Driving towards vision with roadmaps

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

• "When can I have absolutely everything on my list? ... That’s not fast enough!”
• “Why do Agile teams get to do whatever they want and can never tell me when I can get what I need?”
• “How many different times have we switched our backlog…just this week alone?!”

Chances are, you’ve not only heard at least one of these quotes, but may have uttered one or more of these phrases yourself.

When it comes to delivering products well, I find that organizations who actively create and revise product roadmaps based on feedback tend to do much better than those that don’t. When customers understand what they will be able to do with your product and when, I see those customers become loyal purchasers and sometimes enthusiastic advocates for your product.

Roadmaps reflect a tangible representation of a product vision and can be applied to almost any type of product, not just software. Good roadmaps show how a product is intended to be created incrementally over time. Roadmaps should show progressive sets of desired outcomes (not necessarily just a list of features), for who, why, and the general time frames when. Details for the next immediate increment on your roadmap should be fairly certain, with future releases increasingly “fuzzier” in terms of scope and detail.

While a roadmap can help in many ways, I find roadmaps can particularly help enforce the concept of incremental and iterative development through transparency quite well. For instance, roadmaps that show multiple increments can help manage:

1. Customers and their expectations of “when am I going to get X, Y, and Z?”. Instead of risky large, big-bang releases, customers can see a larger picture, understanding how the product will emerge to better suit their needs over time.
2. Team(s) and setting their focus on near term objectives while keeping the long term in mind, reducing the likelihood of “big up-front design.”
3. Groups outside of product development, providing insights and understanding in how they can deliver and support upcoming increments and when they should be ready.

Often, many customers and development teams can be challenged to understand a product vision (or the direction to take a product) without understanding the steps of how you’re going to get there. Roadmaps are a good mechanism to help make this visible. Of course, roadmaps must never be considered contracts with firm commitments. Roadmaps will ebb and flow over time as more is learned about the product, both in how its built and what it is used for.

#agile #scrum #product #productowner #vision #roadmap