vision and illustrate a clear path of improvements in a sequence that is simple to digest.
I designed medium-resolution illustrations to reinforce the script and express context and action while abstracting the details of the solutions since my team had its hands full with scheduled work. I created animations in Figma and Powerpoint when necessary to communicate actions and used transitions to help advance the story.
I designed medium-resolution illustrations to reinforce the script and express context and action while abstracting the details of the solutions since my team had its hands full with scheduled work. I created animations in Figma and Powerpoint when necessary to communicate actions and used transitions to help advance the story.
Animojis make it easy to create medium resolution characters that effectively communicate human expression and are highly customizable.
I shorten the number of characters to three to keep the storyline simple and used before/after slides to juxtapose the improvements over the existing solutions that this new technology replacing.
I shorten the number of characters to three to keep the storyline simple and used before/after slides to juxtapose the improvements over the existing solutions that this new technology replacing.
Results
The vision was well received by our leadership, and it continues to be a north-star helping the different teams prioritize and align the features that are most important for our customers and address their biggest pain points.
Great executive buy-in on vision with excellent feedback on its presentation.
The visualizations created help us communicate internally and with partners even today.
