Experience based roadmap

Once you know what problems folks are facing, you’ve got some ideas how to do it, and you can start thinking about technical feasibility over the course of a project… how do you pace the work to be done such that your audience gets the iterative agile goods? How can you deliver an experience now, soon, and later, rather than all at once muuuch later?

Outcome

A roadmap of how the new user experience will develop over time, with each release delivering an iteratively better or more holistic experience. These are written as UX outcomes, not technical feats, so avoid using the language of the machine and instead use statements similar to job stories or needs statements.

Method

1. Start with a simple horizontal time axis from sooner to later
2. Write notes with UX outcomes that your work will enable, big or small
3. Sort the ideas by when you expect it will be true for users (i.e. it is deployed and users are experiencing what you have developed), aligning very loosely to the now–later timeline.
   • For ideas closer to the later side, consider what a minimal viable experience would be that could be released as close to now as possible, and add a note capturing that to the sooner side in a row. For ideas closer to the sooner side, consider what a long-term view might be after a few iterations, and add a note about that closer to the later side.
4. Tidy up your notes a bit so similar experience descriptions are grouped, and so that releases are roughly chunked.
5. Title each release chunk (could just be “release 1.. 2.. 3”), and draw vertical lines offsetting them
6. Draw a horizontal line below your notes
7. Add notes under each release for high-level technical requirements
8. Shift your releases sooner/later as needed. You might need to move a UX note to a different release, or possibly add a whole new release if you find something to be too technically challenging.
   • You should now have a rough roadmap based on UX and grounded in reasonable technical constraints!

Resources

Miro template IBM, Experience-based Roadmap

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