If your team operates in the agile methodology, you will be familiar with multiple tools and templates that help achieve success. It’s worth asking then: do you need an agile product roadmap? How is this tool different from the other agile process artifacts, and how can it help your team? This article will explore these topics and demonstrate how important an agile product roadmap is.
What Is the Agile Methodology?
When understanding an agile product roadmap, you must first develop a clear understanding of the agile methodology. As outlined in our comprehensive guide, “The Agile methodology is a workflow ideology that emphasizes cyclical improvements, collaboration, and frequent adaptation in order to solve problems.”
What Is an Agile Product Roadmap?
A product roadmap is a document made by a product manager that determines the future schedule a product will follow. It has the direction and vision for creating and releasing a product. Everything about creating and releasing a product cannot be about short-term goals. This is where a roadmap steps in, aligning a team with the short and long-term business goals, which helps ensure that the product’s goal is in line with the company’s overarching business goals.
Additionally, product roadmaps decide the functionalities of a product in the future. Having a solid plan of action is essential to know when new features should be released to get positive feedback from clients and deliver projects on time.
In the context of the agile methodology, an agile product roadmap will:
- Build and share the actual context that will justify the team’s everyday work
- Provide crucial information about the product and its short-term/long-term goals
- Work as a responsive plan and be open to shifts in competitive situations
- Create long term structure for teams while providing flexible options for short term sprints
In this context, an agile product roadmap helps provide structure to teams primarily based in flexible work environments and can help create a clear focus towards long and short-term goals.
Why is an Agile Product Roadmap Crucial for a Team?
You cannot work with a static plan when engaging in dynamic and competitive situations. An agile roadmap is ideal for such cases. It is an editable document where you can make changes when needed the most.
An agile roadmap is constantly improved based on the following factors.
- Regular discussions
- Understanding the priorities
- Regular estimations
- Changes in the plan
- Asynchronous collaboration
The agile product roadmap should be shared with all the stakeholders regularly. Also, an agile roadmap is a detailed and easy-to-understand document. Thus, an agile product roadmap will keep every external and internal entity of the company in the loop. It especially helps win the confidence of stakeholders and decision-makers of the company.
An Agile Product Roadmap Can Embrace Fast-Paced Changes
The flexible nature of an agile product roadmap makes it ideal for teams working in the agile methodology. Further, as an umbrella term, agile can cover a lot of businesses and a lot of activities. Every team indeed has its own way of functioning. However, the following things are expected for teams working in an agile world.
- Operations in short cycles
- Quick changes
- Preparedness for accepting and implementing the changes
- Multiple checkpoints for evaluating your work and feedback
- Working on the feedback
Because of this inherent flexibility, you have to act according to the changes in the situation. Here, an agile product roadmap works because it is not a document containing hard deadlines for your work.
You can keep the dates of an agile roadmap at a quarterly or even a monthly level to help create realistic sprints for you and your team.
Some roadmaps can include a “statement of intent” that never restricts the implementation of changes. For some teams having a “statement of intent” is helpful, but for others, using regular deadlines is essential to keep them on track. Depending on your workflow, either is possible on an agile product roadmap.
Agile Product Roadmaps Create Transparency
A team working on agile methodology will call a spade a spade, and using a roadmap helps teams maintain transparent communication throughout their project. It keeps everything transparent about specific product details and the timeline of project completion.
As change is an inevitable factor in an agile environment, road mapping helps to update and share the plans in case of changes. So, road mapping and agile methodologies work hand in hand to ensure the success of a product team.
Some Element of Agile and Some Element of Roadmapping: You Have the Right Potion for Your Success:
When we think about practical work environments, working in a purely agile environment can be difficult. A particular product team may work on speedy and flexible work cycles. However, that may not fully serve the business goal of the company. In other words, you cannot ignore long-term planning, which is an essential element of a product roadmap.
Your stakeholders need a long-term vision for proper decision-making. Sometimes, the daily or weekly advancements in product management may hold lesser importance. Further, as road mapping prioritizes long-term goals, it can successfully handle more significant problems or pressure in the planning process.
Conclusion
Using an agile product roadmap is beneficial for an agile team and does not contradict the core methodology. If this article helped understand an advantage to implementing a product roadmap, check out some of our other posts about the various agile styles and the differences between a product and project roadmap – only on Fresco.
