How better roadmapping helped CARFAX achieve transparency

Building strategic roadmaps without a dedicated roadmapping tool is tricky. For CARFAX, it made it more difficult to deliver on one of their key corporate values: Transparency. Everything changed when they discovered Roadmunk.

A top workplace

For 40 years, CARFAX has been supplying millions of people across North America and Europe with vehicle history reports to help them buy, service, and sell used cars with more confidence.

CARFAX is nationally recognized as a top workplace by The Washington Post and Glassdoor.com and one of the reasons for that is because they have a culture of trust, openness, and transparency. Visibility and alignment matters – and they want their teams to always understand the value of what they’re doing and how their work connects to CARFAX’s overarching strategy.

This is why roadmapping is such an important focus area within their business and why Strategic Roadmaps mattered so much to their workflows.

The struggle to maintain transparency

The problem for CARFAX was that they were creating roadmap facsimiles using generic, siloed software rather than a dedicated and integrated roadmapping tool. For years they had one big Excel roadmap with joined cells and merged data, which they would copy portions of into PowerPoint, before putting on overlays to draw attention to different elements.

It was a tedious and time-consuming process that was painful to update each month.

These facsimiles made it difficult to offer the transparency and visibility that is core to CARFAX’s ethos because the data in them was static and immediately out of date after being inputted. Visibility also relied on updated Excel files being sent to employees rather than everyone having immediate access to one live document.

Why Strategic Roadmaps was an easy fit

Implementing Strageic Roadmaps alleviated all the stress and inefficiency of making, updating, and distributing roadmaps for CARFAX.

Strategic Roadmap's automation and drag-and-drop customizations have made updating CARFAX’s roadmaps easy and quick, and it’s become much easier to show what’s happening and why it matters.

Moreover, Strategic Roadmaps is dynamic – creating living documents that are fully integrated with Jira, which is where everyone’s working. So teams and managers no longer have to wait for updated Excel files to be passed around.

Their new roadmaps always reflect the reality of the situation at that moment in time.

"It didn’t take much convincing to get our team onto Strategic Roadmaps. It was just so much better than what we were using at the time, and we knew it would meet our needs." – Alison Clough | Manager of Project Services at CARFAX

How CARFAX uses Strategic Roadmaps

Strategic Roadmaps is used primarily by CARFAX’s product owners, project managers, and their teams. Individual teams manage their roadmaps in Strategic Roadmaps on a regular basis.

Those team roadmaps roll up into portfolio roadmaps; from there, they have four macro-level portfolio areas.They routinely share overviews and discussions about each of these with the senior leadership team to help CARFAX prioritize tasks at the strategic level.

This keeps their organization aligned around a singular vision.

Presenting with Strategic Roadmaps has made CARFAX’s update meetings much more productive. The app’s design, with its heading structures and pivotable views, helps them communicate clearly, while the visual indicators help them make sure their game plan is aligned.

This is important especially as their new feature rollouts get more complex.

"We have multiple teams and different levels of leadership pulling up Strategic Roadmaps in their meetings to see how we’re delivering and where we can be performing better." – Aaron Hall | Head of Project and Portfolio Management at CARFAX

"Portfolio management within Strategic Roadmaps is powerful and makes sure my team isn’t wasting their time."

Everybody understands their value

Sometimes leaders of project management teams have to work hard to convince people of the value of their function. This is not because portfolio and project planning aren’t necessary, but because there are a lot of negative, preconceived notions about what project managers do.

Strategic Roadmaps helps CARFAX deliver on their mission to ensure that no one needs convincing of the value of their colleagues' and managers' work.

Because it’s all right there, in black and white, in their roadmaps.

"Portfolio management within Strategic Roadmaps is powerful and makes sure my team isn’t wasting their time." – Aaron Hall | Head of Project and Portfolio Management at CARFAX