Goals

To explain how a technical product roadmap can be more effective than a product backlog for planning a software project, specifiying its high-level requirements and creating team alignment.

Overview

To effectively work together as a software development team it is vital that the team is aligned on the product vision and planning, both in the short and medium term. This includes:

• understanding the user requirements so that it's clear what the product tries to achieve;
• sharing an ubiqitous language so that key terms have the same meaning to all team members;
• having a shared awareness of the product development plan, so that team members do not work at cross purposes.

Almost all companies I have worked with struggle with creating this alignment. Teams often rely on the product backlog to create a shared understanding of the upcoming steps, but as I explain in the next chapter this approach fails to produce good results. As an alternative, I will introduce a particular type of roadmap document, including a small example, and discuss how it can aid team alignment and planning.