Next-Gen Agile Roadmap
What Is A Roadmap?
Roadmap is a crucial communication tool. It aligns team members, stakeholders, shareholders, and other departments. It shows in one glace the strategy, plans, features, and much more for everyone to see.
It is a high-level overview of a product and its different value streams. It can help you decide the best course to bring the most value to a customer while achieving the biggest business impact. Because of its transparent approach, people in your organization will be able not only to see the good sides but also to sooner predict problems and impediments that may arise down the line.
It focuses on strategy and combines the company goals or OKRs with all the work and epics or features that are being done.
A roadmap should also be flexible, enabling you to plan, but also to change the plan when needed and to develop iteratively. You will learn as you go from what you deliver and these feedback loops will provide you with data where you want to double down and where the mistakes were made the most often.
Because of this, it’s crucial to have some flexibility along with predictability and implement improvements that were noticed in each stage.
ProdGoal Roadmap Features
These are the free features ProdGoal’s Roadmap has to offer:
Outcome-driven Roadmap and OKRs
Multi-team or Multi-project Roadmap
Roadmap stages (columns)
Rich-text editor
Column categories
Waiting and active category states
Work-in-progress limits
Column policies
Cards
Cycle time and Lead time
Card types
Card type categories
Blocker flagging
Attachments
One or multiple assignees
Roadmap to Board cards linking
Outcome-Driven Roadmap and OKRs
If you want to have an outcome-driven Roadmap and integrate OKRs as part of your Roadmap, ProdGoal enables you to do so. The best way to do this is using the swimlanes (rows).
You can transparently write at the begging of the swimlane what is the outcome that you want to achieve (using OKRs or some other method). Then, all other items in that swimlane should be directed towards achieving the goal and you should constantly measure if you are making an impact or not.
Using this will help you make the product strategy much more clear and it enables you to constantly track the progress and make the needed adjustments to succeed.
Multi-Team Or Multi-Project Roadmap
Using swimlanes (rows), you can also differentiate between multiple teams or multuple projects and improve transparency. If two teams - not necessarily from the same background - are developing two different features, it helps to make a dedicated row for each team.
ProdGoal’s roadmap rows come with a rich-text editor. You can emphasize important points that have to get across to the team members or stakeholders by styling or formatting the text and adding emojis or even attachments.
If you want to gain more focus and see only what you are interested in the swimlanes are collapsible. If you are working on some other epic or just want to be focused on a particular card, you can collapse the other rows so they don’t divert you from your work. With a click on the three dots in the corner, a menu appears where you can toggle the option.
Roadmap Stages (Columns)
You can use columns in different ways. They can represent different stages of your bigger product development process like: Options, Discovery, Delivery, Review, Done.
Instead of a timeline view, you can also have columns serve as time-buckets like quarters of a year - Q1 2022, Q2 2022, Q3 2022 and so, or some bigger releases. Feel free to use them however you find fit. As mentioned before, they can also help you visualize the work process by dividing it into concrete stages.
In ProdGoal, roadmap columns are similar to board columns feature-wise. They can be easily created, renamed, edited, and deleted. The differences are that roadmap columns can’t be moved that easy, but they can be, as rows, collapsed.
They come with features that help you better visualize the plan and communicate more transparently with your team members and/or stakeholders. These features are column categories, WIP limits, blocker flagging, and policy definition. They will all be presented in the further text.
Rich-Text Editor
In order to get stakeholder buy-in, you’ll have to make sure your strategy is in line with what’s on the roadmap. This means research evidence, clear vision and strategy, as well as the description of the particular features that you have in mind.
The text editor gives you the ability to add attachments too. It is easier to share your plans and ideas if there is a sales chart, for example, or a usage diagram or a sketch of your thought process.
By clicking on a row text area, the editor bar pops up with all the text and attachment options. What else you can do with attachments and how this feature works is explained in detail later in the text.
Column Categories
Column categories add more insights to the Roadmap flow. You can use them to group columns and make different types of work stages.
Column categories come with 5 pre-built categories with predefined names (which you can change), and you have them whenever you create a new project - “Backlog”, “To do”, “In progress”, “Done”, and “Archive”. Each of them has its respective color.
You can change the column category by clicking on the upper right menu and selecting the “Change category” option. Then the modal is shown where you can edit the column and category it belongs to.
Waiting And Active Column States
Like all plans and the roadmap are constantly changing and adjusting, the same goes for the epics and tasks. If there is a delay, impediment or just waiting time for whatever reason, things end up being on hold (or in queue) until the problem is solved, and you have to mark or label this somehow.
To further customize the roadmap, columns with the “In progress” category have the option to change the state from active - which is the default - to the waiting (or queue) state. The column will then change the color to display its waiting state.
With these, you can easily track the flow efficiency of your roadmap items. In the category menu modal, you can choose the column status from the dropdown menu next to the category name in the Status column.
Work-In-Progress Limits
Work-in-progress (or work-in-process or WIP) limits can come in handy in a roadmap when there are limitations to how many or how few initiatives, features, or epics can be in a column. Especially if a column represents some fixed time frame.
Because of the ability to set both min (low) WIP and max (high) WIP it opens the way for additional customization. For example, if you have the minimum WIP limit set to 1 and there are no items in that column - the number at the top of the column will become red and notify you that the column is empty and that you have to do something about it. The same goes for the max WIP limit.
The WIP limits can be set in the category modal as well as other options by entering the values in the columns titled Low WIP and High WIP.
Column Policies
Sometimes it is necessary to explain why a particular column found its way in the roadmap and what it’s needed to be done in that work state and this is where column policies come in. This greatly helps you to be more transparent and clarify to your colleagues why is that column so important according to your agreements.
