What is a Roadmap? How does it aid agile team effectiveness?
“Without a roadmap, agile teams are in danger of building the wrong thing faster than ever.”
What is a Roadmap?
A product roadmap enables the product manager of an agile team to set a vision for the product and share that vision with stakeholders. Having a roadmap ensures stakeholders are on the same page from the start of development through to ongoing delivery of new releases.
Roadmaps provide a simple and visual way of prioritising activities based on delivering the greatest amount of customer and business value. This makes roadmaps a useful tool for managing stakeholder expectations, as well as communicating and coordinating across teams.
The Evolution of Roadmaps
Historically, roadmapping had been an extremely laborious process, designed in static, offline tools like PowerPoint and Excel, which were unable to reflect the real-time operations of a business.
Creating roadmaps in static, offline tools required Product Managers to email slides and spreadsheets to stakeholders. This result was that over time all team members had their own version of the roadmap, making it difficult to collaborate and trust that the version you were looking at was in fact, the single-source of truth.
Roadmapping software such as Easy Agile Roadmaps has transformed that process, enabling agile teams to create live, automated roadmaps that reflect the true ongoing operations of a business. By doing so, stakeholders are appraised of updates in real-time, which allows all teams to track the progress towards epic completion.
How Companies Use Easy Agile Roadmaps
Communicating with Stakeholders: allow distributed teams to make better informed decisions by identifying group purpose and structure, and keeping stakeholders informed in real-time.
Shared Product Vision & Direction: allows teams to visualise shared product vision at a glance, through the sequence of features for delivery to customers
Action-Oriented Teams: contextualising the teams day-to-day work gives purpose and satisfaction to the completion of tasks. This allows teams to keep stakeholders appraised of updates by allowing teams to track progress towards epic completion.
Start roadmapping today with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira
Further Reading:
Concepts and Approaches to Creating Roadmaps
