Lean product roadmap

The honest way to build and plan for your product.

Description

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Planning ahead with strict yearly or quarterly roadmaps is a waste of time and resources when working the agile way. Predicting, planning and committing to your customers beyond a few months ahead is usually a promise to break.

The Lean product roadmap embraces the lean way of thinking by the Product Squad, where the team focuses on what is done now, what are the upcoming priorities based on what is known, and delegation of future ideas into consideration topics instead of commitments.

One way to accomplish the Lean roadmap is to create a simple board with three columns: what you are doing NOW (e.g. this quarter), what you intend to do NEXT (e.g. next quarter), what are the ideas we have for LATER (e.g. next year).

|-----------|------------|-------------|
|    NOW    |    NEXT    |    LATER    |
|-----------|------------|-------------|
| Mission   | Candidate  | Intention   |
| Mission   | Candidate  | Intention   |
| Mission   | Candidate  |             |
| Mission   |            |             |
|-----------|------------|-------------|

An alternative variation to the NOW-NEXT-LATER roadmap is documenting the active Missions (IN PROGRESS), features to be considered for the next cycle (UNDER CONSIDERATION), and longshot ideas (LONGSHOTS).

|-------------|---------------------|-----------|
| IN PROGRESS | UNDER CONSIDERATION | LONGSHOTS |
|-------------|---------------------|-----------|
| Mission     | Candidate           | Intention |
| Mission     | Candidate           | Intention |
| Mission     | Candidate           |           |
| Mission     |                     |           |
|-------------|---------------------|-----------|

Lean roadmap can be a liberating process for the Product Squad, where items in these boards are not treated as contracts, and are freely adjusted or modified as cycles go by, based on new information, customer feedback and new business priorities.