Roadmap process management
Wrote, proposed and executed processes for managing R&D team roadmap and backlog with a customer-driven approach:
Data gathering via stakeholder workshops
- I planned, prepped and organized internal workshops with internal Product users (eg. developers, marketeers and project owners using our DXP) and people in direct contact with our customers (eg. Sales people, marketeers, …). The goal was to know the issues and features that were seen/experienced as most important but also why. This would enable the R&D team to propose a focussed, meaningful scope for the roadmap, to management. I chose to start with internal users and stakeholders, to quickly build up momentum. External users and clients were designated to a later phase.
- I built the workshops around information gathered from participants beforehand (survey), including input from product leads / R&D team lead. In each workshop, we created teams of 2 (mixed profiles) and asked them to rank their items on a 2-axis board. There was also a round for open suggestions as well as time for discussion.
- I compiled the feedback in a data sheet and introduced scoring of value (based on criteria such as repetition, use cases, projected usage, …) vs. difficulty, which I visualized for presentation.
- I followed up with our head of R&D where we used the info to set goals and focus points for the roadmap he could bring to the product board. The various stakeholders were sent summaries, an overview of our conclusions and how these were used for follow-up.
Roadmap management
As products evolve and a team grows, so does the backlog and technical debt. Our team needed to achieve 3 things in order to get a handle on the issue queue and move forward:
- Better understand what the issues, change and feature requests we already had in our queue
- Track new input in a way that got people a faster response and was easier for the team to categorize
- Filter and prioritize
I approached our ticket queue in several phases to achieve this:
- New process for adding tickets: this included guidelines for tags, categories, descriptions, … to be added for new tickets, but also documenting the process for submitting and creating new tickets in the first place.
- Cleanup of the backlog, to implement said system: recategorized tickets, added context, tracing back issues and collecting information from the original reviewers, …
- Created a Google Sheet to function as a dashboard: importing data from the ticket management system API’s to create filtered overviews, using criteria such as type of product, type of work, maintenance vs. user input, …
- The head of R&D and myself categorized the tickets with high-level goals that were informed by the results from the workshops.
- In the team, we tested out a combination of planned refinements and asynchronous sessions, to score the tickets based on basic criteria such as effort, expertise needed, … That way we could eliminate duplicates but also have tickets ready for things like maintenance sprints, inform future sprints, …