Visual Roadmapping with Kanban - Mahesh Singh (#006)

There is a lot of attention given to Lean/ Agile product development teams around the work done and the (Lean/ Agile) processes adopted in by the Dev team once a set of features (backlog items) have been identified for a set of sprints (scrums) and/ or Releases.

However, how do those features get to the team, nicely bunched up in Releases and Sprints? There is a lot of upstream effort by Product Management that goes in 'herding the cats' - defining and maintaining the Product Roadmap with input from myriad and often conflicting sources, abstracting features and requirements at the right level, getting stakeholders to agree on their priority, and then decomposing them so that the Dev teams are continually churning out quality code and product features in a 'just-in-time' manner.  The work that the Product Management team does is at a different cadence than the Dev team.  Most organizations and teams have not yet understood the criticality of managing this upstream work well, nor the effort that needs to be put in so that the Dev team is continually supplied with User Stories at the right time and stakeholders are satisfied the right work is being done at the right time.

This talk focuses on this challenge and describes what we have done as a small product company, where managing the Product Roadmap and successful delivery of releases is critical; and how we have improved over the last 30 months since we adopted Kanban in our own Product Development organization, with specific focus on synchronizing work upstream and downstream for a unified flow.

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