What is an agile roadmap?
A product roadmap is essentially an action plan for how a product will evolve to completion. Product roadmaps can be incredibly useful to outline your product functionality and showcase a timeline for when new features will be implemented. Multiple agile teams can utilize a shared product roadmap. When employed in agile development, a roadmap equips your product with the essential framework for a team’s daily tasks and should be reactive to developments in the competing landscape.
Many agile professionals have turned to product roadmaps as a plan of action to resolve managements need for documentation but is your roadmap a valuable project tool or just a required artifact created and then cast aside? If you create it and never look at it again, then you’re probably struggling with lots of issues like missed deadlines, frustrated stakeholders, bad/slow decisions and mediocre solutions.
How does a Product Roadmap Improve Projects?
When done well, the Agile product roadmap is the foundation and facilitator of solution delivery. The process to create and periodically update the roadmap generates meaningful conversations that create confident teams who are able to meet their commitments. A good roadmap process helps teams manage expectations, facilitate decision making, and most importantly, estimate and deliver valuable solutions.
A useful and predictable roadmap requires a consistent focus on three things:
Transparency
Data-Driven Forecasting and Decision Making
Reflection
Agile teams who focus on transparency and engage stakeholders in meaningful discussions need to build a sturdy framework for the Agile product roadmap. The framework should include:
Business Capabilities
Technical Dependencies
Other Project Impacts
Market Events
Risks/schedule constraints
When teams establish this solid framework across a timeline and commit to frequent recasting, the product roadmap becomes an essential communication and trust-building tool. Leaders and stakeholders understand the product/project plan, and the team becomes confident in their ability to deliver!
To learn more about how to create predictable roadmaps and facilitate transparent conversations, join me live at IIL’s Agile and Scrum 2018 Online Conference on June 7 and on-demand from June 8th through September 10th.
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