Assembla

A roadmap is a prioritized list of feature releases.  Roadmapping focuses the team on doing the most important things first, unlocks the magic of incremental development, and increases the value of a development investment.

Assembla principals have been through dozens of roadmapping sessions for new products, new businesses, and mature enterprise products.  We know how to move the process along and arrive at an inspirational result.

Roadmapping for new products

A new product starts with an expansive vision of what is possible.  The new product roadmap breaks this down into bits that are important and prioritized.  An effective new product roadmapping session point you to a minimal first release that is compelling and achievable in the near future.

Roadmapping will also give the participants a chance to refine the technical architecture and rollout plan.

Roadmapping for existing products

Existing products often carry a long list of freature requests, each of which is important for some constituency.  An effective roadmapping session will sort these into themes and create consensus around a few important goals for the next few releases.  Business progress and release frequency is accelerated.

Roadmapping steps

• Brainstorming.  The goal of this stage is to understand the broad vision, collect all of the outstanding requests, and make sure that no one feels left out.  In this stage, we expand our list.
• Categorizing, voting, and estimating.  In this stage, we figure out what we should do and can do.  Discussion is time-bounded.
• Sort by priority.  We go down the sorted list and draw a line under the minimal set of features that will make a useful release.  The next release should be at the top of the list, followed by future plans.

Roadmapping is a one week process for most organizations.

Read more about Roadmapping: How Your Product Finds Its Way