My exposure has been to AHA! (with JIRA integration) and powerpoints with quarter-by-quarter roadmaps. I want to know what else is out there! What tools/formats do you use?
I’m using Azure Devops to manage sprints. Any suggestions on roadmap integrations for it?
For tools, I have tried Product Board and AHA. Current company uses Jira Align which is pretty good. I supplement it with some macro-based reports on confluence pages. We still use power point from time to time but its minimal - really just depends on the audience.
The tools I mentioned all get out of sync from time to time but if you are using Jira, I would suggest Jira align since at least it is native to the source of truth. The cool features on 3rd party apps are not worth the amount time I used to spend trying to figure out what was out of sync.
We recently switched to ProductBoard. I am still getting used to it but like it so far. I have also used Jira align and AirFocus in the past.
Just being transparent.
Overall, shortcomings are where they still need to improve their product. You can’t build everything, and I do think they’ve made choices (great ones).
A few that come to mind:
Custom prioritization scoring. For those not wanting to work in the options they have, this can be a hill to die on (though I’d argue their segmentation capabilities are more valuable than something like RICE exactly as intercom defined it, or WSJF, etc. that’s not for everyone.
Objectives: They have a good foundation, but more work is needed. Maybe one or two others better here. But nothing you can’t work around today.
I could also say API, but not because I think that it’s better elsewhere, but simply that theirs could be fuller and more robust. But they’ll get there.
I know it is rather unconventional to ask about shortcomings or areas of improvement. Just wanted to gain your perspective and thank you for being open to answering and being transparent.
Anytime. I thought it was a great question.
I had a couple of lengthy discussions with a PM and the customer success contact from product board last year about custom prioritization options and objectives. I agree the segmentation capability was super cool - we didn’t use the integrations that you offered (like salesforce) and couldn’t leverage it. The other options were super manual (excel was less time consuming) but I did appreciate their proactiveness about the feedback. Sounds like they also took it seriously and may have a better option in the future.
There are good people working there.
Thanks for sharing. The product is always evolving so feel free to check it out in the future.
The tool matters less, the process matters more. All roadmap tools are different - some are literally just roadmaps and some are more complete product tools.
The tool will fail if the process either isn’t in place, or if the tool can’t adapt to the changing needs of the team (this tends to happen anyway, because processes change and evolve over time.)
There are endless tools out there, I’d recommend you figure out what your overall needs are first from any given tool and then see how the tool might help support that.
Previously we used to use AHA!, now we switched to Monday. So far so good.
@NatalieSmith, How are you liking Monday? Spent a bit on it but wasn’t able to get the Jira integration to work easily. Need to figure out the required fields and it wasn’t that obvious.
Miro.com is a really good tool to visualize and track product evolution. There are many ways to visualize road map (stickers, lines, schemes, shapes, etc.)
It also can be integrated with Jira.
I like the now/next/later format, with swimlanes to represent different aspects of the product like front end and back end.
I’ve built up a couple of them in ProductPlan, without an integration. My favorite iteration of it was in Confluence using JIRA filters. They filtered into the correct swimlanes automatically based on ticket attributes, moved into now automatically when they went into In Progress, and states or labels could be used to assign them to the next and later columns. So once the Confluence page was setup, I did all of the work in JIRA, which was where the developers and I did pretty much everything anyway.
I’m trying to set up some roadmaps for some existing products and i’m essentially starting in the middle.
We use Jira, so this seems like an easy win - how’d you go about the confluence piece?
Did you use one of the embedded confluence roadmap tools? If yes, which?
Loved using AHA! for the 2 month trial I was able to. Unfortunately, my organization is pretty cheap so I was unable to justify that I couldn’t just do everything I was using it for in excel sheets.
Have you looked at the roadmaps functionality built into Azure Devops? Review team delivery plans in Azure Boards - Azure Boards | Microsoft Learn
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