Product Roadmap Template

If we find that our customers don’t engage with the feature, should we continue to invest in it? We need to understand why engagement is low before we make this decision. This one should probably go without saying; you’re in an Agile environment now, aren’t you? You’re going to need to review and adjust your roadmap regularly as circumstances agile product roadmap change. Before you jump into goal setting and thinking up cool new features, make sure you’ve done the necessary prep work to validate your product. Creating an effective roadmap in any environment is not easy, but especially on an Agile team where changes occur readily and frequently, you have your work cut out for you.

The name is self-explanatory, as manufacturing roadmaps help to control manufacturing and set actual dates for a particular release. Technology roadmaps or IT roadmaps are more low-level documents usually created to agile product roadmap support the main strategic roadmap. They are used for the internal teams to formulate tech requirements. Technology roadmaps determine the use of a certain technology and help to allocate resources they depend on.

Story Map

A few clear smells that your roadmap sucks are if looks anything like a release plan, a feature list, or has specific dates about when something is due. Those types are destined to be very wrong, fail, and cause you to spend way too much time updating them for next week’s meeting. Based on a roadmap application, it might require different approaches to its creation. It might be a high-level visualization of future changes in your product for customers or a detailed plan to align cross-team collaboration and reach a common understanding of the product vision.

• Involving at least one of them in stakeholder discussion won’t hurt too.
• It is a high-level outline of general product information tied to a specific aspect depending on the purpose.
• A user story defines a new software feature from an end-user perspective — including what the user wants and why.
• Involving team members helps them to better grasp the bigger picture and to develop a sense of importance and urgency.
• It can also create quicker learning loops for your team by quickly understanding when something didn’t work so the team can dig deeper to see why whatever was implemented didn’t change user behavior.
• Also consider general backlog prioritization techniques used in Agile, since products are driven by backlog one way or another.

Like features-driven product roadmaps, they’re useful for communicating with teams that have a need for some level of detail about the functionality that is planned for delivery. Also, like features-driven product roadmaps, releases-driven product roadmaps are better suited for near-term planning when the coming functionality and level of required effort are more clear. Strategic product roadmaps place less emphasis on specific features and precise time estimates than some other formats and may even leave out dates altogether. When details of features and functionality are displayed, they’re placed in the context of the strategic imperatives they support. As a product manager, you are there to help facilitate the creation of the product roadmap, not dictate it to your team. You can start by ensuring you have an in-depth understanding of the overarching organization/product goals that relate to the product you’re managing. Most of the time, theme-oriented product roadmaps are quarterly based.

How An Agile Roadmap Works

Objective-driven roadmaps are also easy to update on a rolling basis, giving you flexibility on delivery dates and timelines. One of the biggest challenges in product management is planning the work in a linear, visual way. Sure, we’ve had “roadmaps” for a long time but they betray the true nature of software development. So one concept sheds the constraints of time and another often appears inherently time-based. An team cloud is a valuable tool and quite frankly, the concept of roadmapping fits rather nicely in agile environments. Much like the products produced by agile teams, agile roadmaps are iterative.

At first glance, the idea of a product roadmap may seem antithetical to an agile approach. However, a product roadmap can not only coexist with an agile approach, but it can enable that approach. For example, imagine that your organization notices that a significant portion of your newest users tends to abandon your product within 30 days after their first login. This desire to increase retention is the outcome you wish to achieve. While your first attempts to introduce a product roadmap in an agile environment might meet some resistance initially, there are some steps that you can take to ease this introduction.

Reviewing The Roadmap With The Engineering Team

A ZenHub Project is a high-level plan with a desired start and end date. The scope of projects may not yet be defined and you can modify project start/due dates. A ZenHub Pair programming Epic is a theme of work containing sub-tasks required to complete the larger goal. Adding epics to a project allows you to accurately track project progress.

Agile Principle 10 states that “Simplicity is essential.” Take this same approach with your roadmap. It’ll be too cluttered with hundreds of features that may never make it into development. While it’s incumbent on the team to continually expose what they are doing, learning and deciding, official check-ins can software development service happen on a quarterly basis. Teams meet with leaders to determine how well they’ve tracked towards their OKR’s, what they’ve learned during the last quarter and what they plan on doing in the next quarter. Plenty of startups have successfully adopted an agile mentality that dismisses long-term timelines.

