Introducing Roadmap Royale

Product development teams have been using decades-old Scrum and Kanban methodologies. We wanted to change that to introduce innovative ways to motivate our team and streamline processes. We introduced “Roadmap Royale" to achieve just that. This gamified strategy not only aimed to invigorate our team’s day-to-day tasks but also sought to marry the essence of competition with the spirit of collaboration.?

Embarking on the Journey?

The journey to Roadmap Royale began with a simple idea: to make work more engaging, transparent, and aligned with our overarching goals.? Primary goals were maintaining speed of delivery, smaller feedback loops, deploying multiple products simultaneously, and keeping the spirit of a startup. After extensive planning and consultation with key stakeholders including product, engineering, operations, and executive leadership, we launched our first round of Roadmap Royale in Quarter 1, 2024.?

The Essence of Roadmap Royale?

At its core, Roadmap Royale is more than just a game; it’s a strategic framework that encourages our teams to engage with their work in an entirely new way. Participants, or “players,” pick up roadmap items—each with its own set of points based on complexity, impact, and required skill sets—and work towards completing these items to earn points (aka “Chips”) for a grand prize. This competitive element is balanced with a collaborative spirit, ensuring that while individuals strive for personal achievement, the overarching goal of collective success remains paramount.?

The Value Proposition?

The inception of Roadmap Royale was driven by a desire to align business, product, and engineering goals more closely, ensuring that everyone is moving in the same direction with clarity and purpose. By gamifying the roadmap, we anticipated several key benefits:?

• Enhanced engagement and motivation among team members?
• Increased transparency across projects and priorities?
• Streamlined processes and reduced unnecessary “shoulder tapping”?
• Better alignment of individual contributions with company objectives?

Integrating Game Mechanics into Software Development?

At the heart of Roadmap Royale lies a set of innovative principles, carefully crafted to leverage our team’s competitive spirit and passion for gaming, while enhancing our software development processes. This unique blend of game mechanics and development strategies has redefined our approach to product engineering.?

• Chips as the Currency of Effort: Drawing inspiration from the world of casino gaming, we’ve replaced traditional points with “chips” as the metric for effort and achievement in Scrum. This playful twist not only adds an element of excitement but also makes the process of quantifying effort more tangible and engaging for the team.?

• Velocity as a Measurable Target: Velocity, a key metric in agile methodologies, has been transformed into a game objective within Roadmap Royale. Setting velocity targets for each sprint encourages teams to optimize their processes and work more efficiently towards hitting their goals on the roadmap. It’s a compelling way to keep teams focused and motivated.?
• Chips per Feature for Planning: In place of conventional Planning Poker, we’ve adopted “chips per feature” as a method to estimate the effort required for each task. This system simplifies the estimation process and adds a layer of strategy, as teams must carefully consider how they allocate their chips to maximize their score. The House can also add bonus chips in case the scope or priorities changed. It ensures alignment between value delivery and outcomes for rewards. ?
• Maintaining a WIP Limit of 3: To ensure tasks are not just started but carried through to completion, Roadmap Royale enforces a Work In Progress (WIP) limit of three items. This rule encourages teams to focus on finishing tasks before taking on new ones, promoting a culture of completion and accountability.?
• Leveraging Our Love for Competitive Games: Recognizing our team’s playfully competitive nature and affinity for board and casino games, we designed Roadmap Royale to mirror the dynamics of these games. This has not only made the process more fun but also leveraged our natural competitiveness to foster a more productive and engaged work environment.?

The Rules of Engagement?

To ensure fairness and foster a healthy competitive environment, Roadmap Royale was built around a set of clearly defined rules:?

• Participants form teams or work individually to tackle roadmap items and have the ability to work alone or in tandem with their team?
• Each roadmap item is assigned a point value, reflecting its complexity and impact by product and engineering leadership or “The House”?
• Teams or individuals are limited to three items in progress at any given time, encouraging focus and effective time management. Any projects picked up must be completed.?
• A dedicated QA process is integral to the game, ensuring that quality is not sacrificed for speed.?
• The game operates on a quarterly basis, with points tallied at the end of each period to determine bonuses and rewards.?

The Goal?

The team’s goal is to hit 100 points (aka “Chips”) on the board each quarter It is a collaborative game to meet the goal, but at the same time, each team member (aka “Player”) gets points to be on the leaderboard.?

Rewards and Recognition?

The true heart of Roadmap Royale lies in its rewards system. The portion of yearly bonuses is awarded based on team performance at the end of each quarter, with a grand prize at the year’s end—an all-expense-paid trip to a destination (e.g., Alaska cruise trip with family, swim the Great Barrier Reef, Northern lights in Finland, etc.) for the top performer. These incentives serve not only as a token of appreciation for hard work but also as a tangible symbol of what can be achieved through dedication and teamwork.?

Crafting a Culture of Productivity and Fun?

By marrying the elements of board and casino games with proven software development methodologies, Roadmap Royale has created a vibrant, engaging, and highly productive work culture. It has taken the best of what was working for us and infused it with new life, addressing areas for improvement while capitalizing on our team’s strengths and passions. The result is a dynamic and rewarding approach to product development that motivates, aligns, and delivers results.?

We are already through Round 1 of Roadmap Royale. I will post our learnings from Round 1 next week. If you found this article interesting, please share your thoughts in the comments or DM.