5 Business Reasons for a Product Roadmap

Daryl Wenman-Bateson, October 2019

On the face of it, Product Roadmaps appear to be anti Agile and Lean. At first glance, it would appear a Product Roadmap has no place alongside today’s iterative methodology. We want to build, release and then use the learnings from each release to plan what to build next. The mere mention of an “x” month roadmap appears to harp back to the outdated linear development practices of Waterfall and Prince.

So, why consider a structured roadmap and how does this sit alongside an iterative approach?

A product roadmap should outline the business’ goals, which aim to help achieve a company driven strategy. A modern roadmap will focus on the desired client’s outcomes (rather than feature delivery) which in turn moves us towards the company’s overarching strategy.

At the beginning of the process of building a product roadmap, we may have an idea or even a clear view around what is needed to achieve our desired outcomes, however, as we know from Agile, this will change. Continually adapting to that change, continues to remain a key part of the roadmap, however, by defining out expected outcomes, we can as a team begin to understand the justification for why and where each sprint fits into the company’s overall strategy.

Three layers of a Product Roadmap;

• Knowing that your company Strategy over the medium to long term gives a theme to aim for.
• Understanding that this period (medium term) we are committing to achieving Objective and understanding the context of how that fits into the company’s Strategy, gives meaning to the products or enhancements we are aiming to develop.
• Working on individual Deliverables in the short term with the expectation of meeting our Objective goals provides the final link to understand and review the Sprint’s Goal

Five reasons for a Product Roadmap;

1. Clarity: A roadmap provides a team with a company vision. It’s not always clear how a Sprint Goal was chosen or how our team sprint fits into the bigger company vision, especially with multiple scrum teams working alongside each other. Teams need the wider company strategic context to ensure that they are focused correctly connecting stories to sprints, to objectives which sit under a company strategy gives the complete lineage needed to understand why we are doing individual stories and provides the much needed clarity to make Agile teams successful.
2. Simplicity: Your backlog is not your roadmap. There is just too much information in most backlogs to have a clear defined Product Roadmap.
   
   A good product roadmap will be simple. It’s very hard to state in one or a few lines the company strategy, but if you cannot, it is even harder to achieve! A company may have multiple strategies that they are aiming to achieve, however they need to be succinct in nature.
   
   As we go down the chain from Strategy to Objective to Sprint Goals and Deliverables, more detail will need to exist, but each layer should be brief and simple to understand. It’s hard to simplify goals, however it’s vital to be able to achieve success.
3. Goal Driven: Knowing how our sprint / stories should help solve a specific objective provides us with a goal to aim for. By defining the success criteria for the goal, we can then tell when we’ve succeeded. Being Goal Driven gives us the start and end point for each objective enabling us to know when we’ve gone the right distance down each objective path
4. Change Direction Quickly (and fail fast): Part of the beauty of working in an agile way is being prepared to accept change. We never know for sure what will and won't work, nor do we necessarily know what learnings will be fed back to us from each sprint. Circling back to our roadmap, and the individual goals we are trying to complete enables us to recognise success and, where necessary to fail fast.
5. Cross Team Efficiency: It is hard to run many teams efficiently alongside each other. Having a Company Strategy, broken down into medium term Objectives enables teams to quickly and easily state what they are aiming to achieve with the latest product deliverable sprint. It becomes easier to understand when cross team development is needed and how unified work will result in meeting company objectives. This in turn helps cross team cooperation and organisation to ensure that all teams are focused on the company’s goals and will help to reduce duplication of effort.

Product Roadmaps are living documents that should not be set in stone or produced once a year and forgotten about. They need to adapt as objectives are realised, customers feedback in response to product releases or external influences change the strategic direction.

Used correctly Product Roadmaps will unite the teams and individual team members within an organisation around a common goal, providing the greatest chance of success.