Visualising a technology roadmap and year plan on just one page

Here's something that other engineering leaders might find useful: Showing all the work under one's ownership, a technology roadmap on a single page that nicely prints to A3 paper.

In this example, I capture everything that was important to me as the leader responsible for what was at the time, one of Africa's largest online video streaming platform (Live TV + VOD). I was responsible for the full platform end-to-end:

• Physical Platform Infrastructure and Networking - Data Centres (Compute, Storage, Networking)
• Cloud Services commercials & workloads
• Software Engineering  - multi-platform, multi-device software development & testing
• Enterprise & Solution Architects
• Video Streaming Hardware & Software infrastructure integration & management
• Recommendations & Content Discovery Engines - AI/ML scientists and engineering
• Agile Program Management Office - Agile Specialists
• Technical Operations & Integrations - Command Center & Mission Control 24/7/365 support
• Security, Anti-piracy, Risk & Governance streams

How do I show on one page, the focus areas for the above teams in terms of our year plan, showcasing:

• The themes that categorise the work so non-technical customers & stakeholders can understand
• The cadence of releases for product feature delivery for product & marketing teams
• The key KPIs our work drives - growth targets for monthly active users
• The key events happening during the year that would put a strain on the platform load/stability
• Show what the tech team will be producing month-on-month
• The owners and points-of-contact for each work stream

So if you're a CTO or Head of Engineering responsible for an overarching technical platform, and you're not visualising your work in your own roadmap view, then IMHO, you're missing a trick. I used Excel to craft my roadmap because I was being scrappy - but it is possible to create such views if you invest in a solid product/program planning tool.

Click to enlarge: An example of a technology leader's roadmap / year plan