Thanks for sharing your question Nicole. Please take a look at my article The Product Portfolio Matrix, which describes a framework for managing a group of products. Additionally, you may find my article Six Types of “Product” Owners helpful, as it covers the role of a product portfolio owner in addition to the (Scrum) product owner. Hope this helps!

Hi Justin, Thank you for sharing your feedback and question. It’s great to hear that you have found my work helpful. I am not a Jira expert and won’t be able to help you use the tool unfortunately. But I recommend that you use the next product goal on your roadmap and its features to determine the items in the product backlog. Copy the the features into your product backlog. Remove any items that are not required to meet the goal. Ask yourself which additional items are required to meet the goal and add them to the product backlog. Then prioritise the backlog, break down the high-priority items and refine them so that they are ready to be implemented.

Additionally, clearly distinguish between a product goal and a feature. The former describes a benefit or outcome you want to achieve; the latter captures the output that has to be delivered to meet the goal. Finally, if you work with releases that take more than four months to develop, then consider breaking them down into smaller development efforts, which last two to three months each and which are guided by their own product goals.

Hope this helps!

I find your work very helpful and it helped me a lot to wrap my head around the different artefacts like vision, strategy, roadmap, and backlog. I just recently have done a workshop together with my team to create a product vision board and roadmap for our project. It helped a lot to get a clear view of what has to be done over the next year.

However, I am struggling a bit with the interface between roadmap and backlog. The abstract concept is clear – the roadmap states the goals and high level features of a release and the backlog contains the steps towards the next goal. We are working with Jira to build our backlog and I am not quite sure how I can make the goal and next steps visible inside the backlog so that the team also keeps a clear focus. My first approach was to capture the features of the GO roadmap on a storyboard where I make them goals and then start to define epics underneath them which are milestones on the way to achieve a feature from the roadmap. Since I use the storyboard feature for that I can no longer have a user story / user journey in Jira.

If you could give some more tips how to get a good interface between backlog and roadmap on the practical side, that would be awesome.

Cheers,
Justin

Hi Iuliia,

Thanks for your feedback and sharing your question. As long as your product experiences a fair amount of change, I would recommend that you add the requests to the product roadmap, assuming that they are a. in line with the overall product strategy and b. related to a roadmap goal/outcome/benefit.

If a. does not apply, I would discard the request, unless you decide to change the product strategy. If there is no roadmap goal that the request supports, then either rework your roadmap and introduce an new goal or amend an existing one or discard the request. Note that as long as your product experiences bigger changes, it is beneficial to have a concise product backlog that is easy to adjust.

But when your product has matured and become stable, then you can work with a longer and more detailed product backlog. In this case, you could consider adding feature requests that affect future product releases or versions to the backlog. But I would still recommend ensuring that any request is in line with the product strategy and helps create value for the users or the business.

Hope this helps!

Hi Lucia,

Thank you for sharing your question. While I am not sure that I fully understand your challenge, there are three things that might help you: First, organise around products and have a stable group of product people looking after and one or more stable dev teams developing each product.

Secondly, if your products are related, for example, they are licensed or released together, then establish a portfolio management process where you regularly identify and manage dependencies between the products. This may involve creating a product portfolio strategy and/or product portfolio roadmap.

Thirdly, create a community of practice for the product people. Come together on a regular basis and share how you carry out your work and solve challenges. Review common standards; enhance existing ones and create new standards, for instance, which product portfolio roadmap format should be used.

Does this help?

Thanks for your feedback Amitabh, and good luck with separating the two artefacts!