Radical Roadmapping - Creating Synchronized Agile Product and Technology Roadmaps

Hi all:

The goals of creating a roadmap start out well enough--let's give our customers and stakeholders a picture of the future and get them excited about what we're going to deliver in the future.  However, the implementation generally fails to delight.  They are developed in a silo, are considered by many to be a long-term contracted commitment, and are incomplete.   They generally don't give visibility to the exciting and enabling technology and operations/devops changes that are necessary to achieve much of the innovation and major organizational goals.  Beyond basic technical debt, these are large changes that must be made in concert between the business (product/customers) and the technology (development, devops, ops, security, etc.) teams and there is opportunity for awesome alignment!

Another example of awesome alignment |  Photo by The U.S. Army / CC BY

At Socialware I was responsible for serving all of these groups and developed a passion for solving this problem as a whole.  This presentation will cover what I learned and give participants real-world examples they can take away.

I just submitted the this to the Keep Austin Agile 2016 Conference.  It's tough to get selected as this is a world-class event with a small acceptance rate.  However, I'm really looking forward to sharing it if given the opportunity!

Here's the title:  

Radical Roadmapping - Creating Synchronized Agile Product and Technology Roadmaps

Here's the abstract:

This presentation will discuss why a company would create and maintain three major artifacts (innovation roadmap, infrastructure/platform roadmap, and operations/DevOps roadmap) as well as the process to do so.  Further it will cover how to synchronize them in order to move away from making OR decisions to making AND decisions that will please all stakeholders. It will also discuss key cultural changes that must be present in order to achieve maximum benefit from this approach and challenges experienced along the way to making this a reality at Socialware, a SaaS product company.  Finally, this will include real world examples of the evolution of these roadmaps over 18 months that participants can take away and use as guidelines for doing so.

This concept is RADICAL as it is innovative in both its novel approach and ability to drive enormously positive organizational agility.

Of course, in Matt's usual energetic* style, there will be tangents, humorous self-deprecating references of learning (aka failure), and time for participants to describe how this would "never work" in their organization coupled with Matt's re-framing to help them understand how it just might.

*Best feedback comment ever received in his Keep Austin Agile 2015 presentation on Continuous Capacity Planning: "Man, this guy has been drinking way too much coffee for a 4:00 PM presentation!"

Next Steps

Now to create the content based on the real world examples and learning with the team at Socialware--I'll continue meeting with folks in the community, sharing what I have so far and refining it as I go.  If you're interested in this concept, please let me know--I'd love to share my ideas!

~m@