Both old school and new school have value. Some fundamentals have stood the test of time — sometimes thousands of years. New tools are great too, providing innovative ways to organize and automate. But sometimes blending both gives you even more ways to visualize and manipulate information.

When building my first portfolio roadmap for the SANS Institute, I turned paper notes, emails, and Slack conversations into Trello cards. Then I printed those cards out — just broad summaries, not yet with fleshed-out requirements — used scissors to cut them into slips of paper, and organized them on our cherry wood credenza. I took a picture of the result, then translated that photo into a multi-lane six-month product roadmap in Lucidchart.

Blending old and new school let me generate a first-run roadmap quickly, without the data I didn’t yet have. Whether analog or digital, opposing approaches can provide new insights that either alone cannot.

From there, bullet lists became the next layer. Whether as a status update in an email or a skeleton framework in a corporate wiki, a well-crafted bullet list quickly highlights the top tasks alongside their brief supporting context. In a wiki, this extends to supplemental documents as well.

These quick frameworks are only the beginning — the real work is in the details that get fleshed out and executed on. But at just six weeks into a demanding new role, they provide a necessary focal point to gather consensus and effort around.