The document discusses how agile practices can help product owners successfully manage product roadmaps. It defines the role of a product owner and explains how agile planning, such as identifying and prioritizing features, allows product owners to better align products with business goals and stakeholder needs. The document also shares examples of how agile roadmapping helped one company increase productivity and delivery of new products.

1. How to use Agile for product
road-mapping and
be successful at it ?
Anupam Kundu
© ThoughtWorks 2010 1

2. Session Goal
Who is a How Agile
Business Product helps Product
Fundamentals Owner? Owner?
Agile planning
primer for The Story So
Product Owner Far... Q&A
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3. Session Goal
High-performing
agile teams need
right direction and director
to build
successful products
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4. Business
Fundamentals
What do I
want?
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5. Business
Fundamentals
What do I need
to get it?
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6. Business
Fundamentals
How will I
get there?
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7. Business
Fundamentals
The most important question is
WHAT WE BUILD
not
HOW WE BUILD
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8. Business
Fundamentals
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9. Who is a Product
Owner?
…who makes Engineering &
Development
decisions about
what the product
should do while Product
Management
taking into account
what people who Operations
&
Marketing &
Sales
make buying Support
decisions actually
want...
Jeff Patton
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10. Who is a Product
Owner?
•Subject Matter Expert •Business Advocate
– Understand the domain well – Understand the needs of the
enough to envision a product organization paying for the software
and selects a mix of features that
cater to their goals
•End-User Advocate •Communicator
– Describe the product with – Capable of communicating vision and
understanding of users and intent to the team and the
use, and a product that best stakeholders alike
serves both
•Customer Advocate •Decision Maker
– Understand the needs of the – Given a variety of conflicting goals
business buying the product and opinions be the final logical
and select a mix of features decision maker about what goes into
valuable to the customer a release
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11. Who is a Product
Owner?
…high-performing class of “product-centric” development teams that
characteristically support their company’s value chain, partner with both
their customers and business stakeholders, and own the business results
that their software delivers… Forrester Research on Product Centric Development
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12. { pause }
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13. How Agile helps
Product Owner?
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14. How Agile helps
Product Owner?
Source: State of Agile Development: 3rd Annual Survey, Version One
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15. Agile planning primer
for Product Owner
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16. Portfolio
Division level Strategy
objectives and goals
Product roadmap and
Agile planning primer Prioritized product business strategy
for Product Owner road map
Release
What business
Product objectives will each
Business objectives release achieve?
fulfilled by the product
What capabilities
Product Vision will the release
Product life cycle offer?
Release plan
Sprint Planning Daily story
What stories must
backlog
be included in the Story Details
sprint to achieve
Acceptance
release objectives?
Tests
Iteration Plan
Sprint
velocity/capacity
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17. Agile planning primer
for Product Owner
Product Manager –
Scrum Team
Product Strategy -Constant interaction
Manager –
Business -Faster rate of
Portfolio communication
Sponsor
Stakeholders -Focus on efficiency,
- Business delivery, quick releases
priorities, Product
- Strategy
Release
-Legal obligations
- relatively slower Sprint
progress of
communication
Daily
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18. { Do I still have your attention?! }
Case Studies published
•http://www.thoughtworks.com/simon-schuster
•http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/column-articles/2650-product-road-mapping-
using-agile-principles
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19. The Story So Far...
Business Domain : Publishing and Media
– re-engineer a 15 year old consumer facing site with cutting edge
technologies and social networking tools
– rich experience for authors and readers with multimedia, editorial and crowd
sourced comments and reviews, content aggregation from the web and
content syndication to multiple channel partners
Beta Site Launched in 5 months
– considered a big success
– digital division product team earns kudos and respect across the organization
Product owner overwhelmed
– new products planned by the digital division
– new project requests from stakeholders across the company
– continuous maintenance and upgrade of the existing site
– hard to plan for new products and enhancements while dealing with
maintenance
– frustrations follows soon © ThoughtWorks 2010 19

20. Now how do I
maintain this site
and also attend to
all these
enhancement
requests….
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21. lets ask how the h*** do I
everyone to manage this?
well, its not working
work more
for at all as I
expected…
•Need help with product backlog maintenance
•Team needs to understand the roadmap and what they are working on
•Build up trust with the stakeholders in terms of prioritization of work
requests
• Build social connection and transparency across the teams
•More predictability of delivery, releases
•Sustainable pace

