Imagine for a second that you have a great idea for a product or a solution. You want to get into all of the nitty-gritty details to make it work and believe it has everything to be successful. But how can you relay your goals and desired outcomes to your audience?
You need an agile roadmap, also known as an agile product roadmap. The goal is to create and define your strategic plan in order to envision and communicate the major steps, milestones and goals your product or solution needs to have.
In this article, a detailed introduction and guide to the agile roadmap will be showed. Stay tuned.
Introduction to the Agile Roadmap
What Exactly Is An Agile Roadmap
Behind every successful product is a well-designed and efficient agile roadmap. As a visual representation of your strategic plan, your overall goal is to provide you and your team with a plan of action for how your product or solution can and should evolve over time. Think of it as your timeline to your why, what and when that shows the work that needs to be completed alongside your planned schedule.
When it comes to product owners, this means using roadmaps to outline the functionality of your future product, as well as when new features or concepts will be released. As for those utilizing agile development, your agile roadmap will be able to provide your team with context for everyday work and will respond to any shift in a competitive landscape.
Why Use An Agile Roadmap
Although some discussions say that agile roadmaps don’t look closely enough at the long-term plans of a product or solution, this is completely false. Both agile teams and waterfall teams heavily benefit from an agile roadmap. This is because utilizing a roadmap provides stakeholders with a high-level overview of your product or solution, provides your team with the ability to be on top of daily tasks with insight on priorities and timelines, allows the user, customer or organization to understand the significance of the project, and importantly, shows your long term plan!
You can think of an agile roadmap as big-picture planning which can not only anticipate growth but focus your team and most importantly, bring in stakeholders.
Detailed Guide to Agile Roadmapping
What Should an Agile Product Roadmap Include
As mentioned previously, it is significant for an agile roadmap to include three important questions:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- Why are we working to achieve this?
- What is our timeline for achieving this?
These questions – clearly answered – can bring the big picture together in a much more simple form. Then once we have these answered, we can build on the strategic elements. These can include:
- Forming and delivering business objectives by presenting the goals, initiatives and values of your product.
- Knowing and answering the questions on releases to the market and milestones.
- Communicating the epics and features.
- The overall dependencies and impacts of the product.
How to Build an Agile Product Roadmap
When it comes to agile roadmaps, product managers will coordinate your product team to base their focus on a common goal. That being the official launch of their product or major release. Because they will not only be incredibly effective to your team, but to your stakeholders, partners and customers, they need to be able to communicate your product plans at a high level. How can we do this? Let’s dive in.
Define Your Product Strategy
Defining this will be imperative to your roadmap. The answer should include your product's goals, visions, initiatives and strategies. While this may include some more in-depth research like working on competitive analysis or creating personas, the goal is to inform and provide your team with any and all critical contexts.
Figure out Your Product Features
The review and evaluation of the features of your product are most likely at the top of your mind. But what brings value to your product? You can use your team's and customers' suggestions or feedback to better evaluate these things. If you aren’t 100% sure, you can utilize the RICE method. RICE stands for reach, impact, confidence and effort. Once you are aware, you can add your strongest features to your backlog.
Set up Your Requirements
This process comes down to prioritizing and defining your strategy. It is best utilized when breaking them down into smaller parts. Many product managers do this with story mapping. By being able to organize the product features and tasks (low-level details) we can, then head over to the roadmap and focus on the goals, releases and milestones (high-level details).
Confirm the Release Time
Now it is time to organize the releases for your product. You can do this by ranking your features into importance or themes and coming up with specifics on when you want to release these to your customers.
Shape the Roadmap Overview
You should be able to link your goals and initiatives to all of your major releases. This will land in specific time frames that can be easily displayed in your roadmap. The level of detail and information can always be adjusted based on your audience, but they should be clear and concise for all to understand.
An Excellent Agile Roadmap Builder - Boardmix
Boardmix is your go-to collaborative agile roadmap builder. With its many features – including product creation, online meetings, project management, brainstorming, mapping and diagramming – you can increase team effectiveness and resourcefulness on this all-in-one tool. As a free-for-user online tool, you have the ability to create efficient agile product roadmaps for all of your projects.
Special Features:
- A wide range of agile roadmap templates.
- Ability to share your Boardmix roadmap with team members and stakeholders.
- Collaborators can add on any changes in real time.
- All work is saved immediately via the autosave feature.
- Support online meetings.
- You can export files including .pdf, .jpg, .png, .svg, and Boardmix files.
- As a free online tool, no app is necessary to download.
Payment:
Free for all individual users now.
If you are a product manager looking for an effortless way to create the most efficient agile roadmap, look no further than Boardmix to elevate the evolution of your product or solution. Just try it now!
