Roadmaps Explained

Roadmapping is a planning activity

conducted by Product teams.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are

useless, but planning is

indispensable.”

Eisenhower

What is a Roadmap?

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A roadmap is a visual plan that

drives the organisation towards its

goals.

There are many types of

roadmaps…

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1. Product 1 product + new features + vision

2. Portfolio many products + programs of work + vision

3. Marketing efforts across each channel + growth

4. Technology adoption of new technology + longevity (systems)

5. Platform improvements in the platform + innovation

What a Roadmap isn’t?

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A long laundry list of stuff

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Why Bother with a Product Roadmap?

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To align team members

Making sure they are running in the same race in

the same direction

To prioritise activities that deliver the

most customer and business value

To deliver on the business’s strategy

And achieve the business goals.

How to Create a Roadmap?

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The steps towards a roadmap

1. Collect

2. Prioritise

3. Estimate

4. Assess

5. Re-Prioritise

6. Approve

7. Share & Communicate

Collect 1

Collect ideas from various sources:

• Customer service

• Analysis of the market

• Customer visits

• Workshops

• Internal stakeholders

• Research

• Internal strategy papers

Prioritise 2

Examine and rank each idea by asking:

• Who will the idea benefit?

• What problem are we solving to deliver that benefit?

• How urgent or important is the problem to them?

• How many people share the problem?

• How does the idea help us meet the business goals?

• What vision does the idea drive towards?

• What tangible or intangible benefits can the business

gain?

Goal driven prioritisation

1. List 3 to 6 business goals. For example: • New revenue

• New sales

• Reduction in product costs

• Reduction in customer service costs

• Customer retention

• Legal & regulatory

2. Score each roadmap idea to indicate how effective it will be in progressing towards each business goal.

• A high number is GOOD eg 10 out of 10,

• A low number is POOR, eg 1 out of 10.

3. Total the scores for each idea. • The ideas with the highest scores should be prioritised over those with lower

scores.

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Estimate 3

Estimate (or guess) the effort required to develop each

idea by:

• Getting a team together (Engineering, UX, Product)

• Assigning relative effort to each idea by using:

• Expert opinion

• Analogy (compares the feature being estimated with other

features)

• Disaggregation (splitting features into smaller pieces)

• A combination of the techniques above

Sources:

On Roadmaps and Roadmapping; Steve Johnson,

Agile Estimating & Planning; Mike Cohn

“Planning Poker” as an estimation technique

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Source:

Agile Estimating & Planning; Mike Cohn

1. Asks the estimators

how much effort it

would take to develop

the idea.

1. Receives a deck of cards with

numbers.

2. Listens to the moderator and ask

questions to help determine effort.

3. Estimator selects a card that reflects

effort.

4. Cards are displayed simultaneously.

5. If cards differ significantly, high & low

estimators provide reason for their

estimation.

6. After discussion, estimators repeat the

card selection process.

7. This continues until the card values are

similar across each estimator.

Moderator

Estimators

(Developers, Testers, UX etc)

Assess 4

Assess the list of ideas from the initial analysis based on

the:

• Value to the customer

• Ability to meet business objectives

Re-Prioritise 5

With more information at hand, its time to re-prioritise

the ideas and create the roadmap by:

• Re-ranking the ideas based on:

• Effort & time (magnitude) versus customer &

business value (direction) • Some ideas may require significantly less effort to deliver

but may produce less value than another idea. You might

rank this one over one that delivers enormous value but

takes considerably more effort to deliver.

But don’t wait to get it ‘perfect’

Or you will never get started

Approve 6

Get approval for the roadmap from:

• Your manager

• Those in charge of strategy

• Those that manage the company’s purse strings

• OR, through the annual planning process

Share & Communicate 7

When the roadmap has been approved, create a ‘show

and tell’ version and share with:

• The team that helped with the estimation of the ideas

on the roadmap

• Other internal teams (Marketing, Customer Service)

• External stakeholders (Suppliers, Partners,

Customers)

“I’m okay with sharing the roadmap… as long as clients and

sales people know that the roadmap is a plan and not a

commitment.”

Steve Johnson

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