Make it easier to iterate on the organization of a roadmap > epics > issues
Problem to solve
Situation: When I'm trying to plan a roadmap and organize a bunch of issues/user stories...
Motivation: I want to quickly pull existing issues together, reorganize the structure and timelines, edit issues and epics, and build a roadmap...
Force: It's incredibly frustrating to constantly be cycling back between a roadmap view, an epic view, an issue view, and manually cross linking all of the artifacts necessary to plan a release or initiative.
Force: It's annoying that I have to remember to refresh the page manually to get updates if I'm collaborating with another team member on the planning.
Expected Outcome: So that I can effectively collaborate with my team members and provide a simple visualization that is also highly functional and easy to iterate on that conveys where my product is headed, what my team is working on, and the team's progress towards the goal. s
Intended users
Product managers, directors, executives
Further details
Our Customers Real Use Cases
Epics can now have child epics, but the only way to edit those are by pasting in an epic link in the epic screen, and that relationship doesn’t seem used at all – e.g. in attached screenshots, epic 3 is a child of epic 2, but that relationship isn’t shown in the roadmap at all. The only place it seems to be visible is in the epic-3 details epic-2 is listed as an ancestor, and in epic-2, epic-3 is listed as a child.
Overall no visibility from high level of organization, dates, deliverables, etc. Screenshot from rally posted here (https://docs.ca.com/en-us/ca-agile-central/saas/portfolio-item-timeline) showing what I mean – here showing that there’s an “initiative” of MVP shopping site comprising 6 features (shopping cart, priority shipping, etc), each of which has many user stories and sub-tasks. The solid blue vertical line shows the present date (where am I now), blue diamonds and vertical dashed lines show milestones (deliverables or targets). Relationship of initiative to the child features is shown with the hierarchical nesting on left. This view doesn’t show it but the features can also have dependencies on each other than can be shown with arrows. Each feature is shown both with a gray bar that represents the planned state, as well as with a colored bar that represents the completion state (0-100%, as well as when the last user story was completed – eg the “Knowledgebase” feature here took longer than expected). Everything here is clickable, draggable, filterable (e.g. you can filter just on a particular team, a particular team member, etc). This is just their roadmap screen – there many others focused on different aspects of the agile process and similarly well thought out and tied together.
Plan needs to be able to easily be refined, ideally without screen switching, to add break-downs until the leaf items are user stories small enough to be done in a sprint (e.g. 2 weeks)
Need some way to lay out high level view and plan (think Initiatives and Features in Rally screenshot) – needs to indicate parent/child relationship directly, highly editable without constant screen switching, etc.
Proposal
- Create a simpler primitive interface that combines the concept of the roadmap and epic trees; and allows for adding/updating/removing/associating all items within the same workflow (no multiple tabs, no hitting back in the browser navigation)
- Real time collaboration and instant feedback from the user interface.
- No page refreshes and able to add/edit/update/delete epics and issues within the same workflow.
Permissions and Security
- TBD
Documentation
- TBD
Testing
- TBD
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
- TBD
What is the type of buyer?
- Premium or Ultimate
Links / references
Related Epics & Issues
Competitors
- https://www.aha.io/product/roadmaps#tour-nav (click through the tabs under the hero image)
- https://docs.ca.com/en-us/ca-agile-central/saas/portfolio-item-timeline
- https://agilecraft.com/portfolio