Slackbot
11/14/2023, 7:19 PMBryan Ross
11/15/2023, 1:57 PMLou Bichard
11/15/2023, 2:40 PMI’ve seen so many platform teams operate on the basis that they know what developers want. . . .Yup. My talk tonight is going to be half an hour of me passionately ranting abou tthis (hopefully, productively, with actionable tips) on this topic 😄 You’ve gotta, gotta make sure the roadmap is informed by some user research. If it’s very early days a quick survey is usually okay, but as you progress, really best to get more and more specific. Some other general advice is to make sure that you’re really clear on the problem certain deliverables are solving. If all you have is solutions you’ll have no idea if you addressed the problems in the first place. Big advocate for problem-centred roadmaps. Writing in PRFAQ format can be a useful tool to think from a customers view point (you don’t have to overthink PRFAQs).
Lou Bichard
11/15/2023, 2:44 PMPart of this work is prioritization mechanisms we use to determine the order, wondering which ones you use and if you can share your experiences.IMO a good prioritisation framework is just having good alignment on your overall strategy and approach. Then, your roadmap is just a series of “bets” that hope to move the needle on whatever the strategy is aligned to. In other words, your roadmap is merely a set of steps to implement/test out your strategy. Identify the biggest pains, and the biggest opportunities given where your team(s) are at right now, given skills you have, resources available, etc (not all problems are worth solving now, even if they’re important - if you don’t have the right skills/resources/timing to pull them off). Try to craft a narrative then about some of the most compelling pain points that you have, and why you believe you should solve for them, that should make it easier to then feed into the roadmap discussion. Otherwise you’ll get locked in a battle of “_who’s solution is best_” and that’s likely just going to lead to projects that fail to deliver. I always found the frameworks like RICE etc a bit too formulaic and have not seen them work particularly well. Could be a discussion tool, but I wouldn’t rely on them overly… just my 10c.
Madeline Ford Ryerson
11/28/2023, 11:00 PM