business planning roadmap

7 Business Roadmap Examples To Hit Your Goals

You might have heard of roadmaps before—they’re great for planning, communicating, and aligning organizations on key initiatives and strategies. 

But, without the right tools, creating a comprehensive roadmap from your existing strategy and planning documents can take time and effort (and a lot of head-banging). And the human factor means that you’ll inevitably have to deal with inaccuracies and manual updating.

In this article, we’ll give you seven business roadmap examples and templates to get you started on the right foot with your roadmap planning.

We'll also cover the benefits business roadmaps can offer your organization and show you how to build one in 5 easy steps. 

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• What Is A Business Roadmap? 

Business Roadmap Example

More business roadmap examples and roadmap templates.

• How Do You Create A Business Roadmap?
• Create And Track Your Roadmap With Cascade 🚀  

What Is A Business Roadmap?

A business roadmap is a visual strategic planning tool that presents a company’s strategies, strategic and operational objectives, and action plans in a Gantt chart. 

Business roadmaps serve as a guide, illustrating your business plan from the present to your envisioned success. They provide a holistic view of the organization's business goals across different departments and can be crucial for communicating big-picture initiatives to stakeholders.

They can also help you:

• Keep everyone focused on critical strategic initiatives .
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration by breaking down silos.
• Monitor critical milestones, dependencies between projects, and bottlenecks in your business strategy.
• Identify underperforming areas and risks so you can decide your next move before it’s too late.  

This Business Roadmap Template is a solid foundation to build a business roadmap from scratch. 

It comes prefilled with examples including: 

• Focus areas: The main strategic priorities that you and your teams will be working on. 
• Strategic objectives: The outcomes you want to achieve. 
• Projects: A group of actions to be executed to achieve the desired outcome.
• KPIs: Metrics that will help you measure your progress toward objectives. 

With this template, you can turn your business plan into a comprehensive strategic roadmap that can guide your strategic decisions and efficiently communicate the necessary steps, people involved, and timelines to stakeholders.

💡 Best for: Business owners, entrepreneurs, or leaders who want a solid template to create roadmaps in their business and strategic planning process.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Business Roadmap Template.

💪 Tips to customize your roadmap in Cascade:

1. Get your template and sign up to Cascade for free. The template will be automatically added to your workspace. 

2. Customize your template with your organization’s goals, business objectives, and KPIs.

3. Switch to the Timeline view to visualize your strategic plan as a Gantt-style roadmap.

4. Make adjustments and track progress to keep your business roadmap updated.

5. Bring your team on board to collaborate on your roadmap and ensure everyone is working toward the same outcomes. 

Looking for something more specific? Here are our top picks for other types of business roadmaps you can use to ensure you’re moving forward toward your goals. Each template comes pre-filled with examples and has the key elements of an effective business roadmap. 

Strategy Roadmap

A strategy roadmap helps streamline the strategic planning process, providing a clear and concise guide that helps organizations accomplish their strategic goals effectively. 

Try our Strategy Roadmap Template if you’d like to create a strategic roadmap for your business. It has all the features you’ll need to plan and visualize your business's long-term goals.

💡 Best for: C-level professionals, business managers, and team leaders who want to take a more strategic approach to planning and goal-setting. 

👉 Click here to get your FREE Strategy Roadmap Template.

Business Development Roadmap

A business development roadmap helps to guide your business as it expands and evolves. It assists leadership teams or even sales teams in setting clear overall goals and outlines the strategies needed to win in the long term. 

Our Business Development Roadmap Template is ideal for those looking to develop and execute a strategic growth strategy that is comprehensive but easy to communicate. Use it to clarify your organization's growth objectives, pinpoint opportunities, and craft a strategic approach to make the most of them.

Plus, with Cascade’s real-time dashboards , strategy reports , and data integrations , you can execute your business development plan all in one place.

💡 Best for: Executives , and business development managers responsible for taking their business's growth and development to a new level. Applicable to organizations of any size.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Business Development Roadmap Template.

