Roadmap Transformation: From Obstacle to Catalyst
Add to calendarWhen charting new territory–-enterprise-scale Agile–-traditional roadmaps only take you so far. When landscapes change in weeks, product management must find a way to reconcile sprint plans and backlogs from multiple teams with longer-term product direction. David Wilby, SVP of Products at Borland, shares how his teams tackled the roadmap challenge during Borland’s Agile transformation. He’ll cover how roadmaps became a barrier to scaling Agile, how his teams adopted Agile roadmapping, the challenges, and the impact the new practices have had on Borland’s Agile transformation.
35 minutes presentation; 10 minutes Q&A
In this talk, David will take the audience through the following tale, sharing his experiences and the lessons he and his team learned along the way. Today, David is a huge proponent of Agile roadmapping techniques, he believes that they can help software organizations address many of the challenges related to product management and its role in scaling Agility.
Epilogue: Just over two years ago, Borland’s development organization embarked on an Agile transformation. As the stories of the pioneering Agile development teams began to circulate around the product organization, word spread that a new world was being discovered.
Conflict: While the development teams had begun to experience the benefits of transitioning to Scrum, the way to the new world was less clear for Borland’s product managers. The roadmaps they had charted each year — sometimes in isolation — did not seem to reflect the reality of the new engineering world. Their trusty roadmaps were out of sync.
- Where problems arose for Borland when their Agile development organization met their traditional product management organization
- How this friction would ultimately prevent Borland from scaling Agile
Rising Action: To bring peace and a new level of prosperity to the product organization, David and his teams sought counsel from an expert Agile cartographer, Enthiosys. And, the product management organization began the journey towards Agile roadmapping.
- Why David chose to implement Agile roadmapping
- How it was introduced, what it looked like (participants, rules, process)
- What challenges these first Agile PM pioneers faced in the process
- What does a Borland Agile roadmap looks like
Resolution: Today, the Agile roadmapping process that began with a single team and a handful of product managers, has evolved and scaled along with Borland’s own transformation (today, nearly 70% of all Borland’s teams are Agile).
- What four key problems Agile roadmapping has solved for Borland’s product teams
- How the Agile roadmapping process has evolved and scaled. How the process works today, in a world where there are roadmaps of roadmaps and complex relationships and dependencies between products
- The key lessons David and his teams learned along the way
- An understanding of some of the problems and challenges that can arise in the roadmapping process for an organization that is transitioning to Agile
- How the roadmap can go from being an obstacle to Agile adoption into one of the most powerful tools to help transform your enterprise
- Examples of how to widely embrace Agile roadmapping to solve some of the challenges with scaling Agility within the enterprise
- A look at some of the benefits that Agile roadmapping processes can bring in aiding clear communication between R&D and the outside world.
