Setup - Product Roadmap
Objective
Product roadmaps are not the easiest thing to pin down, especially in the early stages of a product lifecycle. Thankfully, the planning phase yielded some valuable artifacts for driving the product roadmap.
Principles
Our exact process must vary to a certain degree depending on the product, market, and unique stakeholder needs, but we follow a few general best practices:
- Roadmap planning can only happen once the appropriate activities and artifacts were completed during the planning phase.
- The initial version of the roadmap is drafted during the first release planning meeting. As such, the entire team is present and actively involved in driving the discussion and creation of goals.
- Once broad goals and features are decided upon, we create Epics in Pivotal Tracker that represent the major roadmap milestones. This allows the team to track progress against specific epics and associate their stories to those product milestones.
- Epics should be broken down into reasonably sized goals. Ideally, epics should take 1-3 weeks to complete. This allows us to more easily chunk down epics into weekly iteration goals and commitments.