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24. The Story So Far...
•What is the business value for the product?
•Is the new feature considered a legal obligation for the market?
•Does the new product provide a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace?
•How much can the proposed product leverage the newly created infrastructure?
•Which product can help launch or promote new or emerging lines of business?
•Will the new product allow the stakeholders to reach and exploit new marketing geographies?
•How much will it cost to launch the new product?
•Is there a need to build follow-up modules to the product?
•Is this a new product a catch-up with rest of the players in the market?
•Can we quickly identify multiple small tasks and create a product of value for the internal web
/ content admin team?
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25. The Story So Far...
identification prioritization exploration confirmation
Identification
– business and technology stakeholders brainstorm new products,
features and ideas along with the product owner
– (ranked) product roadmap with high level business visions and goals
outlined for the highest priority projects and features
– mainly product owners ( & business analysts) and business
stakeholders © ThoughtWorks 2010 25

26. The Story So Far...
identification prioritization exploration confirmation
Prioritization
– discuss current state of product backlog with the team
– identify initial risks and assumptions from prioritized products
– order of magnitude estimates for the prioritized products
– product owners ( & business analysts), scrum master, dev team
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27. The Story So Far...
identification prioritization exploration confirmation
Exploration
– spike technology integration touch points
– granular estimates
– draft release plan of priority products
– dev team, scrum master, product owners ( & business analysts)
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28. The Story So Far...
identification prioritization exploration confirmation
Confirmation
– decision to go or no-go
– put products into hibernation or kill them
– refine release timelines and schedules
– product owners ( & business analysts), business stakeholders and
scrum master
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29. The Story So Far...
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30. The Story So Far...
Extend the bandwidth of the product owner
– Add a dedicated Business Analyst to work as PO proxy for couple of projects
– Introduce other POs in the mix with the concept of an UBER PO having the
final call on sprint priorities
– Moved to 2 weeks sprint (instead of weekly sprints)
Manage the backlogs
– Reduce three backlogs to two
– One backlog for high value new projects and key features
– Second backlog of all low priority bugs and enhancements to the current site
Adopt Agile Principles to road-mapping process
– The roadmap document is declared as a live document constantly prioritized
based on feedback from stakeholders and agile team every sprint
– Greater visibility to the project team beyond the release scope by introducing
a feedback oriented collaborative approach
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31. The Story So Far...
Productivity Improvement: team output
January April August December
New Products
Maintenance

32. Business goals improvement
– Approx number of products added to roadmap / year:
74
The Story So Far...
– Approx number of products delivered / year: 26
– 2 NEW products every month!
New Products - Roadmap Success
Count of New Products Added to Roadmap Count of New Product Launched
20 8.00
18
7.00
16
6.00
14
5.00
12
10 4.00
8
3.00
6
2.00
4
1.00
2
0.00
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
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33. The Story So Far... 1. All product owners are equal but
some POs are more equal than
others – think of the ϋber PO
2. Rapid portfolio management gives
ability to change roadmap
direction every sprint
3. Providing visibility into the
roadmap increases trust and
accountability within the
stakeholders
4. Cross pollination of ideas (during
road-mapping ) as the agile team
gets involved
5. Early and frequent collaboration is
a risk mitigation tactic
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34. Q&A
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35. References
1. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches
2. http://www.scrumalliance.org/
3. http://agilemanifesto.org/
4. http://www.implementingscrum.com
5. www.mountaingoat.com – Mike Cohn
6. www.agileproductdesign.com – Jeff Patton
7. http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/articles/415-the-agile-pyramid-
aligning-the-corporate-strategy-with-agility – Joe Krebs
8. http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/column-articles/2650-product-
road-mapping-using-agile-principles
9. http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/column-articles/2806-project-
portfolio-decisionsdecisions-for-now
10. Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility – Jan, 2010
Forrester Research
11. Product-Centric Development Is A Hot New Trend – Dec, 2009 Forrester
Research
12. Design Comics
13. Microsoft Office ClipArt
14. All beloved ThoughtWorkers
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36. About the Speaker
Anupam Kundu
Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks
ak@thoughtworks.com
kundu.anupam@gmail.com
•agile project management
•agile coaching for product owners
•global software delivery expertise
•12+ years experience
•Developer, Business Analyst, Architect,
Offshore Coordinator, Project Manager, Pre sales,
Account Management
•Author
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