Building your first roadmap

Building your first roadmap Product roadmap is an important strategic tool that helps you align all of the stakeholders on your direction. It is vitally important for the whole company, including clients, to know where you are heading. Here we will cover the process we have in place and tools we use to build a roadmap. Why you need a roadmap This is a very common question people may ask, especially if you’re trying to build things the agile way.

Thinking in sprints: setting and communicating dates with Agile

“When” often is the word product development teams fear most. When is the release date for this feature in development? When is that feature a customer asked for scheduled on the roadmap? When will that nasty bug one of your investors discovered, be fixed? Giving a confident answer to the question “when?”, is one of the objectives of making a plan. But, in the age of Agile development, is making plans and communicating dates still relevant?

How to extract quantitative product feedback from your CRM

Getting feedback from your customers is essential to improve your product, and to find product-market-fit. There are various interaction channels with your customers, for example, support systems, website chat, or simply your company’s E-Mail address. And of course, especially in larger organizations, the business development or sales teams are one of the most important channels to and from your customers. They may give you feedback they hear from customers by E-Mail, Slack, or in conversations.

Drag-and-drop, Jira integration, and more with shipit 1.4

One of the most requested features since our launch has been drag-and-drop support for items on the roadmap. We’re happy that this is now available, just in time to prepare and prioritize your product roadmap details for the fourth quarter of 2019. Watch how our own roadmap for Q4 changed while going through these steps in the header clip above. With this released, in addition to drag-and-drop we also added the following features to shipit:

Securing data at shipit

Insurance industry plays on our fears: pay a smaller fee for an unlikely future event, and if it happens you will be covered. If it is a calculated risk, this money is worth spending. If you care about your partner’s future well-being and your children, you might insure your life so that in the worst-case scenario they get financial support for some time. A similar concept is applied when building software.

Aligning your team around the product roadmap for the upcoming quarter

Do you have your 2019 Q4 roadmap ready yet? September just started, which means that the fourth quarter of 2019 is less than a month away. If your organisation (like most companies) plans in calendar quarters, now is a good time to get your product roadmap updated, too. And this is where shipit can help you get your roadmap prioritised, your team aligned, and your plans visualized. Here’s the steps you want to follow:

What are Product Requirements Documents and why do you need them?

Paul is a product manager, and he takes great care of writing proper user stories for all features and manages an up-to-date backlogs in Jira. Nevertheless he feels the “big picture” gets lost in translation while the engineering team is implementing the backlog. Heck, sometimes even Paul himself gets lost in the sea of tickets, and has to remind himself of why an initiative was started in the first place.

Fresh features on shipit: Confluence integration and improved roadmaps

We just rolled out a set of new features on shipit. Confluence Integration You can now store requirements documents for each roadmap item in Atlassian Confluence. If you connect your confluence account with shipit, whenever you create a roadmap item it creates a new requirements page in confluence. It is pre-filled with a template and placed under a space and parent page you can set up in the integration. We also revamped the looks of our integrations page.

shipit 1.1 released

We’ve just released the first update for shipit. Here’s what’s new. First, we have a new, more visual representation of product roadmaps. These are great for sharing and impressing your team and stakeholders. Note how you can now easily switch between bullet-point and Gantt chart view of the roadmap. The duration of roadmap items (and with that length of the Gantt chart bars) is expressed in sprint granularity. This means you can really quickly select the start and end sprint in order to set the duration of the roadmap item.

shipit is now ready for you

We are excited to be at the point now to have selected users sign-up and try the product. The current version of the product focuses on planning a product roadmap. It employs a simple rolling quarterly planning process. We described the approach in an earlier post on Medium. The second key aspect is about addressing the “why” for product initiatives. While there are numerous options when it comes to ticket management and planning boards, often the bigger picture is lost in a sea of tickets.

How to ship product with a quarterly product roadmap and sprint-based execution

Every now and then I get asked how to best organise a product roadmap, and how to execute on it. I’ve been asked frequently enough to publish my suggestions here in this post. Product management with “advanced common sense” One of my all time favourite terms is how David Allen summarised his Getting Things Done approach for personal productivity: “advanced common sense”. It shows that an approach that works doesn’t have to be complex.