How Marketers Can Build and Use Agile Roadmaps

Key Takeaways

• Planning is essential for success in Agile marketing, but the way that planning happens is very different.
• Agile roadmaps have much less detail and are less rigid than their traditional counterparts.
• Creating an Agile roadmap begins with setting strategic goals, before creating user stories and epics around them, prioritizing those items in a backlog, mapping that backlog to time horizons, executing, and evolving as you go.
• Agile roadmaps should be flexible, evolve regularly, prioritize outcomes over outputs, and be visualized.

“Agile teams don’t plan” is still perhaps the most persistent myth in the Agile world.

The reality could hardly be more different. Planning is completely integral to Agile ways of working. The difference is in how Agile approaches planning relative to the traditional Waterfall approach. Instead of being prescriptive about where you’re going and how you get there, Agile is about being flexible with the how.

One of the keys to getting this kind of planning right is understanding how to use Agile roadmaps. So let’s dive into just what these roadmaps are, how you can create them, and most importantly, how to use them to improve your marketing.

Agile Roadmaps vs Traditional Roadmaps

Let’s start by understanding what an Agile roadmap is not. Traditional roadmaps are detailed sets of instructions designed to create a predictable workflow. They typically contain lots of fixed dates by which certain things should be achieved.

So for example, in something like a product launch, a rough traditional roadmap might look something like this:

• Phase 1: pre-launch (begins 5 months before launch on June 15th)
  • Initial market research (Jan 15th - Feb 15th)
  • Positioning and messaging (Feb 15th - March 7th)
  • Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy (March 7th - 28th)
  • Build internal alignment (Mar 28th - April 11th)
• Phase 2: Build-up (2 months before launch)
  • Create content, design landing pages, write press releases, design email campaigns (April 11th - June 15th)
  • Outreach to journalists, bloggers, and influencers (April 11th - June 15th)
• Phase 3: Launch
  • Launch email campaigns, send press releases, release blog posts, etc. (June 15th)
• Phase 4: Post-Launch (2 months post-launch)
  • Gather customer feedback
  • Conduct follow-up surveys
  • Share customer testimonials on landing pages
  • Further optimize key pages and messages based on feedback

The problem here is that you’re planning out your post-launch steps 5+ months in advance. You may as well be planning when to take a coffee break in 5 months. When you set out clear timelines like this, marketers can begin to focus on “making their deadlines” over adapting and evolving based on learnings. That’s particularly true when extensive documentation is expected at each step, making it more cumbersome to make changes down the line.

For example, maybe when outreaching to bloggers and influencers about this product you get some crucial feedback. Based on this information, you can totally rethink how to position your product. But doing so would mean missing your next deadline, so instead you stick to the plan and abandon that valuable information.

An Agile roadmap, by contrast, may contain all the same steps, but with less detail and rigidity around dates. Instead of setting out exactly what day something will happen months in advance, it’s designed simply to build alignment around what needs to happen while remaining flexible in the actual execution.

Think of your Agile roadmap like a plan for a road trip. On the one hand, you don’t want to set off with no plan whatsoever: no direction, final destination, nothing. On the other hand, deciding exactly when you will stop for meals, gas, etc. for the entire trip is unnecessary and unrealistic.

Why Agile Roadmaps Are So Crucial Today

It’s a bit of a cliche but entirely true: marketing is moving faster than ever. In a world where new AI tools are released daily and it feels like shifts in economic circumstances and consumer preferences are hitting us constantly, it’s easy for marketers to feel overwhelmed. Agile roadmaps are ideal ways to create just enough structure to build alignment, keep projects on track, and ensure those projects ultimately deliver the value your stakeholders need. 

They’re particularly important when just introducing agility to a team. Often, traditional marketing teams can feel a bit lost when trying out Agile for the first time. Agile roadmaps offer some structure and predictability without sacrificing the ability to react and adapt which makes Agile so effective for modern marketing.

Agile roadmaps are also useful for reminding teams to regularly pause, gather feedback, and revise their plans. It can be easy to skip over these crucial steps, particularly for teams new to Agile ways of working.

Understanding Agile Roadmaps

Depending on the Agile framework you’re using, you may be used to breaking your marketing work into sprints or running things continuously. Either way, it can be dangerously easy to stay focused only on what’s in front of you: making editorial calendars, trying to improve metrics, etc. This can often lead to us marketers losing sight of a longer-term vision for what their work is building towards.

