Product RoadMap- the agile way

Let's start by talking about what is a Product Roadmap.

It is a holistic view of your product vision. It does not contain every detail of the steps you are going to take but it does capture the essence of your strategy. It is usually a visual that maps out the vision and direction of your product offering over time. It is used for communication to clients, stakeholders, investors; why and what of your product.   

Usually in companies where the Sales team has already committed to something and sold the product which is built for; there time-based roadmaps are more useful.

 What is Agile Product RoadMap?  

Agile Product Roadmap is the same as the Product Roadmap, but it is usually depicted in terms of theme rather than traditional time-based references. It serves as a general guide, which is not accurate to time. The question that arises is why a general guide is needed?  

Executives, Investors like to see quarter-based maps as they are key stakeholders in the project. We cannot give them a time based accurate roadmap if the teams are agile.  

When these roadmaps are used in agile development, a roadmap provides context about the team’s current work, and this roadmap is more flexible as compared to time-based roadmaps.   

Why go for Agile Product RoadMapping?  

Agile is more of a buzz word, whatever falls under Agile category has to be quick, the shorter cycles, the flexible working models and the readiness to adapt the change.  

Even in the Product world, there are a lot of variables Product Managers have to deal with over the course of time, the technical issues development team encounters, the infrastructure stability. All these things cannot be predicted but can be managed.  

However, when it comes to key stakeholders, the company’s vision; such kinds of variables are independent of your product and they can change over a period of time; at times like these Agile Product RoadMap solves a great deal.  

Agile Roadmaps are more realistic and keep everyone on track about what is going to happen in the next few weeks and rest everything is just a vision. Just like Agile development and the environment is transparent, Agile roadmapping is also transparent.  

Once cannot escape long term vision and strategy of Product; especially in bigger companies where there are a lot of stakeholders and management functions involved; but just having a holistic plan on a page makes more sense than writing dates against the ideas for next few quarters.  

Difference between Traditional and Agile RoadMap

?What does a Roadmap look like?  

Traditionally speaking Product Managers used to make RoadMap in PowerPoint which clearly depicts timelines and major milestones in Product journey. That roadmap is usually shared with everyone in the team  

Currently in the market there are n number of tools to build a RoadMap in an interactive and easy manner. However, the work remains the same, the advancement in technology made it easy to keep the RoadMap online, which helps serve the purpose of a shared and central team as well.  

All the members of the team can see the live updates in the RoadMap for future/aspiration themes and can align their learning as per that.  

Snippet of Traditional RoadMap

Theme Based RoadMap Alignment: 

ProdPad team clearly defines and works in an Agile environment, here is a snippet of the Theme based RoadMap by them.  

Usually quarterly OKRs are defined to fit in theme-based roadmaps.  

Snippet of Theme Based RoadMap

What is OKR and how are they used in Agile RoadMapping?  

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results.  

Objectives are the actual goals the team focuses on and sets for themselves. It clearly states “Why are we doing this? ”  

If your OKRs as in the objectives and the key results of those objectives defined well, there is less scope of confusion amongst the team members and they are also aware about the details of the tasks assigned to them, this helps in achieving better accountability. That is one of the main reasons that OKRs work quite well in Agile environments.  

One can say OKR is a way of fitting roadmapping into Agile Development Hierarchy.  

Please read this blog by Jeff for detailed understanding of OKR. 

#productmanagement #RoadMap #Agile