What Is an Agile Roadmap? Definition and Create

What is the Agile roadmap?

A roadmap is a step-by-step strategy for a product or service development. Agile roadmaps have short time frames and frequent revisions for changing features. They have the potential to look beyond the next big release through continuous software testing.

Agile roadmaps creation aims to reflect product strategy while also responding to changes. Such as competitive landscape shifts, value proposition shifts, and technical restrictions. 

Agile roadmap tools like Chisel help teams keep track of milestones, features, and product strategies to make better decisions and prioritize jobs.

Although features and dates characterize non-agile product roadmaps, agile product roadmaps focus on desired goals and outcomes. And give critical context to a software team’s daily activities. 

Multiple teams frequently collaborate on a similar agile roadmap.

It’s worth noting that some agile teams consider their iterative approach to work inconsistent with the roadmapping method. 

Since they don’t want to adhere to a precise strategy or schedule, these teams may reject creating a product roadmap. 

Dates, on the other hand, are essential. Even the most adaptable product teams must stick to deadlines and schedules (or date ranges). 

After all, both company leaders and customers want new services and capabilities to be available within a specific time.

Developing an agile roadmap will help you no matter what type of Agile methodology you use or how closely your team follows it. Utilize your roadmap as a guide to ensure that you focus your efforts on the most critical tasks. 

Such as those that correspond with the product’s overall strategy. You can make better tradeoff decisions, track progress, and give customers more value if you use an agile roadmap as a guide.

How to create an effective agile roadmap?

Determine the goals and Advantages:

Working in agile is a dynamic environment. Whether your product is new and undergoing considerable development, the market is vibrant with new rivals or technologies bringing change. 

It would help if you used a goal-oriented product roadmap or a theme-based roadmap. 

Goal-oriented roadmaps focus on achieving specific goals or objectives, such as recruiting new customers, boosting engagement, and eliminating technical debt. 

Features are still there, but they get treated as second-class citizens, generated from the aims and used sparingly.

Transform your objectives into efforts:

Initiatives (also known as epics) establish the work themes that will complement the product vision and assist you in achieving your objectives. 

Features and user stories divide into initiatives, which often span numerous releases. 

Before you specify new features to pursue, ensure the new plan corresponds with your initiatives whenever your agile team wishes to pivot based on new data or user input.

Collect input from various divisions:

Getting input from other teams is necessary to create an agile roadmap that is precise, thorough, and practical. 

Engineering, advertising, design, sales, and customer support, to mention a few, should all participate in creating and executing a complete product experience.

Consider using purpose-built product management tools to develop your agile roadmap if you need to work with organizations that aren’t ordinarily agile. Such as budget offices or the legal team) and require lengthier timescales. 

Multiple work streams and schedules may be easier to organize and follow.

Define product features and connect them to strategic goals:

Now is the time to divide your vast work themes into features or user stories. Your features represent the new functionality that you will provide to clients regularly. 

The functionalities are then broken down into technical requirements and organized into sprints by development teams. Use your product’s vision, goals, and efforts to determine which features to prioritize as a guide. 

You can provide work and iterate quickly without deviating off course when all your features link to the overarching product plan.

Make a schedule for product releases:

Organize the features in your agile roadmap into releases to provide incremental value to clients within a specified time limit. Whether you release daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, it’s entirely up to you. Note that a release is different from a sprint or iteration. 

It focuses on delivering a new user experience (rather than merely providing code) and includes all cross-functional effort required. 

Releases are still critical in an agile context because they inform teammates and customers about what to anticipate.

Take note of and incorporate customer reviews:

Customer input should be collected regularly as part of your agile roadmap. Using user interviews, usability testing, and usage data, some teams get ideas. 

You may also use Chisel, a purpose-built idea management tool, to gather, rank, prioritize comments, and promote the best ideas to features on your roadmap. 

It must all stay in one place. You may identify when to make changes by mapping each functionality to the product strategy (versus when to stick to the plan).

Suggested Read: How to Manage Product Releases and Versioning

Agile roadmap vs. release plan

The agile roadmap provides a high-level strategic overview or synopsis of the product, demonstrating the “why” behind plans. The release plan aims to go over what you need to do, including what you’re doing and when you want to finish it.

Even if they haven’t mentioned the exact dates, the agile roadmap covers a longer duration (typically at least 12 months). On the other hand, the release plan is for a much shorter period, say three to six months.

The primary audience for these documents also differs. You rely more on a plan when communicating with stakeholders such as executives, marketers, and other client-facing teams. 

However, in this scenario, a release strategy is used to create internal alignment, particularly between Product and Engineering.

Why choose Chisel to build an Agile Roadmap?

Chisel is the only comprehensive product management tool on the market, addressing the three key factors of building high-quality products. They are outstanding roadmaps, team alignment, and customer engagement. 

Chisel is a central repository for product managers to keep track of team and customer feedback and product roadmap information. As a result, the odds of a product’s success increase while time and money get saved.

Your product gets divided into two sections in Chisel: components and features. Individual actions or projects that achieve a minor goal refers to as features. Components are collections of elements that work together to achieve a common purpose or relate in a particular manner.