Better product roadmaps - 2 tools to help you

 

 I just spent the last two days of the week in Product Owner (CSPO) class with Mitch Lacey and Luke Hohmann in downtown Bellevue.

One of the things that really stuck with me from the class was a section that Luke did on road-mapping. There were two things he did that I thought were really valuable. Valuable enough that I'm sitting here in a coffee shop writing this post on Saturday morning waiting for my product manager, Peter Goubert, to show up so we can start using some of the mojo I learned in class on our own product roadmaps for Agile On Demand and TeamTrack. 

The first valuable thing are the Innovation Games® we played in class. Those are activities wedid  help us collaborate and solve complex problems like prioritizing backlogs, planning roadmaps and negotiating business value. The games come in a lot of flavors and are for playing with your team, your stakeholders and your customers. I've played them a couple of times now with my team at Serena, with citizens at Games for Democracy and am planning them for customers at an Agile Tech-Day in New York next month. The net of the games is that they are a way to interact with opinionated groups of people, get them to drop their inhibitions and find out what they really think and know. One of the games we played, called Prune the Product Tree, worked very well for taking a backlog of items for a product and mapping them against key dates and dependencies to start the creation of a meaningful product roadmap.

The second valuable tool is a pattern language and template for creating roadmaps that actually work. You can find them here. The template takes into a lot of factors and organizes them into related swim lanes, which allows me to take into account a 'real' business value for the release. It's meant to be visual so you can blow it up and hang it on the wall. Developer teams use them to understand the what and why of the schedule, managers can understand what and why to prioritize and stakeholders can understand what and when to promote and push to customers. It's the best holistic view of a road map that I've seen. And I'm eager to put it into action with my own group. It also fit together nicely with the games and it made sense to take the results of a game, like prune the product tree, and apply it to a visual graph of the roadmap using the template.

The games are excellent if you're looking for a way to re-envigorate your customer and stakeholder conversations. They help to re-focus conversations and get the meat behind what people are telling you. I find them very valuable and if you're lucky enough to be in a city where Luke's got a games class coming up you might want to check it out.

Comments

[Christian Sarason]

Hey Patchen,

Thanks so much for getting me to attend this course with you! I agree that the visual translation of the product roadmap is particularly powerful, which got me musing on the connections between the type's of games we learned in the class and one of my heros, Edward Tufte (www.tufte.com). Tufte's basic premise is that information dense, graphical representations of information are a richer form of communication, and this dovetails nicely with Prune the Product Tree and the roadmap templates that Enthiosys has put together.

My basic takeaway was that the most important thing you can do in agile is to increase communication bandwidth among all parties, and measure things so you can reproduce your results with some predictability. Of course, there is always more to learn, which makes working on an agile team so much fun!