The complete guide to planning and building agile roadmaps
Agile roadmap examples by real-world PMs + flexible, ready-to-use roadmap templates. With insights from PMs working at Google, EA, Wealthsimple, Shopify.
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Agile roadmaps have solid benefits that fit nicely into any agile environment. Whatever your agile style, the key to reaping the rewards of an agile roadmap comes down to treating it as a statement of intent. Your agile roadmap requires flexibility, attention and frequent re-evaluation to be truly effective.
What's in the guide?
Chapter 1
Can agile and roadmapping work together?
Debunking the argument that roadmaps don’t belong in agile environments. Agile isn’t restricted by a timeline. Roadmapping is often time-based. The two concepts seem counterintuitive. In this chapter, you’ll learn how product managers use an agile roadmap to achieve concrete benefits.
Chapter 2
What you need to know before creating an agile roadmap
The 5 steps you should follow for effective agile roadmap planning. Agile teams deal with constant change. So you need to prepare and plan your roadmap around the evolving nature of that environment. We give you the steps + a handy checklist to make the agile roadmap planning process easier.
Chapter 3
How to visualize your agile roadmap
Swimlanes, timelines, dates, no dates: There is no one way to create an agile roadmap. Implemented and executed by real-life companies, these agile roadmap examples are suited for different agile scenarios. We asked six awesome product managers to share how they’re actually using agile and why their chosen roadmap works best for them.
Chapter 4
Guidelines for your agile roadmap
Some final best practices to create powerful and effective agile roadmaps. By now, you’ll have 4 powerful ways to visualize your agile roadmap. But no matter how you choose to represent your roadmap, there are certain standards that you need to follow to ensure the success of your plan.
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About this guide
Roadmaps are a key to achieving the team cohesion that’s needed in agile environments. Agile teams are constantly learning and baking those learnings into the product development process, and they need the tools and artifacts that will help them do that without any snags.
Roadmaps improve alignment among product teams
Developers, designers and product managers who work in agile don’t really see long-term plans as a priority. They’re more concerned with what they can accomplish for short-term cycles (days, weeks, even hours). An agile roadmap allows product managers to communicate to their teams that they understand how they function. With an agile roadmap, you can commit to those short-term priorities while acknowledging that the future is unknown, and therefore the process is flexible.
Cross-company cohesion with sales, CS, marketing
Agile is a software and product development framework that non-maker teams can’t really apply. Sales works in lengthy cycles, marketing is concerned with the next release, customer success has quarterly goals. It’s possible to have different teams working along different timelines within the same company. Teams working under more traditional time constraints may have a lot of questions for agile teams (Why isn’t this done? When should we expect this?). A roadmap adapted for your agile environment communicates realistic goals to internal stakeholders prying for answers.