Engineering roadmaps can be helpful in any company that develops physical or digital products. But most often, agile development organizations use them. Engineering roadmaps are valuable tools to guide cross-functional agile teams through the development process as they offer a high-level overview of plans and objectives. Using engineering roadmaps can help a company’s engineers understand the bigger strategic picture, aid in making better engineering decisions, and help keep the team on time and on budget.
Key Features
- Great for planning out your next few sprints
- Milestones designate release dates
- Initiatives are color-coded according to functional areas responsible for them
This example roadmap is broken down into sprints of approximately one month in length, with milestones marking expected release dates. The swimlanes represent three different cross-functional teams—the Monet team, Picasso team, and Rembrandt team—and initiatives are color-coded to indicate whether they fall under the jurisdiction of engineering, UX, Ops, or QA.
A product manager may use this roadmap to communicate the plan directly to engineering teams. ProductPlan roadmaps also easily integrate with project management tools like Jira and Pivotal Tracker so that product managers can track the progress of individual stories and tasks that make up the initiatives on the roadmap.