I'm working on my roadmapping talk for Agile 2018. I finally had the transforming idea about how to position the talk: Roadmapping and product planning are about feedback loops.
The shorter the feedback loop, the faster and more often we can learn.
That feedback loop works in at least these ways:
- The faster we learn, the more often we can question our product assumptions. (See the post about Double-Loop Learning.) What do customers want and what do they use in the product?
- The faster we learn, the more often we can link the decision to the actual events and decisions that might have created those events. (See the Long Decision Wait Times post for how long wait times work.)
- The faster we learn, the more often we can create hypotheses about how our team works and what we might do differently.
We need feedback from our customers to know they want to use the products we create.
We need feedback from our decisions so we can decide to continue this product or move the team to another product.
We need feedback about our team's process so we can consider what might make our team even better.
Here are more “how little” questions:
- How little can you plan to create a small feedback loop?
- How little can you do to get some feedback on the product?
- How little can you do get some feedback on the process (the team's process, the roadmapping process, any process).
Okay, I just wrote the smallest blog post that might give me some feedback.