Agile roadmaps offer a way to be more strategic and forward-thinking with your marketing while also giving your team a sense that they’re working towards a larger goal. This is particularly important when marketing a product or service which is itself evolving. In these cases, Agile roadmaps are crucial for enabling marketing to be proactive instead of reactive as things change.

How to Create an Agile Roadmap

The first thing to understand about creating an Agile roadmap is that it should be done by the marketing owner. They should consider the organization’s strategic goals, where the market is going, what limitations the team has to improve the product, what their value propositions are, etc.

Step 1: Strategic Goals

For most marketers, an Agile roadmap begins with a strategic goal like becoming a thought leader or improving a key metric. This goal should be something that will really drive the business and should come with personas to help ensure it aligns with your target audience. Without this nothing else really matters because even if you’re successful that success won’t move the needle.

Step 2: User Stories and Epics

Now let’s go through the building blocks of an Agile roadmap one by one. It starts with user stories, which allow the marketing owner to describe what needs to be created and why. For example:

“As a manager of an Agile marketing team, I want to learn how to use Agile roadmaps better, so we can improve how we plan.”

You just read the user story for this very article. It tells everyone working on it who it’s for and what it should help them accomplish. This is immensely useful in keeping everyone on the same page about a piece of work.

Once you have a series of user stories, you can combine them into epics. An epic is a larger project that can span many sprints and teams. For example, an epic might be a major product launch requiring marketing and product development teams to work together closely to decide on what should be included and how it can be marketed.

Several epics can then be combined into an initiative. Here, you’re taking several projects which might take one or more months each, and giving them a broader organizational goal that might span a year or more. Taking that product launch example, a company might use several product launch epics to achieve the initiative of increasing revenue by 15%.

Each user story tells you why this task is important and how it contributes to the epic. Then that epic tells you why those stories are important and contribute to an initiative, etc. You should be able to draw a line of logic from the smallest user story all the way up to an Agile roadmap, helping everyone in the organization understand how their work contributes to broader goals.

Step 3: Build and Prioritize a Backlog

Now it’s time to begin gathering the various user stories and epics you think will contribute to your Agile roadmap’s strategic goal and putting them into a prioritized backlog. That prioritization may be based on a specific framework like MoSCoW or ICE, or simply be based around the items your team thinks will have the greatest impact for the least amount of work.

Step 4: Map Backlog Items to Time Horizons

Now you can take all the items in your backlog and organize them. However, instead of deciding exactly when items should be completed, you can simply break them into things that should be done Now, Next, and Later. This gives your Agile roadmap structure while keeping things nice and flexible.

Step 5: Begin Executing

Typically, this step will involve bringing your epics or user stories into sprints, but if you don’t work in sprints you may simply begin working directly from your backlog. As you go, run regular retrospectives to check in on what you’ve learned and make adjustments to your backlog, time horizons, etc.

Lastly, within an Agile roadmap, milestones simply mark key moments – for example, when a product launches at the end of its corresponding initiative. This helps teams keep on top of what’s happening when using the roadmap.

Before proceeding to learn how to use an Agile roadmap, why don't you take a second to get our latest State of Agile Marketing Report?

Using an Agile Roadmap

When it comes to using Agile roadmaps, there are a few key things you shouldn’t forget to do.

Gather Feedback and Input

Creating an Agile marketing roadmap begins with getting one or more marketing owners together and deciding what broader goals they want to achieve based on market forces, internal resources, and other potential restraints. That said, roadmaps should never be created in isolation, and must be built on input from stakeholders outside marketing.

For example, your organization may want to expand into a new product category. Thus your Agile marketing roadmap might focus on research, developing an approach, and executing a strategy (all while remaining Agile of course) to achieve that goal. 

Check in Regularly

Once a roadmap has been created, the work isn’t done! You need to ensure the work your team does contributes towards the goals in the roadmap on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, the roadmap can easily just be forgotten.

Stay Flexible

Another key point of using Agile roadmaps is that they can’t be set in stone (otherwise they wouldn’t be very Agile). Circumstances will always change in marketing and you need to be ready to adapt. If one of those product launch initiatives performs poorly, everyone involved needs to be ready to analyze the problem and make changes accordingly. 

