Photo by Wise
Welcome to the Mission Roadmap - a map of how we plan to achieve the mission of building money without borders: moving it instantly, transparently, conveniently, and - eventually - for free.
These are the opening words for Wise’s Mission Roadmap that they have recently shared with the public. Here it is:
It’s always great to see what’s being built and which direction the company is taking, and I wish more companies did that. Not only can we see what’s in the development pipeline here, but we can get some hints as to how Wise functions internally.
Each row on the roadmap is set to specific tribe. Tribes in Wise are a “group of product teams covering similar functional areas” (more in their engineering blog). There are purely engineering tribes, e.g. Platform & Security, and there are tribes without an engineering element, e.g. People & Legal. Not all of them are present on the roadmap though.
Each roadmap item is assigned a mission pillar and a region. What’s interesting here is how the mission (which you can read about in their blog post) expanded from Instant, Convenient, and Free to also include Coverage (from few supported currencies to becoming truly global) and Transparent (which I think they reflect that in their “No hidden fees” moto).
Regions are color-coded and most of the features are meant for the global audience with some targeting specific countries or regions.
I love their use of emojis to assign which mission pillar a particular roadmap initiative refers to. Pictures and colors allow for quick visual navigation when there is no other way to filter items. We also rely on emojis in shipit to add some visual explanation to the quarterly OKRs.
With the recently released status view it is now possible to build a similar looking (and in my opinion better functioning) unofficial Wise Mission Roadmap:
Interactive roadmaps allow one to navigate into specific features, regions, or mission pillars (in case of Wise) with ease and give better presentation to your different teams without overflowing them with information they don’t need.
In shipit we use item status to indicate the progress in the current quarter (which doesn’t mean these can’t be used for something else). By default statuses are called planned, in progress, and finished which I then renamed to follow the Wise convention.
Because there is no indication how long each feature would take to build and deliver, items from the now column were put in the current quarter, and the remaining ones into the next two quarters.
Take a look at the different views of the same roadmap: https://app.getshipit.com/r/tVTZlShDfP. Which one do you like more, the original or shipit?