Project Roadmap

A project roadmap helps teams articulate project plans, achieve goals, and monitor progress. It should guide project teams, ensuring projects remain on track, within budget, and on schedule.

Use our Project Roadmap Template to help focus your planning efforts and ensure smooth and successful execution. It has everything you need to outline scopes, establish goals and objectives, allocate resources, and plot deliverables on realistic timelines.

💡 Best for: Project teams, project managers, and project portfolio managers who want to streamline project planning, management, and execution.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Project Roadmap Template.

Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is instrumental in product management by simplifying the complex product creation cycles and communicating imperatives in your product development process. 

If you're looking for a comprehensive framework to steer teams through your product strategy, our Product Roadmap Template will start you off on the right foot.

Use it to outline your new product vision, set clear objectives, and pinpoint the necessary actions and resources to reach critical milestones.

💡 Best for: R&D teams, product leaders, and product teams looking to enhance their product development and planning approach.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Product Roadmap Template.

Technology Roadmap

A technology roadmap provides clear paths for organizations to achieve strategic technological goals and stay competitive through ongoing innovation. It’s also crucial for giving context to long-term technology goals that are often hard to communicate.

Using a visual tool like a roadmap can assist CTOs and CIOs in identifying, executing, and monitoring their technology strategies to support business growth and innovation.

Our Technology Roadmap Template is a great starting point for planning your technology strategy and making sure it runs smoothly. With it, you can establish clear objectives, prioritize projects, allocate resources, and set realistic timelines.

💡 Best for: CTOs, CIOs, and IT leaders planning their technology strategy.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Technology Roadmap Template.

Marketing Roadmap

Marketing roadmaps help you outline key marketing goals, KPIs, and projects. They can also help maintain a clear project direction and timeline and keep teams focused on results.

If you want to build your marketing roadmap, our Marketing Strategy Roadmap Template offers a comprehensive framework to start with your own. Use it to streamline your marketing planning with a comprehensive framework to guide your team through goal setting, objective identification, and action planning.

With this template, you’ll be able to craft a world-class strategic marketing plan that your organization understands and buys into.

💡 Best for: CMOs, team leads, and marketing professionals who want to build a solid marketing roadmap to drive effective marketing campaigns for their business.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Marketing Roadmap Template.

The Benefits Of A Business Roadmap

A business roadmap or any other type of roadmap tool can make a big difference in your planning and execution. Here are the key benefits business roadmaps offer:

• Improved prioritization: Business roadmaps can help identify and prioritize the most impactful actions. This approach ensures that high-priority initiatives receive attention, driving growth and progress more efficiently.
• Increased transparency: For a plan to be successful, you need buy-in at every level. By visually displaying objectives, initiatives, and progress, a business roadmap opens up your strategy to stakeholders. This, in turn, can help build trust, shared ownership, and accountability among team members.
• Confident decision-making: A business roadmap is an instrumental asset for real-time decision-making by providing valuable metrics and context in one place. With them, you get a 4D perspective on performance and quickly identify what is working and where to optimize.
• Greater adaptability: A well-designed business roadmap allows organizations to respond effectively to market, industry, or internal changes. With all data in one place, you get better visibility into how your business performs at every level. This helps you make the right decisions at the right time. 
• Focused execution: Strategic roadmaps bring structure and simplicity to building strategies by breaking them down into high-level objectives, business metrics , and a series of initiatives, milestones, and programs that are executable and trackable. This drives ownership among those responsible for the execution and business outcomes.

How Do You Create A Business Roadmap? 

If you grabbed one of the templates above , then you’re already halfway there. You just need to adjust the pre-filled “dummy data” to make them your own. Click on any element (like focus area, objective, or KPI) and edit away!

If you want to build a custom roadmap from scratch and truly tailor it to your organization's needs , then follow this five-step approach below.

