• Agile & Scrum Basics

What is an Agile Roadmap? Direction for autonomous teams

Can you see it before you? No. An Agile Roadmap is your visual aid. It allows you to see at a glance the timeline, growth path, innovation and team goals. It is meant to map the future vision and long-term agenda and visualize the way to the result. Roadmap means roadmap in Dutch, so that may already paint a picture.

In this article, we look together at three key issues:

• What is an Agile Roadmap?
• How does an Agile Roadmap work?
• What does an Agile Roadmap do?

What is an Agile Roadmap?

The roadmap is a visualization of vision, direction and progress. All this is plotted against a clear timeline, making it a strategic planning technique that brings goals and results into focus.

Additional useful fact of the roadmap is that it helps communicate with all stakeholders and interested parties. This way you can easily(er) present important steps and discuss the strategy.

How does an Agile Roadmap work?

There is no set format for an Agile Roadmap. It obviously varies from challenge to challenge, from company to company and from team to team. What you can do is discover the answer to some questions. Creating a roadmap becomes easier when you have answers to these questions:

• Current situation: where are we now?
• Developments: what is coming our way?
• Ambitions: where do we want to go?
• Feasibility: how can we get there?
• Priorities: which route do we take?

What does an Agile Roadmap do?

There are many benefits to creating a roadmap. Here are the 4 benefits of creating a development roadmap, a roadmap:

1. It translates vision into concrete plans;
2. It encourages thinking along;
3. It is a handhold for making choices;
4. It brings spending, capacity and budgets into focus.

But when is something a roadmap? When can you talk about it? There are some important criteria for that. Can you tick off these criteria?

• It supports making choices and formulating goals;
• It gives a sharper picture of a vision of the future;
• It simplifies collaboration;
• It helps set priorities;
• It allows you to respond to changes, opportunities and threats;
• So it is not static, but continuously updated

but also…

• It allows you to set team goals;
• It is supported by Agile working methods, such as Scrum or Lean;
• It provides clarification for both short-term thinking and long-term vision;
• It supports the Agile design of innovation.

Is there a difference between an Agile Roadmap a Product Backlog?

The answer to that question is “yes. Although it is not always clear to everyone. So we can totally imagine that there is sometimes confusion about that. Very simply and briefly:

An Agile Roadmap shows the “where to” in the short, medium and long term.
A Product Backlog shows the initiatives especially for the near future.