Continuous Roadmapping Using a North Star

‘Continuous Roadmapping’: ‘High-level lightweight Product Roadmaps synced periodically with Agile Product Backlogs’

As an Agile Coach, Agile transformist and Scrum Master I teach and mentor Agile teams, Product Owners and executives how:

• To use User Story Mapping and Designing Thinking with remote collaboration to improve designs and overall customer satisfaction.

• To define and perform ongoing scientific experiments to validate assumptions and test new approaches with customers and get their feedback in a timely manner to efficiently drive product design and implementation.

• To implement DevOps CI/CD pipelines to improve testing and deployments of applications and services. To implement MLOPS to improve the efficiency of ML and AI application development and deployment.

• To capture and manage Business Rules involving adherence to laws as product requirements. To implement legal requirements according to changing business needs and priorities and to evolve them over time as legal requirements change.

• To manage data sets and properly perform Data Governance to meet legal requirements and business needs for ML and AI applications.

As an agile practitioner and agile coach I don’t believe in Waterfall planning methodologies nor detailed multiyear Product Roadmaps. But I also fully appreciate the importance of Regulatory Compliance and of adhering to laws as well as the importance of user privacy and system security for attaining successful business outcomes and business reputation.

So the question becomes how can agile teams manage adherence to new and evolving laws and protect user privacy and system security in the light of the increasing challenges of malware, data breaches, etc.  One important tool and associated process I rarely hear spoken of is ‘Continuous Roadmapping using a North Star’.

A simple description of ‘Continuous Roadmapping’ is ‘high-level lightweight Product Roadmaps synced periodically with Agile Product Backlogs’. I didn’t invent Continuous Roadmapping but I absolutely believe in it and have used it with great success.

Since I rarely hear about or see teams using ‘Continuous Roadmapping’ I thought I would make sure to highlight it in a LinkedIn posting, so here it is:

‘Continuous Roadmapping’ using a ‘North Star‘:

(Credit to and excerpts from John Cutler’s (‘aka ‘Cutlefish’) ‘TBM 2.1/52: Continuous Roadmapping‘ at https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-2152-continuous-roadmapping?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web )

“How many roadmaps are the result of rushed, big-batch planning efforts? Lots.

You’ve got four weeks at the end of the year (or ten days at the end of the quarter) to get it right. Quick! Quick! Imagine the amount of money invested this way. And the dollars wasted because of premature convergence. I bet it is billions of dollars.

The flip side is playing whack-a-mole…doing whatever is hot at the moment. Who needs a stinkin’ roadmap or strategy anyway? This is costly as well. A much better approach is Continuous Roadmapping. What does that look like? Say our bets take, on average, six weeks to put in motion. To have a year’s worth of work “ready”, we’d need eight bets on the board”.

“Continuous Roadmapping is not that hard to do nor very resource intensive and is best done at a fairly high-level. But it does require the discipline to do it periodically and to keep it in sync with the Product Backlog. It can serve as a high-level summary of near-term goals for management, and to keep everyone on the same page across many teams and organizations. It is especially useful when it is updated and reviewed when new laws come out, or new products are under development that are influenced by new laws or the enforcement thereof”.  
(For more details, please see John Cutler’s Substack posting at the link given above).