April 2011, while I was working on a Music Social Network for Blackberry which called Mobion Music.
Once, my Senior Product Owner, Sikisima-sama asked me: “Nam, I need the roadmap for Mobion Music for next 6 months”. That is the very early state of my carrer, I had never heard about a Roadmap before. So the first question appeared in my mind, “What is a Roadmap, how I can make a Roadmap for Mobion Music?”. That seemed like not belong to my specialty. But, anyway, I got started to fingure out.
First of all, I was asking around my senior colleages, none of them was asked that question before, but anyway, they gave me some advices.
Then I was thinking and researching for the market, trends, coolest stuff related to the our service. Questions kept appearing then, then they lead me to one thing like “How is our service become in this December”, “To get there, how many release would we publish?”, “With each release, what is the purpose ?”, “How we let all those releases related to gether to reach to “the serverice that we want it to become”?”.
I answered all these questions with my limited knowledge of one-year-experience Software Engineer. Then asking around again. All the answers I considerd could be wrong or right.
After all, I gave my Roadmap to my Senior Product Owner with 3 major points:
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Since now to December, we have 3 archivements to gain: A,B,C. all of them will lead us to the main target: D.
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To archive A: we need to do 1,2,3,etc. Same with B,C.
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If there is no obstacle, we could have our Product+D in December.
If that product: Product+D is what my Senior Product Owner want, we’were going to do with this map-the Roadmap.
After one day discuss with the Board of Product Owners, we decided to go that way. That is how I made my first Roadmap.