10 Tips For Creating Agile Product Roadmaps

10 Tips For Creating Agile Product Roadmaps

1 Focus on Goals and Benefits

Whenever you are faced with an agile, dynamic environment — be it that your product is young and is experiencing significant change or that the market is dynamic with new competitors or technologies introducing change, you should work with a goal-oriented product roadmap, sometimes also referred to as theme-based. Goal-oriented roadmaps focus on goals or objectives like acquiring customers, increasing engagement, and removing technical debt.

2 Do the Necessary Prep Work

Describe and validate the product strategy — the path to realize your vision — before you create your roadmap and decide how the strategy is best implemented

3 Tell a Coherent Story

Your product roadmap should tell a coherent story about the likely growth of your product. Each release should build on the previous one and move you closer towards your vision. Be clear who your audience is: An internal product roadmap talks to development, marketing, sales, service, and the other groups involved in making your product a success; and external roadmap is aimed at existing and prospective customers.

4 Keep it Simple

Resist the temptation of adding too many details to your roadmap. Keep your roadmap simple and easy to understand. Capture what really matters and leave out the rest by focusing on the goals. Keep the features on your roadmap coarse-grained and derive them from the goals. The details, including the epics, user stories, scenarios and UI designs, belong in the product backlog and not on your roadmap.

5 Secure Strong Buy-in

The best roadmap is worthless if the people required to develop, market, and sell the product don’t buy into it. The best way to create agreement is to collaborate with the key stakeholders to create and update the product roadmap. This allows you to leverage their ideas and knowledge and creates strong buy-in. Running a collaborative roadmapping workshop is a great way to engage everyone and create a shared product roadmap

6 Have the Courage to Say No

While you want to get buy-in to from the key stakeholders, you should not say yes to every idea and request. This would turn your product roadmap into a feature soup, a random collection of features. “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features,” said Steve Jobs. Use your vision and product strategy to make the right decisions.

7 Know When to Show Dates

Some people recommend to never show dates on a product roadmap, others always include them. I recommend to use dates or timeframe on an internal roadmap that coordinates the work carried out by the internal stakeholders, such as, the development team, marketing, sales, and support.

8 Make your Roadmap Measurable

When using a goal-oriented roadmap, ensure that every goal is measurable. This allows you to tell if you have met the goal or not. If your goal is to acquire customers, for example, then ask yourself how many new customers should be acquired; or if your goal is to reduce technical debt, determine how much of the bad code should be removed or rewritten.

9 Determine Cost Top-Down

Whenever your product is new, young, or changing, I recommend that you do not attempt to determine the development cost bottom-up but rather top-down. It’s virtually impossible to derive the right epics and user stories from the roadmap features, get correct estimates from your team, and accurately anticipate the velocity and the rate of change in the product backlog.

10 Regularly Review and Adjust the Roadmap

Last but not least: If the environment you’re in is agile, then change is likely to occur. You should therefore regularly review and update your product roadmap — between every four weeks to every three months depending on how young your product and how dynamic the market is.

https://romanpichler.medium.com/10-tips-for-creating-an-agile-product-roadmap-515637c8081b