Roadmaps

A roadmap is a strategic planning technique used to show a projects key goals, milestones or deliverables on a timeline view. It is a powerful visual tool that helps you see the plan and see progress against the plan. A Gantt chart would be a common example of a roadmap and is commonly used in project management. 

Although product roadmaps can be incredibly useful, they are sometimes misused and can cause more confusion than alignment. If milestones, objectives and key results are not clearly defined, the roadmap will lack vision. If there is no clear owner for the roadmap, it will lose its reliability. If the roadmap is fixed without an understanding of how quickly a team can work (called team velocity) it will lose its credibility. 

An effective Agile product roadmap starts with a refined prioritised list of what will be built or created for the service or product called a product backlog. By creating a backlog the team has defined and prioritised valuable product or service increments that can be delivered incrementally. Those backlog items should be sized by the teams doing the work, and that effort estimation can then be used to place backlog items into upcoming time periods on the roadmap (usually called sprints) based on available capacity.