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Roadmapping tools can be helpful but stakeholders often get confused. Depending on stakeholder audience:
1. Use a kanban tool either independer or in Jira, and if Jira create a confluence page embedding the kanban with context around expectations.
2. Create an excel / spreadsheet with features, epics, tech debt, goals etc.. with a top level gantt view over the roadmap period (i.e. your stakeholders will be able to see real time flexibility based on effort and it you’re fancy enough dependencies too).
3. Final option is to do a mix of this is your org’s existing tools.
P.S. for truly out of touch, or cross functional, or problematic stakeholders, do all of this but present as bullet points in columns headered with “quarter” breakout.
P.S.S. for external stakeholders such as a client, make a pretty graphic.
Coach
Good tips here! 3 more thoughts:
- quarterly reviews with stakeholders to show what was completed in the last quarter, and what’s upcoming in the next quarter.
- emphasize that anything more than a quarter out is a “guesstimate” at best from both a priority and delivery perspective
- if anyone requests changes to the roadmap, they must get buy in from the stakeholders of the feature(s) that they are displacing to agree in the new priority. I find that a lot of stakeholders are brave / demanding when they want their feature prioritized, but when presented against other priorities, they often agree that the current priorities are correct.
I like the tool aha.io it can roll up the vision, features, epics quite well
It might help giving a very specific example.
Roadmap can definitely change and that’s the point of being agile, but if they’re constantly changing to me, that means you’re not doing enough due diligence in the beginning to make sure you understand the now and the future.
If you have executives just yelling and screaming to get stuff on the roadmap and you’re moving it up then you’re not doing your job as a product manager
What we did is create epics and then have the stories/tasks/details below them. The epics were connected to value drivers (impact, difficulty, time to market) and gave them a score. Lime this stakeholders understood the general idea/direction of the product while keeping the team aligned as well as they could work on the details.
We used productboard.com but any other will do as well, as we all know it‘s not about the tool. Productboard also is rather expensive and has a bit of a learning curve. But at least it looks pretty. Mind you, jira is all that and looks crap on top.
Unless you want to operate using waterfall. Just don't put dates on milestones. Explain general goals and priorities.
Regards, devs.
Try using the Roman Pichler GO roadmap
There is no silver bullet imo. Different stakeholders will require different types of details. Our job is to make it all clear to those different audiences which inevitably means additional work.