Agile Product Roadmaps

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog management, stakeholder management and forecasting. Therefore, you will probably use a variety of tools and techniques to track progress, manage expectations and keep people informed. One of the tools that may come in handy for you is a product roadmap. Applying product roadmaps effectively can be challenging, however. The concept of a product roadmap, however, is that it is a high-level, strategic plan, that describes the likely development of the product over the next period of time. The roadmap should support the products’ purpose and vision and it helps the Product Owners to keep their stakeholders aligned. The roadmap also makes it easier to coordinate the development of different products and it fosters transparency in order to manage customer expectations.
In a lot of organizations, I see that Product Owners are focused mostly on developing features and therefore, a lot of roadmaps are also dominated by features and functionalities to be delivered. The disadvantage of focusing on features too much, is that there are always too much features that would add value, therefore creating a lack of focus on the vision and goals. By focusing on the features too much, the roadmap will turn into an overloaded product backlog, instead of a high-level, strategic plan for the products’ future development.
In my everyday practice, I’ve seen a variety of product roadmaps that were used. Although these three different roadmaps all have different pros and cons, I’ve seen all of them add value for Product Owners in their daily work. Personally, I always use a combination of these three roadmap practices. I mostly use the Storymap in the beginning of a products’ development, because I want to create insight for the stakeholders in the products’ features.
Goal Oriented product roadmap (GO product roadmap)
What I personally like a lot about the GO product roadmap is that it facilitates a lot of focus on the goals you want to achieve as a Product Owner, much more than the actual work to be done (the features). Although the GO product roadmap offers the possibility of adding features, I like to start with the end goals in mind, and I believe every Product Owner should do so. The GO product roadmap and focus on goals enables value steering (steering on outcome) instead of steering on work packages (steering on output). Since you are responsible for the product vision, strategy and roadmap as a Product Owner, I believe this is a valuable asset of the GO product roadmap.
Another aspect of the GO product roadmap I like a lot is that it supports you in thinking about the most valuable features that enable the achievement of your goals. Since Agile is also about “Simplicity – maximizing the work not done” (Agile principle