Business Savvy Software

Scoping a feature into a project is one thing, but scoping 50 features into 200 projects that deliver on the strategy of the company becomes a roadmap.  You can take this to extremes and try to plan out the next 2 years or take the other extreme and focus on just the next thing.  Agilers say we should delay decision making until the last responsible moment, but there is a difference between decision making and planning.  

I think its diligent to plan ahead 3 months, but with the understanding that the roadmap is like a radar – its a blip that’s only accurate at the point it was created – but once we have this reference point, its much easier to see changes and to comminucate priotities.   

At Xero, we use two levels of roadmap, but I’ll explain it as three, because the first two (buyer & product) are very specific to your product offerings.

Buyer Roadmap
Managing a separate roadmap for each buyer persona helps keep in perspective who you are solving problems for and helps to prioritise features for each buyer persona.  

Product Roadmap
You may have a 1-1 buyer-product mapping or one buyer for many products or many buyers for one product or many buyers for many products.  How you productise your software is a strategic decision and managing a product roadmap helps keep your strategy in perspective.

Company Roadmap
This roadmap is the convergence of the product roadmaps into one roadmap that can be communicated to the company without getting overwhelming.

At Xero, we present our roadmap based on the current goals that we’re aiming for.  For example, one goal is to be the easiest accounting system and there are projects we do to serve this goal.  Another goal is to achieve customer numbers so there are different projects we do to serve this goal.

Product Lifecycle: Part 1 – solving problems
Product Lifecycle: Part 2 – scope
Product Lifecycle: Part 3 – the roadmap
Product Lifecycle: Part 4 – delivering