💡Tip: You can use the same step-by-step process if you want to build your roadmap in manual tools like Excel. However, using Cascade offers additional free benefits such as drag-and-drop dashboards and data integrations to automate your performance tracking in one place.  

1. Create your objectives for each focus area

Start by defining your focus areas , which are high-level categories that group your objectives. For example, you might choose Operational Efficiency as one of your focus areas. 

Then, outline short-term and long-term objectives for each focus area, focusing on specific, measurable, and achievable goals. 

💡A key thing to remember: Less is better. Focus on your most critical strategic objectives . This will set the tone for strategic decision-making and ensure everyone is on the same page.

2. Add KPIs to measure performance

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for tracking progress, evaluating the effectiveness of initiatives, and informing data-driven decision-making. 

In Cascade, you can add KPI to each objective. Define KPIs that are relevant and aligned with your objectives. These will help you monitor progress, identify potential problems, and act before it’s too late. 

3. Assign initiatives and responsibilities 

Successful execution requires action and ownership. In Cascade’s Planner , you can assign key initiatives and projects under each objective. 

This functionality will allow you to co-create project and action plans with your team members and ensure you clearly understand capacities and possible constraints ahead of time. You can also add owners and collaborators to each initiative and KPI to ensure accountability across your organization.

4. Define milestones and a timeline

Milestones and timeframes help set realistic expectations and keep the organization on track. They are also crucial for prioritizing different initiatives in your strategy and ensuring your plan aligns with the company’s broader strategic initiatives .

Establish milestones that mark significant progress and create a timeline to visualize the expected completion of each initiative. 

In Cascade , you can switch to the Timeline View to get a roadmap view of your strategy, planning, and execution. This feature makes it easy to identify which projects are on track and where you need to course-correct.

5. Execute and track progress 

With Cascade, maintaining momentum in your strategy execution couldn't be easier. Use real-time dashboards to track critical metrics and create regular strategy reports to communicate priorities, inform decision-making, and keep everyone moving in the right direction.

Create And Track Your Roadmap With Cascade 🚀 

If you want to get the most out of your strategy, roadmaps are a great addition to your toolkit. 

But creating a roadmap with outdated tools and disconnected platforms is an uphill battle. Don't let multiple spreadsheets, siloed information, and static tools hold you back. You risk running your operations blindfolded and too slow to recognize and seize the opportunity. 

“Cascade provides a readily accessible platform for hosting our strategy and enables us to generate live updates at the push of a button. It has increased transparency and accountability for our strategic priorities and has allowed us to remove silo working and improve alignment. The real game changer from my perspective is the reporting function. Cascade has turned a labor-intensive manual process into something which can be completed in minutes.” - Enterprise customer from Construction Industry  (Source: G2 review )

With Cascade, effective strategic planning and strategy execution doesn’t have to be complex or chaotic where everyone works in different directions. We bring clarity to chaos by bringing together all components of successful strategy execution. 

Ready to take Cascade for a spin? 

Sign up today for free , or book a 1:1 product demo with one of Cascade’s in-house strategy experts.

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Nine business roadmap examples for scaling your organization

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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 its 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 roadmap 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 lay out 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 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

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 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 common roadmap template might not be as applicable if you don't have many teams or resources. That’s why we suggest a startup roadmap for businesses still finding their footing.

A startup roadmap helps smaller businesses plan how they’ll hit 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.

Startups tend not to be heavily process-oriented. As a result, startup roadmaps lean more on the high-level and flexible side, so as to adapt quickly to the often chaotic startup environment. The roadmap is a small business’ way of zooming in on its end goal (hint: business growth) and mapping out a feasible plan to achieve said goal.

Startup roadmap examples

The truth is, as a startup, you’re probably not too strict about timelines. 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 the status of the project, 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

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. 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 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

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 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 infrastructure 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 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

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 enterprise architecture roadmap

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 goals 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 percent of the market share in two years.

Capability roadmap examples

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.

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