Often when we work with our clients on projects, it becomes essential and more than important for everyone to understand the big picture. When our clients have a hard time visualizing and communicating their vision and strategy, we help them by working with them for creating a visual product roadmap. Yes; this in short is all about story mapping.
This particular technique leverages lean requirements gathering practices in order to quickly
- Identify
- Prioritize
- Plan
- Develop a product roadmap.
Step One: Brainstorm. This is the first step. To do this, we gather team members to discuss the business problem we are trying to solve. This helps set the context for the roadmap and identify the target market users. We then brainstorm features to solve the identified business problems.
Step Two: Organize: Once we have a collection of thoughts and ideas, we organize them. We place similar ideas, or user stories, into groups.
Step Three: Prioritize: We need to identify the priority of how to deliver these items. This step is crucial in situations when we run out of time or budget.
Step Four: Plan: We break our stories out into different to produce valuable product increments. During this step, we need to consider dependencies, blockers, risks, and parallel activities to deliver values.
Step Five: Execute: We may need to modify our plan based on what we learn. We then easily revisit our product roadmap, and decide how to adjust our plan based on this new information.