Roadmaps shouldn’t change constantly, but they can’t be set in stone either. You need to find the right balance, get feedback from your teams, and monitor how initiatives and epics are performing.

Prioritize Outcomes, Not Outputs

If the goal of your Agile roadmap is to publish a specific number of articles, send a number of emails, etc. you’re going about it wrong. Agile is all about outcomes instead of outputs. You could publish 100 terrible articles and not achieve anything but you reached the goal of your Agile roadmap!

So be sure to think about the final outcomes you want for your organization. These should be strategic, not tactical.

Visualize

Ideally, you will track your Agile Roadmap on something like a Kanban board. This visualization makes it far easier to use your roadmap and keep everyone on track. The tools you can use to do this will also help you track Agile metrics that can tell you when your teams aren’t performing well. Based on that information, it may be time to test some process improvements.

What Does an Agile Marketing Roadmap Look Like?

While Agile marketing roadmaps can look different depending on the program you use to create it, in general a top-level view like this can show when the team needs to begin and complete specific initiatives. Each of them should then be broken down into cards and possibly assigned to sprints based on whether your team uses Scrum, Kanban, or a hybrid method.

However you approach it, the goal should be a clearly visualized roadmap that’s easy to follow for everyone on the team. This helps ensure it will be understood, internalized, and followed.

An Example of an Agile Roadmap in Action

Let’s start with the Agile roadmap before looking at its components to understand how they interact. In this example, the goal of the Agile roadmap is to shift the company from one reliant on selling one-off licenses to one reliant on recurring Software as a Service (SaaS) income.

Within that roadmap, there are four initiatives, each one built around a new SaaS product. The first one is to make software that helps people edit their photos in creative ways. Within that initiative, there’s an epic to create and execute an initial marketing strategy for the new product. Within that epic, there’s a user story about creating a short video to show off what the product can do.

In this example, every person working at every level of the roadmap can clearly see how their work contributes to all the goals above them. The user story contributes to the epic, which contributes to the initiative, which contributes to the roadmap. The teams are aligned around common goals and have a framework to make decisions and collaborate.

Agile Roadmap FAQs

What Is the Roadmap in Agile?

Agile roadmaps are loosely structured plans designed to focus efforts on achieving specific goals. Unlike traditional roadmaps, they contain less detail and avoid setting specific dates for when things should be achieved. This helps teams remain flexible and make adjustments based on new information.

What Are the 5 Lifecycle Steps of an Agile Project?

Agile projects can be broken into 5 steps: Envision (initiating the project), Speculation (planning the project), Exploring (executing the project), Adapting (monitoring feedback), and Closing (final delivery).

What Should You Include in a Roadmap?

An effective roadmap should include a strategic goal it hopes to achieve or contribute to and the various tasks that will happen during the roadmap. However, it’s best to avoid creating detailed plans with specific dates as this makes it more difficult to adapt and evolve during the execution of that roadmap.

How to Create a Roadmap

Creating a roadmap should begin with consulting stakeholders and identifying what strategic goals you wish to achieve. Then you can build a list of user stories and epics that will achieve that goal. Once that list has been organized into a backlog and prioritized, you can begin executing.

How to Build a Strategic Roadmap

A strategic roadmap should be built around top-level strategic goals that will really move the needle for your organization. Based on those goals, you can create a list of user stories and epics to achieve them. However, those user stories and epics should focus on the coming months to avoid planning too far ahead. That can happen every quarter or so when you meet to discuss progress and revise your roadmap.

Looking for Other Ways to Improve Your Agile Marketing Performance?

There’s a lot that can go wrong when creating something as complex as an Agile roadmap. That’s why a strong foundation of Agile knowledge and experience is so critical for success. But getting access to the training and coaching you need can be expensive and difficult to coordinate.

That’s why we built The AgileSherpas Edge. It’s the perfect combination of self-paced learning (over 1,000 hours of it!), coaching hours, additional coaching from our custom-built AI-powered Sherpabot, quarterly workshops, and much more all for a low monthly price. So you can skip the big training and consulting bills and access a flexible (dare we say Agile) solution to unlocking all the benefits Agile has to offer.