It has been more than two decades since ‘Agile methodologies’ were introduced to the world, and it is still a go-to framework implemented by most companies. 71% of the companies over the globe have adopted Agile and Agile adoption has helped 98% of the companies. The failure rate of Agile projects is 8% which is quite low and Agile projects are 28% more successful than traditional projects. In this article, I will cover the importance of the Product Roadmap in Agile and help you select the right roadmap based on your project.
What is Agile?
In simple terms, it is a set of rules followed by organizations to deliver a project in an iterative time-boxed approach. It helps in building the software incrementally over a period by taking into consideration the feedback from the customer and the cross-functional teams. The objective is to provide an end product that satisfies the needs of the customer. There are different types of Agile frameworks, one of the most popular ones is scrum. As a part of the scrum, teams work on the prioritized user stories in sprints which are time-boxed and the work done is reviewed after every sprint.
Why Agile needs a Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap is a document that defines how your product would look like over a period of time. It lays out the vision, strategy, and initiatives, ultimately helps the team in understanding what the next steps are and when those should be taken. Now, one can argue that when an organization is following agile which emphasis embracing change, so they don’t need a product roadmap. But Product roadmap is still essential because an organization still needs a direction to achieve a vision that has been set by the stakeholders. If there is no product roadmap, then the company itself is directionless where there is no vision and no goal to be achieved although it might be following agile. Such an organization would be just working to roll something out which meets their client’s needs but it still won’t have any clue about where their product is going to be in a year or few years down the line.
Agile is a framework to implement a project but the product roadmap is a starting point and also the end point for a project. After a project is completed, teams still need to come back to this one source of truth which is product roadmap to analyze where their product stands after a project is finished and what is the next step required, and at that moment Product roadmap is updated and revised to align it with the changes if any occurred. So, the product roadmap is agile too and is updated a couple of times in a year.
Product Roadmap
Product roadmap defines journey of a product over a period. It aligns the companies’ vision and strategy and communicates the goals and initiatives required by the teams. It helps in ensuring that the day-to-day activities of the team align with the high-level business strategy and they are not going off the track.
There are many benefits of making product roadmaps:
- Helps in defining the next steps and when they should be taken.
- Helps in tracking progress of the teams.
- Helps in keeping the cross functional teams aligned with the goal.
- Facilitates Stakeholder collaboration.
- Helps understand the vision and product strategy.
- To update the existing and potential customers about upcoming features
Types of Product Roadmap
There are different types of roadmaps. If I categorize the internal roadmaps ( for team/organization) then there are three types: Goal Oriented roadmaps, Theme Based roadmaps, Feature based roadmaps
Goal Oriented Roadmaps: These roadmaps provide an overview of the goals to be implemented over a period of time, the key features which would support to fulfill those goals and ultimately the metrics which can be used to measure the goals achieved. This is the only roadmap which would indicate how successful your implementation was or is going to be because it is listing down the metrics which would be observed over a couple of quarters. I have given a basic example here. This roadmap is helpful when a specific goal set and the metrics to measure it are known.
Theme Based Roadmaps: Theme based roadmaps are very similar to goal oriented one but in this roadmap, the themes or specific areas are tracked over time. Themes could be infrastructure, Marketing, Sales, HR, Platforms, Integrations etc. depending on the type of the business of the organization. Example is shown below.
Feature Based Roadmap: This type of roadmap involves features which are planned across a period of time. One module or a complete feature could be planned to be delivered across quarters as shown below. It is suitable when the features are the complete focus, and the goal is to roll out the features in planned releases.
The above three are the major types of roadmaps, but I have one more roadmap to share which I call Agile Product Roadmap. This type of roadmap does not have timelines, but you can include a timeline, or it can be suitable when created for a quarter or release. But this would make more sense for the scrum team and they can connect with it more as compared to other types of roadmaps. It shows the work completed vs in progress and backlog across platforms or teams. This can be used to track the performance of the teams or organization. Metrics would be the features/stories completed vs backlog. Although it would be good for internal teams it will not make a lot of sense for higher-level executives.
Conclusion
Product roadmaps play a crucial role in setting the fundamentals right for the team and making sure the team does not lose track of what needs to be achieved. Following agile does not make the Product roadmap obsolete but instead makes it a very important document that fits in agile very well when updated frequently to make sure that the product development is following the journey intended.
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