Agile Product Road-map

A road-map is every bit as important to an agile team as it is to a waterfall team because it provides context around the team's every-day work, and responds to shifts in the competitive landscape.

How an agile road-map differs from a waterfall road-map

A waterfall product road-map communicates a long-term commitment to building specific features on a set timeline. However, an agile road-map accommodates inevitable changes while still committing to getting meaningful work done. It communicates a short-term plan for achieving product goals, with the flexibility to adjust that plan according to customer value.

Here are some key ways that agile and waterfall road-maps differ:

	Waterfall road-map	Agile road-map
Goals	Business-centric	Customer-centric
Planning horizon	Years	Months or quarters
Planning cadence	Annually	Quarterly
Resource / capacity planning	By major project	By small team
Investment	Committed	Incremental
Collaboration	Segmented	Cross-functional team
Flexibility	Limited	Limitless

Goals: Waterfall organizations often set business-centric goals, measured by financial KPIs. Agile organizations often set customer-centric goals, such as user growth and customer delight.

Planning horizon: A waterfall product road-map reflects commitments to a longer-term timeline — typically a year or two. And an agile road-map reflects quarterly (or even monthly) commitments.

Planning cadence: Waterfall organizations commonly do annual strategy and product planning. Agile organizations usually do it much more regularly in quarterly strategy and product planning cycles.

Resource / capacity planning: A waterfall road-map reflects heavy upfront dedication of resources, which are allocated by project. An agile road-map considers the sprint team the resource unit and can allocate by sprint velocity or team capacity.

Investment: Waterfall-driven products receive funding according to the organization’s annual planning cadence. These funds are committed for the year and are often based on the previous year. By contrast, agile-driven products can be funded incrementally as the organization adjusts its portfolio based on customer feedback and data.

Collaboration: In a waterfall organization, work is sequential and segmented — with one department’s phase typically unable to advance until the previous one is completed. In an agile organization, teams collaborate on a plan and work cross-functionally and concurrently.

Flexibility: Because of how work is planned and funded, waterfall road-maps have limited flexibility. Agile road-maps accommodate extensive flexibility. This can create its own set of challenges because teams need to be careful that unlimited flexibility does not lead to unnecessary pivots in development and resources.

In this post focus was on how an agile road-map differs from a waterfall road-map, next time we will discuss steps to create an Agile Product Road-map.

What do you think? Let me know your inputs & suggestions.

Courtesy: Several online blogs, you tube videos, tutorials & other resources