
Agile Product Roadmaps
One of the most handy tools for Product Owners to both forecast and describe the forward
Agile IQ® Score: 93-130
A team at this stage of its agile journey is establishing its agile behaviours in the Ha stage of Shu Ha Ri. A Stage Two team has an Agile IQ® of 93-130.
Stage Three companies start to see tangible results from your investment in your digital transformation. Transparency of the health of your products and services is higher, enabling leaders to make informed decisions on where to invest.
Up to $10M+
Up to 2 weeks
Up to 30 days
Medium
Stage Three organisations typically advance to even higher levels of effectiveness when they learning advanced patterns and practices such as Design Thinking, Kanban to optimise for flow, and Lean to reduce waste.
It typically takes a company 1-2 years to reach Stage Three. Unfortunately, Many slide backwards to Stage One or Two after 2-3 years thinking”the job is done”.
Your Agile IQ® score shows that your organisation is starting to show real benefits from agile reflected in the way managers, teams, and the company focuses on product management.
Project Management | move to |
Product Management |
Stakeholder requirements | move to |
"Customer first" mindset |
Measuring efficiency and milestone based deliverables | move to |
Measuring value, impact and outcomes |
Your Agile IQ® score suggests that while benefits from agile are being received, growth is reliant on ensuring that when delivery pressures are strong that people don't revert back to old behaviours.
Explore additional practices | actions for growth |
Add DevOps, Design Thinking, Kanban, and XP on top of Scrum |
Evolve to Product Management | actions for growth |
Avoid reinforcing traditional project management behaviours and practices. |
Alignment and Cadence | actions for growth |
For scaled agile initiatives and agile release trains, ensure all teams are Sprinting and aligned so that the whole company can also "Sprint". |
Data on the fastest path to growth, based on other companies' successes and lessons learned, is key to avoid the traps of transformation
Feature factory | avoid |
Turning teams into a factory for delivery of requirements. The whole system needs to be inspecting, adapting, and improving. |
Agile as a Methodology | avoid |
As soon as practices are standardised they cease to improve. Don't turn agile into just a "project management methodology". |
Set and forget | avoid |
Assume "we're agile" and the job is done. Consider who is accountable for ensuring that agile is an effective operating model for product management and how to report on it. |
Issues most often occur in Stage Three teams when:
Shifting from project management approaches to an agile product management structure
Stage Three Teams should be focussed on learning how to increase their capability to reduce delivery risk, higher productivity and lower costs.
Investment in automation whether teams are from finance, marketing and comms or software development
Diversification of the types of skills, practices and patterns the team has experience with improves their ability to adapt to new situations.
Adding practices like Design Thinking, Lean UX, and DevOps, results in:
Agile Product Management focuses on a longer-term relationship between teams, the Product Manager, and customers. In product management, the team remains focussed on supporting, iterating, and improving the product (or service) until that product is no longer of value to its users and stakeholders. This is a very different way of working to project management where, after the product has been developed, it’s handed over to its owner with a transition to “business as usual”, and the project team is disbanded.
Organisations that start down agile ways of working evolve through three main steps from project to product management.
Scrum Masters are expected to coach stakeholders and business through the transformation of continuous improvement toward agile product management. This includes:
Focus on Agile IQ® improvement actions that impact:
Managers and agile leaders should now be focussed on:
Team establishment exercises, like the Team Charter and Skills Matrix, that were created in Stage One are key assets to use to focus on capability development over purely “people management”.
Stage Three Teams should be focussed on learning how to increase their capability to reduce delivery risk, higher productivity and lower costs. Key practices for Stage Three teams include:
Focus on Agile IQ® improvement actions that impact:
Automation reduces time, effort and cost, whilst reducing manual errors, giving your business more time to focus on your primary objectives. Repetitive tasks can be completed faster. Automating processes ensures high quality results as each task is performed identically, without human error.
With automation, teams should see the following improvements:
Automation isn’t only for software teams, doing testing and deployment.
One of the most handy tools for Product Owners to both forecast and describe the forward
Inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal empowers a team to adapt its Sprint Backlog
Get the most out of the latest version of the IT service management (ITSM) and agile
Big stories can causes lots of problems. The remedy is to slice the item into ‘small’
One of the easiest methods to slice Backlog items into smaller pieces