Digital Product Management | WHITE PAPER | 7
Clarity roadmaps provide some very unique capabilities for digital product management. We believe the following
items are unique to Clarity and valuable to digital product managers:
• Connecting planning to results: Product managers can build a top-down plan and connect all the details. If you
are mapping investments to a roadmap, for example, you can automatically sync the budget and actual spend
to your roadmap. As work progresses, you always know your financial positions well as other importable metrics,
such as accepted story-points and team allocation.
• Aligning your planning with your fiscal calendar: A planning tool should understand that your planning year
begins in April, for example. Surprisingly, most roadmap tools do not do that. Clarity lets you plan in fiscal years,
quarters, and customized periods.
• Planning involves alternatives: Clarity enables the digital product manager to roadmap multiple alternatives to
their strategy, and present them graphically in a scenario comparison view to stakeholders. There are options and
trade-os. Communicating them in a powerful, visual, and collaborative way really helps to engage the business
in the decision-making process.
• Understanding the money: Digital product managers have the tools to define the cost, benefit, and ROI of each
major epic in their strategic plan. These tools help inform the business where funding is being allocated. They
simplify the entire funding discussion by providing a visual and collaborative view of all the work necessary to
sustain and grow the product. The tools even include investment in infrastructure and other technical capabilities
that may not be understood by stakeholders and are often omitted in the funding discussions.
• Practical prioritization: Our customers have told us repeatedly about their failures with prioritization. Ranking
and sophisticated ranking rules are quickly gamed unless only one person controls the ranking. The roadmaps in
Clarity use a concept called
Must Haves
that customers call simple, practical, and valuable. The following three
Must Haves
are provided (you can add more):
– Carryover: If a feature needs completion, or the work is not finished, we’re going to carry this over to the next
increment. If it was worth starting, it is probably worth finishing.
– Required: A technology upgrade, security patch, data center requirement, or compliance activity. If they must
be done, they are in the
Must Haves
category.
– Top Choices: These are market impacting capabilities that lead the pack in terms of importance. After marking
all the capabilities as
Must Haves
, you will find that the remaining selection process is much simpler.
Strategic roadmaps enable the digital product manager to gain a shared understanding of all the work being planning
for the next 12 to 18 months. Strategic roadmaps are not intended to be an actual, non-changeable plan, but without
a plan engineering is a rudderless ship. The strategic roadmaps also set the direction of the short-term program
increments (PI) that drive engineering iterations.
Feature Roadmaps to Link Strategy to Engineering Planning
In each PI or release, a digital product manager uses the strategic plan to inform the more detailed feature planning
in preparation for so-called Big Room Planning. A feature roadmap is created from the strategic plan with, in this
case, epics being decomposed into more granular feature details. We have found this step in the process to be easily
handled using the roadmaps in Clarity, though some organizations may choose to go directly to Rally® software or
other agile tools.
The feature plan is reviewed with senior architects and engineering leads prior to doing any team estimation. This step
is done to minimize the amount of estimating the teams have to do. The engineering leads who review the proposed
feature roadmap can remove work that needs to be done in a later release or requires the time of a specific team that
might be overloaded at the moment.