of a roadmap in the sense that: The final goals for the period are broken down into smaller goals, which are quantified and measurable. The smaller goals, limited by timelines, also have specific technological achievements to be made and validated. The milestones of such technological achievements tend to indicate features or subfeatures that need to be developed and incorporated as whole or part of a product that the company develops. Functions of companies such as strategy development and forecasting typically develop positions about what the company needs to achieve in the future and helps formulate the dialog that needs to happen with the technical functions to arrive at what the company's projected path looks like. Any document that captures the end result becomes a roadmap that could be shared with the whole of the company to confirm and implement the collective vision that is intended to be achieved. CHAPTER 4 NETWORK ROADMAPS Formulation of a Technology Roadmap Let's look at a fictional product meeting where key personnel from different parts of a product company are meeting to compare their notes and determine what should be happening with the product. The following is an example of a typical product meeting: Actors: Bob from Product Marketing, Alan from Engineering, David from Sales, and Rick from customer support. Bob: As I was saying, customers would like to know what features our product would be supporting in the subsequent releases. I have a long list of features that different customers want. So tell me, what can we do over this year and the coming year to make this happen? Alan: Engineering is pretty far behind the current commitments as it is and we surely would need to drop some features even to get current releases out. The question is which features do I drop? David: Team-1 really need to give some clear directions to sales. We keep meeting lots of customers and I am not really sure if we are speaking about the correct features that we are focusing on. I would like to read from the same sheet