You may think that planning is anti-agile because it’s so waterfall. A little planning can go a long way. Sure, there’s a tipping point where you can plan too much and get too attached to your plan. That being said, you still need to know the strategic initiatives, vision, and the resulting delivery dates and outcomes.

Here are the top 3 benefits of product roadmap planning.

#1. Collaboration and communication

Nothing can replace the benefits of collaborating and communicating while planning your product roadmap. You get varied, diverse outlooks and input from a wide range of individuals to help create a more well-rounded product. And you communicate your strategies across your entire organization and even outside to vendors, clients, and others with a stake in the product.

It’s difficult to create a product in a vacuum. Collaboration and communication are key elements to any product, and in particular, the product roadmap. While you can’t guarantee product success for a variety of reasons, you can guarantee its failure if you haven’t collaborated and communicated on its planning.

#2. Align products with corporate strategies

The best product roadmaps have corporate strategies as their foundation. When you align your product to a corporate strategy or goal, you put the company’s vision at the forefront of your product. Then everyone will work towards successful launch as it supports your company’s vision for the future.

All employees involved in the product launch will have the corporate vision in mind, gaining more buy-in and ownership. When you vest your employees in a new product launch, you can look for amazing results.

#3. Streamline your product backlog

How do you decide what to include and what not to in your product backlog? Use your product roadmap planning time to search through your backlog. Analyze each item on the list to see if it’s still valid and still aligns with your company’s vision and strategies. Managing and purging your backlog of inconsequential fillers or outdated or irrelevant tasks compacts your list into a more reasonable backlog, too.

Streamlining your product backlog doesn’t mean you’ve chiseled anything in stone. You can always add and remove features. This keeps team members flexible and ready for change.

Final thoughts

Share your product roadmap early and often. Be flexible enough to accept changes on the fly, and use your roadmap to help guide you towards successful product completion. And don’t forget—product roadmap planning does have its place in being agile.

The Hutwork difference

A simple and easy-to-use product planning template makes creating your product roadmap a breeze. Hutwork, an industry leader in product roadmaps and plans, allows you to easily create stunning roadmaps for your product strategies and plans. Collaborate, plan, communicate, track, manage, and report on a variety of roadmaps from a single dashboard.