“It’s in our Roadmap” – This phrase is quiet popular in the life of a product manager, especially when designing any HR SaaS solutions as the product keeps on evolving from time to time. There are always some incorrect connotations about what a road map is and what it should be used for.
Ideally a product road map in a SaaS HR software is an outlook towards the organisation’s strategy wrt to the product. It helps the customers to gain an insight and confidence in you that the organisation has a fair understanding of the market and how it will provide Industry best practices. It is a reflection of the current understanding of the market, the product, the users, and the company that is updated only when changes are need to further simplify the process and provide better user experience.
We should also be clear that a product road map is not a sales pitch which should be used when they can’t convince the customer about the value of the proposition. Neither it is prediction of where the market will be in the next 12-24 months nor it’s a tool that constantly gets changed based on the product manager’s discretion.
Sales will always expect to know the specific time for any feature to come, as they go out in the market. A CEO will look for a firm roadmap to keep all the stakeholders happy. Each and every team is going to have a different reason for wanting the roadmap, and each reason requires an entirely different level of details. In order to meet all the expectations, one should create a roadmap that’s tightly-committed in the short-term, loosely-committed in the near-term, and visionary in the long term.
Before writing a road map for SaaS HR software or be it any software one should take into consideration 3 things
- Who is the audience – As in any other conference or communication it is important to know the target audience, whether it’s the top management or HR team or the employees; similarly, one should always know the audience to which the road map will be reviewed/ shared.
- What is the purpose/ need of the road map
- What level of detailing is required
For example:
For the next three months, you probably have a good idea of what features are going to be completed and/or what’s got a very good chance to get started and hopefully finished. These specific features should be called out in that time-frame.
From three to six (or maybe nine) months, you should have a prioritised backlog that you can look at to determine what are the likely areas in which you’ll focus your efforts.
Outside this, everything is a total guess.
Just a basic comprehension of who it is you’re making the roadmap for an HR SaaS solutions, what you’re targeting, and what level of details you’re shooting for makes the magic possible.
To know more about SaaS for human resources management, Contact us.
