{"id":3823,"date":"2016-01-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prodpad.com?p=3823&preview_id=3823"},"modified":"2023-05-05T12:33:57","modified_gmt":"2023-05-05T11:33:57","slug":"get-away-ambiguous-timelines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prodpad.com\/blog\/get-away-ambiguous-timelines\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s True, Most People Don’t Need To Know Your Product Timeline"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We recently published “Why Release Dates Are Irrelevant To Product Managers<\/a>” and it immediately became one of our most widely shared pieces. Was it something I said?

I hope so.

The worst kept secret of in the product management community\u00a0is that we’re terrible with dates. We don’t like them. Working with them is bad for our products and bad for our careers. But\u00a0for the sake of our teams, our bosses and our customers (who in a sense, are also our bosses), we continue to set timelines.

And we continue to miss\u00a0them, change them or end up\u00a0in a sweaty panic when we realize we’re moving forward on a project we’d rather axe\u00a0altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n
\"whooshing<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

When I suggested that you can keep dates out of your job altogether, a lot of you were intrigued. And then you wanted to know what that looks like. How do\u00a0you actually get away with ambiguous timelines<\/em>?

The following is\u00a0how I outlined it for one of our readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Q: How do\u00a0I promise the company and customers that we will continue to deliver value if I am ambiguous on the timing? Granted, I realize I cannot say \u201cOn January 23 @ 4pm\u201d this feature will be implemented. But not having a timeline\u00a0is too ambiguous for a lot of organizations. Am I wrong?<\/em>

A: Absolutely. You can’t\u00a0abandon timelines altogether – that would never work.

The trick is to have two separate\u00a0documents up your sleeve, with two different purposes: your<\/strong> roadmap<\/strong> and your release plan<\/strong>.

Your release plan outlines dates, dependencies and resources for the upcoming releases. Your roadmap broadly shows your current, short-term and long-term priorities.

Now, how you or your dev team manage this depends on your dev style.

If you\u2019re following an agile methodology, you might have a backlog of stories that are approved, estimated, and ready to be picked up for development in the next 2-3 sprints.\u00a0If each sprint is 2 weeks and followed by a release, then you would have a working plan for what\u2019s going to be released over the next 4-6 weeks.

If your team is using a Kanban board<\/a> with releases every few days, you might have a release plan of just a couple weeks.

If waterfall is more your thing, you might be mid-project and have a plan to release in a couple months. (Though this one gets harder and harder to manage, especially if you\u2019re not putting in the upfront time to do the project management work of estimating, buffering, and planning in detail to get it out. It\u2019s why so\u00a0many companies are moving to more agile approaches!)

So for the very short term, you should have a release plan of sorts. It can be as simple as a \u2018To Release\u2019 pile that gets stacked up in your Trello board, or something more structured in JIRA.

The release plan is essential as you still need your marketing team to be prepped for a launch, your support team to be trained on how to support, your sales team ready to start selling,\u00a0and so on. It’s like a mini project plan for what’s already in the pipeline.

This works out great for you –\u00a0they usually don\u2019t need to know much beyond the next\u00a0few weeks anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything else sits on your product roadmap.<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n
\"flexible-roadmap-attributes\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The Current column of your roadmap shows broadly what\u2019s in development and coming up to be released. We even pull through the exact status of each ticket so you can see the progress in real-time.

But the Current column, which might be anywhere from 2-4 months of overview, will include a broader picture of what\u2019s coming up: It doesn\u2019t just show what\u2019s in development at that moment, but also looks at everything that\u2019s being planned, analyzed, designed, and prepped for development too.

So don\u2019t do away with dates altogether!

These are essential to knowing when something\u2019s going to go live. But until it\u2019s really gone into development, you won\u2019t have a clear picture of when it\u2019ll come out.

Just talk about them separately.

This\u00a0keeps\u00a0conversations around the release plan tactical (how do we get this out, what can we do to unblock this obstacle?), and\u00a0conversations around the roadmap strategic (are these initiatives going to move the needle, are they in the right order based on what we\u2019ve seen in the last 6 months?).\u00a0<\/strong>

So when it comes to roadmap, you get to have\u00a0that flexibility so you can react to changes in the market, competition, or how customers reacted to what you just made live in your last release.

What do you think? Did life just get a little easier or what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Update: We’re developing an e-course to help you set up and introduce a theme-based roadmap at your organization. We’ll drop it in your inbox when it’s ready – sign up here<\/a><\/span>.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We recently published “Why Release Dates Are Irrelevant To Product Managers” and it immediately became one of our most widely shared pieces. Was it something I said? I hope so.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"pp_uni_tag":[],"class_list":["post-3823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-leadership"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow To Get Away With Ambiguous Timelines<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Getting in trouble because your timelines are always wildly inaccurate? 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