Time to Revamp Roadmap Management Out of 1990s
In May 2017, I joined a great scaleup company — Feedzai. It uses advanced machine learning to fight fraud and keep commerce safe.
I joined Feedzai in its super growth mode, from 150 people to 280 in less than a year.
As the engineering team grew, the number of scrum teams is increasing. At the same time, our customer base is also growing. We have a much wider roadmap intake funnel influenced by current customers, prospects, internal teams, and market insights. More features start to require multiple scrum teams (dependencies).
Planning and executing on the same 2 week cadence no longer works in growth companies.
Teams are busy, while business units didn’t get what they want. We have scrum and sprint metrics but no big picture visibility. No one could answer these 3 basic questions without some effort of digging:
What features will we launch next month? Why?
What other features were considered but excluded from the next release? Why?
Which team and skills do we need to hire next? How do we decide?
We also had gaps and misunderstanding between various departments, e.g. Product, Marketing, Sales, Support as there wasn’t an end to end view of bringing the product to the hands of customers.
My first 2 months at Feedzai was to build a full product development life cycle framework (PDLC) from idea initiation through development to go to market. We also built an idea intake process to funnel, prioritize and align feature roadmap with stakeholders (Sales, support, marketing in particular).
To support these processes, I reconfigured Jira, instituted roadmap planning and tracking cadences, and built 4 spreadsheets to manage ideas, product plan, team assignment, and rolling planning (current period execution and next period discovery in parallel).
I made these change quite quickly, as Feedzai is the 4th growth company I went through this type transformation (with some slight tweaks partnering with product and engineering teams, of course).
The framework, Jira optimization, and a suite of spreadsheets can now enable us to plan strategically, flow through to execution, and to adjust our plan when new things come to our roadmap.
But operating this requires a lot of manual effort by product managers, engineering managers, and Project managers/ scrum masters. On average each may spent 2 or more days per week on updating spreadsheets, syncing of data in different tools, and writing various status updates.
While this sounds challenging, it is not quite unique.
A growing company needs to adjust where to focus frequently. This requires overall visibility, and ability to re-align initiatives and teams periodically. However, planning is painful. It takes a lot of time to iterate through various roadmap options within the constraint of resources, timeline, and dependencies. (see Build A Better Execution Roadmap). This gets exponentially more complex when the company gets bigger. If a feature requires 2–5 teams, and there are 10+ teams, the permutation combination can get out of control very quickly. At most we do 2–3 iterations of roadmap options and quit then. We run out of energy and time to find the best combination. And even if we’ve “locked down” upcoming roadmap (next month or quarter), things change… and the pain will start all over again
Because of this complexity, many companies give up on roadmap planning, and resort to “pure agile”…
While some companies practice roadmap planning and resource management to compliment agile execution, the way we manage this process has not changed for 20 years
Spreadsheet + meetings + emails are still the way teams connect the dots
In the past 2 years, I’ve been on several tool hunts, tried and used dozens of product roadmap and project portfolio tools. I also did many interviews with many Product, PMO or engineering leaders. It seems there is no modern tool that truly connects strategy and execution, and enable cross functionally collaboration.
The lightbulb moment: When 2 engineering leaders from 2 different companies reach out for suggestions on a “better spreadsheet” to manage roadmap and resource… I realized they didn’t need a better spreadsheet, they needed an intelligent roadmap execution platform for their growing teams. I decided to build one.
Dragonboat — connects strategy and execution, and enables cross-functional collaboration. It’s not build for one team or one function. It’s not a generic database plus a UI with infinite flexibility… it is a purpose built tool embedded with best practice for building products for growing teams. It powers the “build, measure, learn” at scale for growing companies. It works with your existing tools, and empower broad visibility and alignment.
* * * We’d love to hear your roadmap planning ideas, challenges. Reach us here.
