What Is An Agile Roadmap? How To Build Your Own
One of my product mentors used to say that agile development methodologies are one of the key reasons we live in a fast-paced business environment in software products. The more companies adopted agile, the faster they would ship new products which would lead to even more companies adopting it in order to keep up with the market.
The wide adoption of agile did not mean, however, that everybody stopped making plans in the mid-term and long-term. It’s just the way they made these plans changed. Hence, traditional detailed plans were replaced by agile roadmaps.
So, what are agile roadmaps about? How do you make one? Let’s find an answer to these questions together.
What Is An Agile Roadmap?
Let’s begin by defining what a roadmap is in general, then understand how the agile one is different from the rest.
A roadmap is a high-level visual representation of your product plans. It usually shows the features and initiatives that you want to work on, along with a time frame of delivery for each of them.
The items on your roadmap are ordered by their priority and follow your product strategy. Sometimes, your product vision will be visible in the form of a short text or highlight on the roadmap, too. This helps your product, marketing, and development teams have a clear understanding of the long-term direction of your product.
Now, about the agile one. Unlike the very traditional product roadmap documents (e.g. Gantt charts used in waterfall development), agile roadmaps are:
- More flexible: Items are planned for each sprint instead of fixing a completion date.
- Adaptable: Agile roadmap tools let you easily change priorities in your list. There are no task-level dependencies described in them either.
- Incremental: They focus on per-sprint or quarterly deliverables and include small releases over a fixed period of time.
- Lightweight: They don’t contain a detailed breakdown of tasks. Instead, you will only see the high-level initiatives and epics that your teams are planning to work on.
So, instead of serving the purpose of meticulous planning, agile roadmaps aim to communicate high-level direction with your teams and stakeholders.
What Does An Agile Roadmap Look Like?
Agile roadmaps are not only lightweight with their content but also with their visual representation. If you’re used to the visually overcrowded Gantt charts, you will definitely enjoy the way agile ones look.
I mean, look at this visual disaster.
And compare it with an agile roadmap.
Unlike the visually-heavy Gantt chart, this roadmap is much easier to scan and perceive. As mentioned earlier, it does not focus on small tasks and shows you the high-level epics (e.g. Two-factor authentication) and initiatives (improving the self-serve capabilities).
In terms of timeline, we have quarters in this example. But you can also use months or sprints instead.
Finally, there are the major milestones for your product. In this case, we have three major releases visible on the roadmap. If you’re following the agile product management best practice of releasing each sprint, you can set milestones for them on the roadmap too.
When To Use Agile Roadmaps
As the name implies, this kind of roadmap is your go-to option if your company follows agile development principles.
I don’t want to leave an impression that I hate classical waterfall development. They are great for specific use cases (e.g. developing the controllers of electric generators in a power plant). But there are also cases when a lightweight flexible roadmap will do more harm than good. That’s why you will almost certainly see Gantt charts there.
However, if you’re a startup with a new product and ambitious product goals, then agile roadmaps are definitely what you would want to use. You might also be in a larger company that operates in a highly volatile and fast-paced market (e.g. OpenAI developing its LLM models). In that case, you have no choice but to adopt the agile environment, too (along with an agile roadmap).
Overall, if speed and flexibility are your key product goals both in the near term and the long term, then I would suggest your product teams use agile roadmaps for your planning and communication.
How To Create An Agile Roadmap
Compared to Gantt charts, agile roadmaps are relatively easy to make. Here’s a step-by-step guide that you can follow to make one:
- Understand your business goals and KPIs: This way, the initiatives you represent on the roadmap will help you achieve them.
- List the functionality necessary to achieve your metrics and business objectives: It can be anything from new features, enhancements of existing ones, integrations with other services, user experience improvements, changes in workflow, and others.
- Reserve time for processing customer feedback: In your planning process, always keep some room for changing priorities in your roadmap. After each release, you will receive a hefty amount of user feedback that you need to act upon. Sometimes, the product features that cover this feedback will be highly prioritized.
- Avoid setting specific dates: As your priorities change constantly, you have a risk of not meeting the expectations of your key stakeholders. Use per-sprint, monthly, or quarterly deadlines instead.
- Get a buy-in from everyone: It includes your management and team. If you’re using Scrum, then you need separate buy-ins from the software development team, product owner, and scrum master.
After you finish all these steps, you are free to share this roadmap with everyone on your team and start filling your product backlog with items from this plan.
Agile Roadmapping Software Options
Considering its simplicity, there are multiple ways you can create an agile product roadmap. As long as you follow the basic principles of how to create a product roadmap, the tool you use shouldn’t matter much. Heck, you can even make one using PowerPoint or Excel.
However, there’s a reason specialized product roadmapping tools exist. They let you instantly create different types of roadmaps, tie your roadmap to your strategic planning docs, integrate with Scrum and Kanban tools, and more.
So, here’s a selection of roadmapping tools that you can consider using:
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monday dev
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.7 -
Craft.io
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.5 -
ProdPad
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.3
If you didn’t find the tool that fits your needs here, you can also check out our curated list of best product roadmap software for more options.
Using An Agile Roadmap
The creation of your agile roadmap is not the final task that you need to do related to your mid-term and long-term planning. Your roadmap is essentially useless unless you use it as a tool for communication and direction.
So, as soon as the roadmap is ready, you need to share it with all relevant people in the company, including the agile teams that will work on the features in it. It is a great practice to have a short meeting with your teams to present the roadmap, explain the product and business rationale behind the items on it, and listen to your team's questions and concerns.
Nurturing The Agile Roadmap
Your agile roadmap is, well, agile. This means that the elements and priorities should not be set in stone.
So, one of the critical parts of managing your roadmap is to regularly review its content and priorities. After all, if you’re using an agile roadmap, you are most likely operating in a highly dynamic market where users’ needs and competitors’ solutions change constantly. In a market like this, you cannot afford to stick to the plan that was developed months ago.
So, go ahead and schedule quarterly roadmap review sessions where you and your product team members will gather to discuss the latest changes in the market and decide if the current iteration of the roadmap is a good fit for it. If it’s not, then you’re free to make adjustments.
Join For More Roadmapping Insights
Agile roadmaps are a great solution for planning for the future while staying flexible and able to respond quickly to market changes. They contain enough information to keep everyone in the company aligned with your vision. But they don’t focus on the small details that can easily change a couple of months into development.
I hope you liked our guide on agile roadmaps. But that’s not the only topic on planning and product development that we have here at theproductmanager.com. So, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more.