Today I attended the "Agile Roadmapping" webinar helded by Pragmatic Marketing. The folks at Pragmatic Marketing are top notch and I have enjoyed their classes and have become "Pragmatic Marketing Certified". Enough about me...the webinar was a total disappointment. The sound cut off and they spent most of the time talking about their travels. It got way off topic and it just glossed over the day to day struggles that product managers face developing roadmaps in an agile environment. So I've decided to dedicate this blogpost to providing my viewpoint and perspective in an effort to dig a bit deeper than the superficial.
- Setting Expectations - With agile your roadmap is very detailed during the current sprint and then becomes less so as you start to prioritize your product backlog. As for putting when items will be delivered, I would recommend only putting a timef rame down for the current sprint stories and then just putting the rest down in a priority. If executives don't like the fact that there is no time frame for that feature they want by the end of the year, work to educate them that scrum is the not the right process to guarantee delivery of a feature many sprints from now. Careful positioning of the roadmap is critical in the context of SCRUM.
- Crafting - A roadmap is an excellent communication tool for the vision of product management. Priorities, product themes, and overall initiatives can be communicated along with their value to the market. It must be updated often, preferably at the end of the every sprint as you learn more and have begun planning for the next sprint. An updated roadmap presentation including goals for the current sprint and how that fits into the remaining work for that particular feature or product. How many times have you had to scurry to update your presentation when you get an email from an exec who wants an update? If you updated it at the end of every sprint, it would be an easy request to meet.
- Time - Many times we are so busy being product owners and getting our heads around all of the incoming stories that we can't even begin to think about the market. Take time to get this done. Step away from the tactical a little bit...your team will appreciate it in the long run.
Good points on setting expectations. We need one level of information for the product team, and another for sales & customers.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the technical difficulties. GoToWebinar was monitoring the problems almost instantly and they were great for getting us back online. But the flow of the presentation was certainly affected.
Join us on Friday, June 19 for another session, this time with Luke Hohmann of Enthiosys. Luke is co-author of our Living in an Agile World ebook, available free at productmarketing.com