I have just spent the past few days producing a visual product roadmap for the web service that I am a Product Manager for. There is some debate as to whether you need a roadmap at all but I find them very valuable for the following reasons:
1) They build consensus. Agile development is team based and it helps if all the members of that team are headed in roughly the same direction. A roadmap is a reference point for all the team.
2) They are visual. My roadmaps start with the current situation in the left hand corner and the stated vision for the product in the top right hand corner. Each new feature is then plotted onto the roadmap showing progression against a given theme eg. improved search. Dates are not included as they are bound to change, it's the direction towards a stated aim that is important here.
3) They are iterative and allow for change. A good roadmap is flexible and achievable in small steps.
4) They communicate the long term / strategic vision for a product. Its very easy to get stuck in the day to day and forget to focus on the overall direction, as new ideas emerge you can then plot whether they fit with the overall plan and then decide whether its the plan that needs to change or the request for the new feature.
Our roadmap is now pinned to the team planning board and I hope will be a reference and discussion point as we move forward.
After a recent course on agile development I learnt how to play the game of planning poker. Since being back at the office I have used it in a couple of product planning sessions and found it to be really useful.
The principal of the game is that in any group of people you will have difference of opinion as to how important a new product feature is or how complex it might be to build. This is where poker comes in to help you gain consensus during estimation.
Each player takes a set of cards with a series of numbers on it (based on fibonacci). The person taking the meeting would then read out the summary of the new product feature that is being suggested. Maybe in the form of a user story.
Each member of the group then picks the value that they'd like to assign to the idea without showing the rest of the group. So you might pick a 100 say if its really really important (if you are assigning business value) or an 8 if its somewhere in the middle.
The group then turns over their cards at the same time. At this point you will usually find that someone has given the idea a high value, another less so. This is everyone's opportunity to discuss why there is a difference in their scores. It's the conversation at this point that I have found the most valuable. Planning poker is a great way of getting a very detailed opinion from everyone in the group.
The aim of the game is to keep up the discussion until you play again and everyone has agreed the same score for the idea / feature / backlog item. Then you can move onto the next.
This is one of the more useful and fun tools that I've used in product development for a while. If you haven't tried it I would suggest getting a pack of cards and giving it a go, or playing online at planningpoker.com
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