Three Creative Ways to Do a Roadmap Slide

When you want to present long-term plans, visualizing them is the best way to communicate your company or product vision. In this blog, you’ll find three ways to make your strategic roadmap presentation attractive and well-remembered.

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It’s this time of year when people talk intensively about new directions and set fresh objectives for their businesses. On all levels, from the board presentations, product development blueprints, or investor pitches of a start-up.

Roadmaps can be used for various levels of planning – Strategy, Tactics, Operations too. They differ by the scope of vision. By definition, strategy is a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal or set of objectives. Operational planning is rather short-term (days, weeks, a few months at most). For these, you can use also a standard calendar view of the objectives.

Remark: You can get all presented diagrams and icons from Roadmap Diagram Templates.

Depending on the type of planning you present about, choose one of the following slide visualizations:

Roadmap as a real picture of a path and horizon
Roadmap as a simple road line
Timeline graphics representing a path

Far far Away Picture Roadmaps – Best for Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities and ensure all teams are working toward a common goal. If you want to know more about good strategic planning, check these 10 Steps To Creating A Project Plan.

A well-designed strategic roadmap is like a GPS for your business. It’s one of the best tools to lift the fog and make your vision clear for everyone on the team. Furthermore, the presentation of such a plan should help people imagine the future. Hence using real pictures is a good idea.

Curvy road picture with strategy milestones landmarks

In such a road map view, you can add milestone elements to visualize what needs to be prioritized year-by-year (or month-by-month) to achieve your vision.

5 year strategy road map landmarks, project steps sand footprint roadmap picture, quarter milestones

If you prefer the less realistic look, you can go for the simplistic yet modern look of flat graphics.

Product Roadmaps Mapping Year Activities

In case you want to focus more on elements of a path – e.g. various project stages or departments involved, consider using infographics roadmaps. The more simple ones can be created using simple PowerPoint shapes, as on the third slide below.

project plan timeline roadmap flat hills picture, skyline pathway departments roadmap, 6 stages roadmap flat infograhpics

Roadmap Timeline Diagrams

Timeline diagrams are another type of roadmap graphics you can apply instead of text bullet points. You can use one of the PowerPoint SmartArt diagrams. Or to be less default-looking, add a set of shapes, connect them by line and enrich each point with an icon. These timelines are suitable for illustrating project stages or sequence of steps, too.

When creating such a timeline, take care all points are aligned and equally distributed, so the overall picture looks clean and professional.

9 steps timeline roadmap with signpost icons strategic roadmap presentation

Circular 6 steps arrow timeline diagram strategic roadmap presentation

Whatever your planning level and context, the visual roadmap can be one of the best weapons in your communication arsenal. It’s the one tool that can continue to remind everyone of your vision and keep all team members on the right road.

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Roadmap Graphics Resources

To help you visualize your plans quickly, we designed a template with various strategic roadmap presentation diagrams and timeline infographics. Check and use it for presenting your strategies and project plans.

The roadmaps set contains various editable diagrams: