Who Should Use Roadmaps & Story Maps?
When speaking with current and prospective customers we often engage with people in the roles of: Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Team Lead, Customer Service Manager, Project Manager, Product Marketing Manager and Program Manager.
These folks want to improve how they communicate the product vision, desired customer outcomes and delivery strategy. They aim to better align and organise one or more teams, coordinate with their peers and ensure leadership is kept in the loop with respect to progress.
At Easy Agile we’ve learned that equipping people in these roles with the right techniques helps them achieve those outcomes. And this is true of small and large organisations alike.
Below we look at three roles I encountered in my coaching capacity at Twitter, and how they took advantage of two techniques: user story mapping and roadmapping.
Product Managers
At Twitter the Product Managers were in charge of setting the product vision and strategy. Often they would work in conjunction with our user research and design teams to identify their customer personas, yet the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘why’ of the solution was their responsibility.
Further, in the user facing aspects of the product — “Consumer” — much of what a product manager proposed was arranged as an experiment containing a hypothesis and success criteria.
What did they need?
In order to understand a complex product and its interactions with the Twitter platform a Product Manager needed a way to visualise the customer journey. This included the technical aspects with internal teams plus our external 300 million user audience.
Product Managers needed to collaborate effectively with their team (occasionally distributed) and ensure their backlog was prioritised based on value to the customer. They needed to ensure stakeholders were familiar with the target delivery schedule and minimise downstream disruption to other teams.
User Story Maps
User Story Maps allow Product Managers to conduct collaborative story mapping sessions bringing the whole team together to create and order a product backlog.
Visualising customer activities in chronological order and placing user stories under them allows the team to see the solution in a holistic way. A great way to break down a big hairy feature into something that the whole team can consume and deliver on.
Roadmaps
Roadmapping is a less collaborative exercise as it is a way for the Product Manager to take responsibility for the direction and timing of their solution. At the end of the day, this simple visualisation allows the product manager to start a conversation with, and get feedback from, stakeholders.
Program Managers
It was the Program Manager’s job at Twitter to coordinate and align streams of work. An example was our preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup which spanned 100+ teams in our Infrastructure Operations, Consumer, Revenue and Search & Relevance groups, amongst others.
Program Managers wanted to manage scope, timelines, and resources for an on-time release. It wasn’t always date driven, yet slipping could result in a downstream impact on dependent teams.
While the Program Manager wasn’t necessarily ultimately responsible for the outcome they were on the hook for setting expectations and keeping everyone appraised of progress.
What did they need?
The Program Manager needed a clear understanding of the product vision and strategy, as set by the Product Manager. Much like the Product Manager, the Program Manager required streamlined communication and planning techniques to keep all stakeholders in the loop.
Roadmaps
The Program Manager used the product roadmap to communicate with a varied audience in a simple and visual way, showing the journey the product will take over time.
Coupled with a story map, the roadmap allowed Program Managers at Twitter to keep appraised of the groups progress and getting an early warning when we were veering away from the original vision. This allowed them to provide weekly updates (pushed, not pulled unfortunately) and manage stakeholder expectations.
Team Lead
Team Leads at Twitter occasionally wore the Product Owner hat, yet most times they were 100% focused on ensuring the health of the team. It was important for Tech Leads to help their teams maintain a rhythm and sustainable pace, and guide the team as they work to deliver the solution.
For the Tech Lead the story map helped convey to the team how the weekly backlog related to a larger product vision.
What do they need?
In order for the team to find a sustainable pace the Team Leads wanted to make sure that a given week wasn’t overloaded. That enabled the team to manage their on-call rotation, conduct professional development (Twitter University) and work towards the highest value customer outcomes.
User Story Maps
Story Mapping started with the team creating the backlog, and it continues with the weekly backlog grooming session. The team comes together and the Tech Lead will level the sprints based upon past team capacity.
Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira shows how many story points worth of work has been scheduled for a given sprint, allowing the team to punt work to a future sprint if they feel there is too much on their plate in a given week.
Being agile, and being effective, is hard work. At Easy Agile we’re trying to make it easier for everyone on your team.
Read next:
Understand what your customers want with agile user story maps
