Product roadmap, what's best?
Rogerio Taques
8 replies
What do you guys use for writing down your product roadmap? Do you have one for stakeholders and another for users, or just a single one for everybody? 🤔
Replies
Saul Fleischman@osakasaul
We use Asana. We do not share the roadmap with customers or users and have no stakeholders other than our founders, who continue to work on RiteKit.
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@osakasaul, thanks for sharing! Nice to know that. We currently use Jira, but I'm not really satisfied with the outcome and how "hard" it is to maintain and adapt.
@rogeriotaques Jira is powerful. Haven't used it in years (we got forced into it by a company we were working with), but for our team, more actions to get anything done makes it a fail. When leading a team, especially when some are non-devs, each action added leads some people to think to "just Slack it," though you need them to add it to your project management solution. That's where Asana is better.
@osakasaul agreed! I used Asana few years ago (2018), but not for sharing a roadmap! Perhaps, I need to give it another try. 🤔
I found the best roadmap is the now/next/later roadmap for long-term planning to know where your product is heading. You can use it to share it with stakeholders. This is a bit tough because ideally, you're trying to solve problems that bring the most benefit to your company & users. You should solve the problems until they're resolved so there's why this roadmap doesn't have any deadline or timeline (which is the way it should be).
Alongside that, I'm using a sprint roadmap for my development team that includes initiatives we'll be working on in the upcoming sprint to add it to a context but we know these plans can change and the initiatives can be prolonged if needed.
We still didn't get to the point to create a roadmap for users but I would probably also create it as now/next/later.
@pm_optimizer Nice idea! I'll try using "now/next/later" for my roadmap instead of a vague timeline. I already use initiatives in my roadmap shared with all stakeholders, including devs. We also have a Jira backlog for the dev team. 🤗
Planning a roadmap and prioritizing project tasks is an important step to ensure that the project is executed successfully. We use (GanttPRO https://ganttpro.com/) to create and manage our roadmaps. The tool provides visually appealing Gantt charts and many additional features to make roadmap management an easy and pleasant process.
Highly recommended.
@pavel_kukhnavets Interesting, Pavel. Thank you for sharing that.
I was used to work with gantt charts when running waterfall projects, many years ago. I have never thought of using it while running Agile. 🤔
Are you using it on Agile or Waterfall?