What's done is done?

A habit from a lot of teams have is that they will finish a project, and so close all the tickets in Jira… wipe down their whiteboards… crumple up all their sticky notes.. and move on to the next thing. Which is great for keeping up an ‘agile cadence’, but it’s not great for making sure they’ve actually solved the problem.

Problem: Lots of features, no impact or measured outcome.

It's not uncommon for teams to not leave enough room or time for validating work to be done, and to be constantly pushing out new features in hopes that one of them magically solves the right problems. 

Common patterns in organizations might include:

  • A timeline roadmap that outlines all the features to be done, and their deadlines, but no room for measurement or iteration after completion of each project.
  • A roadmap with lots of features but no connection to actual problems they will attempt to solve, or a product with a bunch of features but no evidence backing up the usefulness and value of the features. 
  • A roadmap that 'disappears' once delivered - no space or time to track what the outcome was of previous deliveries.

 

Solution: Make space for validation in your roadmap.

To make sure that your team’s hard work is impactful, a better approach is to make space for validation in your process. 

The ‘Lean’ approach is to Build, Measure, and Learn, but too often, there isn’t time for measuring and learning. This can be built into your process by not working in a date-driven way, but instead working towards solving problems (eg. don’t just move on when the delivery date passes—move on when the problem is measurably solved)

A good practice is to have a ‘validation’ roadmap, or a ‘completed’ roadmap, tracking previously finished initiatives and the outcomes, along with delivery dates and pass/fail status of any associated experiments and ideas.

ProdPad is designed to help teams validate that problems are actually being solved and the objectives are being met. 

Completed roadmap view in ProdPad

ProdPad has a unique ‘Completed’ view of the roadmap, showing all cards that have been completed, which creates space for tracking the outcome of each initiative and the associated ideas/experiments.

It’s good practice to log initiatives that worked as well as those that didn’t, so that lessons are learned and used in future product decisions, rather than forgotten or swept under the rug. 

This interface also acts as a helpful record of what’s been delivered and when, so it’s easy to look back and see what problems the product team has solved and what impact has been made! You can even publish this view to easily share it with other stakeholders inside and outside of your teams.

You can explore the Completed view of the roadmap live in our Sandbox environment: https://sandbox.prodpad.com/products/4d20d0f0-7de1-11e8-8e97-011809fd47b5/roadmap/card/8d9e0af0-7df3-11e8-8dc6-ff6d943966b9/attributes?view=completed 

 

Objectives and Key Results in ProdPad

ProdPad also handles your Objectives and Key Results. 

You can create Objectives at the Product or Portfolio level, and set up Key Results to track for each.

Each Key Result can be connected to multiple Contributing Roadmap Cards, and can be tracked step by step whether they are On Track, Behind, or At Risk. Each change includes a status change comment so everyone knows what’s changed and why, and once completed, you have a record of how you’ve performed on your team’s OKRs and can easily report on them.

You can explore the Objectives and Key Results live in our Sandbox environment: https://sandbox.prodpad.com/products/4d20d0f0-7de1-11e8-8e97-011809fd47b5/objectives/9b6b6d20-7de0-11e8-a8ca-0abbec7104a5?view=portfolio 

 

ProdPad solves the problem validation problem and many others!

 

Have you got other problems you're looking to solve?

 

PS. Want all of these in a presentation format so you can convince your boss and team to use ProdPad to solve these problems? Grab your copy here!