Hey, Ashwin here! Welcome to edition #19 of the Tech Lead Compass newsletter!
In today’s digital age, technology drives almost every organization, either powering core functions or supporting operations. A technology roadmap provides a high-level view of how your organization plans to leverage tech for business growth.
What is a Technology Roadmap?
A technology roadmap is a strategic planning document that outlines an organization’s technology goals, initiatives, and milestones over a specified time period
Technology roadmaps can be created for various scopes, from a single product to an entire industry. They are particularly useful in fast-moving technology sectors to ensure organizations stay competitive and innovative.
Why a tech roadmap is needed?
Here are some reasons for a tech roadmap to exist.
- Align technology development and related activities with business objectives and market needs.
- Prioritize technology investments and resource allocation, communicate with business decision-makers and key stakeholders across the organization
- Provide a framework for planning and tracking technology evolution
- Helps to proactively identify potential challenges and dependencies
What should a tech roadmap include?
- Current state of technology: Where the organization stands w.r.t. tech maturity and landscape
- Future technology goals: Where the organization wants to go with tech about its long-term goals and vision
- Timeline: How the goals will be achieved over a period of time (typically 1-3 years)
- Key Milestones and Deliverables: What are the major milestones in the roadmap and what will be delivered to add value
- Resourcing: What investments like people, tools, partnerships, etc. are expected to achieve these goals
- Potential risks and mitigations: What are the known risks and how do we plan to mitigate them
How can you create one for your organization?
Here are 5 steps to create a robust tech roadmap for your organization:
- Define – Clarify goals and define how tech can support them
- Assess – Make an inventory of current technology, and define what emerging tech is required to address market needs and the competitive landscape
- Prioritize – Rank what is needed based on their business impact, feasibility, budget constraints, and resources/skills available
- Plan – Create an implementation plan with key milestones, deliverables, and metrics to measure progress
- Communicate – Make a package to visually depict the roadmap, explain key aspects in simple terms for stakeholders to review and offer feedback
You might have to iterate a few times based on feedback, but that’s quite natural given the significance of a tech roadmap.
I hope this gives you a solid foundation and go, define the awesome tech roadmap for your organization!
Now on to the must-read news from the past week…
5 “Must-Read” Tech News for the Week
Anthropic has introduced a new feature called the “Prompt Playground” for its AI model, Claude. This tool is designed to help developers quickly generate, test, and refine prompts to improve their AI applications.
Microsoft decided to give up its observer seat on OpenAI’s board. Microsoft stated that it has seen significant progress from OpenAI over the past eight months and is confident in the company’s direction, making the observer seat unnecessary.
Galaxy Z Flip6, Galaxy Z Fold6, Galaxy Watch Ultra, Galaxy Watch 7, and Galaxy Buds3 were all announced in the Galaxy Unpacked event on 10 July. Galaxy Ring, a health tracking device was also announced. This article from The Verge goes into further detail on Galaxy Ring.
AWS’s new service, App Studio allows users to create enterprise applications by simply describing what they need in natural language – also known as prompts.
The tool was developed after analyzing AI bot and crawler traffic to fine-tune automatic bot detection models.
Bloomberg highlights the urgent need for over 1 million high-tech engineers in India as the economy continues to expand.
That’s it for the week!
