Roadmaps: Friend of Foe?
And how to design them so that they fuel your team, instead of holding it back
Hey there,
We’re almost 1 month into Q2 - time flies. This is typically the time when roadmaps get updates, adjusted and reviewed. I’ve done this with our roadmap, building on the learnings we made in Q1 (we’ve decided to pilot Shape Up instead of SCRUM as a result, but that’s a topic for another time)!
When reviewing our roadmap I noticed that I still struggle with the immanent tension between communicating “committed timelines” to our stakeholders and the fact that we want to keep the roadmap as customer-need-focused as possible (as opposed to solution-focused) which means there is always ambiguity until the point where something is actually shipped to production. We’re always learning and we never know everything.
Recently I came across 3 different resources that advice on how to deal with the problem and how to create roadmaps that actually drive your team forward instead of holding it back. I’m applying learning from each of these resources in our roadmap for Q2. Take a look and let me know what you think!
Roadmaps: How to design them so that they fuel your team, instead of holding it back
🔖 Medium: The Playbook to fix your Product Roadmap By Markus Müller
Top Takeaways: The key is to understand the different levels of a roadmap and make sure that you have a coherent thread between all of them. A roadmap pipeline is a crucial tool to keep the “chaos under control”. Markus suggests 3 routines to stay aligned across different teams: Weekly triage, Roadmap alignment (monthly) and syncing with latest OKRs (quarterly).
🧵 Twitter: Linear roadmaps are misleading by Pavel Samsonov
Top Takeaways: Strategic roadmaps are better than linear (unrealistic) or honest roadmaps. They are almost dissolved from a physical timeline and basically a decision-tree that is describing exactly where you will end up based on a set of decisions/experiment outcomes that you’ll have to make/collect along the way.
💌 Substack: How to do Discovery and Delivery at the same time … with Pivot Triggers by Tom Kervin
Top Takeaways: This is a genius idea that moves you entirely away from estimating certain efforts to thinking about the time you have as an investment. It’s very similar to SHAPE UP in product development. So this approach allows you to still control the time you are ready to invest into something, but instead of working with estimates it enables the whole team to size the “appetite” you have for a specific opportunity and pivot early if that appetite changes.
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Have a great start to your week!
Darja
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