This column policy feature offers just that. To expand on the idea and rules behind the column and bring it closer to everyone on the team or in the organization, so there is no confusion. You can use these policies to explain what the columns are used, what needs to be done when the work is inside the column, or what the criteria are for an item exiting the column (exit criteria).
Each roadmap column has this option, and you can manage and define your policies from the column’s top menu when you select the “Define policy” option.
Cards
Pretty much everything in the roadmap has something to do with cards. They are an integral part of every roadmap. They can become epics, features, or tasks that you can then move and iterate over. They have to be easy to use but also carry a lot of features to accommodate everything that could come up in a product development cycle.
Roadmap cards in ProdGoal are intuitive and feature-rich to help you customize the roadmap like cycle time and lead time, card types, and type categories. All the features a card has will be described in detail in the next few paragraphs.
Cycle Time And Lead Time
Cycle time is usually the time a task takes to be finished - as it enters the “In progress” status to the “Done” status. The lead time is when a part of a product is created and all the way to the final done state (e.g. when a feature is shipped or deployed to clients).
In ProdGoal, this is a feature that tracks the card’s cycle time as it passes through different work stages. It activates when you move the card to the “In progress” column and keeps calculating the time spent until the card goes to the “Archive” category column or back to the “Backlog” category column.
You can analyze the data so you can improve the cycle time, lead time and throughput of all your tasks, get a better insight into the work flow, or find out the causes of the delays and impediments.
The card always displays the time it has entered the “In progress” state. The tracking stops when the card is moved to the “Done” column. By clicking on the icon, you can see every status the card has been in and how much time is spent there.
Card Types
Card types offer various customization options to implement while making the roadmap. By creating and choosing the card types, you can group cards to easily represent different types of work, but also goals, themes, topics or whatever your need is.
ProdGoal’s roadmap card types can be added, renamed, and deleted, unlike the column counterparts. This adds to the overall flexibility of the roadmap-building process. The 5 types that are available when you create a new project are: “Default”, “Bug”, “Value”, “Maintenance”, and “BAU” (Business-As-Usual) but you can rename them and use them differently, based on whatever need you have.
This option enables you to easily see the distribution of the roadmap items that you have and it gives you invaluable insights into what you have delivered, what you are working on currently and also what types of work are you planning. These insights into the distribution of your wor can be crucial for setting up the right product strategy.
By clicking on the three dots in the top right corner of the card, you can easily choose one of the predefined types, or you can select the “Edit” option and enter the advanced menu for managing card types and categories.
Card Type Categories
The need for categories is understandable, as the roadmap is a living document and the constant change of situations calls for an Agile system. Use the categories to order the cards in the same theme, high-level type or, as the name says - cateogry.
The categories are limited in number and there are 5 of them with default names that are the same as the 5 initial card types. However, you can change the category names to suit your company and business environment.
Just like column categories, item type categories have colors too. Then the cards will have the left side color-coded for easier visualization.
The categories can be managed from the advanced menu described in the paragraph above.
Blocker Flagging
As long as we are doing product management or project management, there will always be trade-offs to be made. That’s why it is useful to have a feature that can label a impeded card for example, or a dependency waiting to be resolved.
ProdGoal has this feature available for the card to be flagged as a blocker. It is color-coded to stand out in the roadmap. But, of course, you can get creative with this feature and use it whatever way you need to.
Simply click on the card’s menu and select the “Block” option. Its color will turn to red so it gets noticed easily.
Attachments
Nowadays adding an attachment is an absolute must-have feature in every online tool. It is very hard sometimes to express your idea the way you imagined unless you use an image or a GIF animation.
ProdGoal offers 5MB of internal storage. That doesn’t sound like much, but with an image optimization on the backend, it compresses the image no matter the size.
There is also Google Drive integration, with which you can connect to your Google account for unlimited storage space.
One Or Multiple Assignees
Depending on the team you work with it is important to have hands untied regarding task assignments or putting the right person as the initiative or feature lead. Maybe you will never have to assign a task to more than one person, but it is good to have that additional option if the need arises. Which is not likely with some other tools (Jira, we are looking at you).
That’s why ProdGoal went with the option so you can have multiple assignees, to give that extra space and not limit you in any way.
When you hover the pointer over a card, a user icon will appear in the lower right corner, and by clicking it you can select all the members you invited to your organization.
Roadmap To Board Cards Linking
When you create an initiative, feature, or epic in your roadmap, you’ll want to attach the lower-level tasks to it. Having the high-level item and the tasks that are well-defined and clear at the low-level is crucial for all the connections to work together well. This also enables you to easily go from a high-level view to a low-level view and vice versa
The last, but definitely not the least - the Board item linking feature. With a glance, you will be able to track the progress of the roadmap card and each item attached to it. This enables you to see the progress of each roadmap card at a glance and to easily analyze all the data as time goes by.
By clicking on the card’s progress bar, you will see all the items attached to it in a list, ordered by the status they are in, so you can see if and where there is a space for improvement or modification. This way, you will see in just one click a more broken-down view of each initiative, epic, or feature that you are working on.
You can link the items to a roadmap card through the Backlog view. When you click the “Choose” option, a dropdown menu will open with a list of roadmap cards to choose from, but more on that in greater detail can be read in this text.
Summary
ProdGoal’s outcome-driven roadmap brings new nex-generation features and possibilities that other tools don’t provide. It is currently the best tool on the market for product management while it combines the best practices from project management.
It is a fluid representation of ideas from inception to completion and it visualizes the whole planning process and enables you to achieve product goals. That is why ProdGoal created this feature to help you in your decision-making, visualizing, aligning and presenting the ideas to the stakeholders.
The features that were explained here are all free and with no limits, so give ProdGoal a try and see how it can improve your business. You can cancel anytime.