Features

Roadmaps enable this alignment by communicating the strategy, goals, and upcoming features of your product. To understand why, let’s first understand the point of a product roadmap. We will then cover how an agile roadmap works, as well as four principles to help you create your own. Roadmunk is a roadmapping tool that makes it easy to share and visualize your product strategy. And if you’re an agile-ish team that’s still incorporating waterfall elements, your product roadmap tends to have dates with a caveat. Your dates closer to the present tend to be more granular, whereas the further along you go the more abstract (i.e. fuzzy) the time headers become. If you work in a more structured agile environment, another option is to structure your product roadmap by cycle or sprint—and not link those sprints to specific dates.

To complete this activity, the user needs to perform certain tasks which are recorded and converted into user stories for software development. To build a roadmap, product owners take into account phases of the system development life cycle market trajectories, value propositions, and engineering constraints. Once these factors are reasonably well-understood, they’re expressed in a roadmap as initiatives and timelines.

Agile

You can combine roadmap revisions with existing meetings (e.g. update the product roadmap after each demo, when all the stakeholders are present). That’s why it makes sense to break them into epics (i.e. large pieces of work that share a common goal) and into smaller user stories that can be completed within one sprint (1-4 weeks). From there you can work on specific goals you want to achieve with your product. These goals are relatively short-term , specific, and have clear success metrics (e.g. acquire a thousand new customers by the next quarter). Users often don’t believe the development team listens to their feedback or can deliver the promised capabilities .

Instead, they want to understand what problems the team is working to solve. An outcome-oriented roadmap is very similar to a theme-oriented approach. An outcome is defined as “something that follows as a result or consequence.” By agreeing on the outcomes you and the team will be driving toward, it leaves full power to the team to define the solution. Once your stakeholders align on those themes, you and the team can nest epics beneath those themes. For example, an epic beneath the ‘improve the plant care experience’ theme could be ‘Water Schedule UX Improvements’.

Customers,Suppliers, and partners need to understand how Solutions will evolve and how they will participate in achieving the vision. A product roadmap’s function directly ties into one of the major motivations of adopting an agile methodology . Roadmaps change frequently, allowing them to easily fit into agile settings — which also get reoriented often. Product Management Resources Use our in-depth guides to build great roadmaps. Whatever views you create, if you want to use your roadmap to drive the most productive discussions possible, then you must tailor the views of your roadmap to meet your audience where they are. Learn how to use versions to organize your work around milestones you can aim for. The „rest of the business“ is kept in the dark as to what the team is up to.

For example, a feature-based format is not suitable for the marketing department or management but is recommended for your engineering team. The format chosen will suggest the necessary items of information to be highlighted and which themes or goals should be prioritized on the timeline. The audience you have to present your roadmap to will be a predetermining factor for the format of your roadmap, its type, and the contents you should include in it. Determining the type of roadmap is a complex, and we will detail that in the next section.

Ways Roadmaps Help You Be Better At Your Job (and Your Career)

Agile planning and the agile roadmapping process are ongoing activities, not boxes to check on your to-do list. Business objectives and KPIs are usually tied to somewhat near-term timelines (i.e. current quarter, fiscal year, etc.). You also need to consider longer-term objectives while you’re making your agile plan as well. Revisit your product vision cloud business solutions statement before you start planning and keep it top of mind throughout your planning process. The vision statement represents a long-term aspirational goal for the product and you want to ensure that your plan aligns with the vision as well. Use caution when deciding how many small details make their way onto the product roadmap based on new findings.

Post the roadmap online and keep it current 4 stages so the team has a single source of truth.

productboard is a product management system that enables teams to get the right products to market faster. We think agile roadmaps need their own set of principles — loosely based on the original 12 agile principles — that tie your plan to the agile development process. This, in turn, makes your roadmap a living document that improves alignment and buy-in. These quarterly outcome goals are where each team is going to focus in an effort to help achieve the strategic theme. They should work together with leadership to ensure these are aligned and properly levelled.