She is a professional with rich experience in innovation and high-tech domain, including more than 8 years in IT in various roles from testing to business analysis, product management and technical pre-sales. She have been working as a Consultant for Targetprocess, an Agile project management tool, and gained deep knowledge of Agile methodologies, including Scrum, LeSS, SAFe, NEXUS. She used to be an advocate of Agile, which helps many teams to increase their efficiency by improving processes and collaboration. However, She have a PhD in economics, naturally She was looking for more scientific and pragmatic ways to manage knowledge work and eventually found it in Kanban. Applying this method to the unique processes of a company, helped me to achieve better outcomes in both IT and non-IT cases.

Being Agile and Pragmatic when Managing Product Roadmap

As many startups and bigger software development companies, we struggled with planning and forecasting our product development. With the basic Kanban practices and principles applied, we implemented a simple solution to create a roadmap: we used options/real options theory to manage the strategic backlog, started measuring capacity in 2-dev/sprints and introduced a WIP limit of 2 features for Downstream Kanban as well as 2 classes of service (standard, expedite). The roadmap has helped us to balance demand and capability to deliver, ensuring expectations of external and internal stakeholders are managed accordingly.

‘A roadmap cannot be realistic without understanding our delivery capability, otherwise it’s wishful thinking’ - this can be the key outcome of our story.