Organising your roadmap by themes instead of features builds an engaging user narrative. It helps you to describe the value your product provides.
Themes group together features by the value they offer users. They align everyone in your team towards the big picture. This stops conversations from getting bogged down by the individual features.
The Benefit of Roadmap Themes
Focusing on themes over features gives you flexibility. This keeps you agile and allows you to swap out individual features if you find they no longer support the product’s vision.
How to Write Themes
The easiest way to start building out the themes of your product is to first identify the outcomes your users want to achieve. You can then compare this with your business goals to prioritise the common themes that will create the most impact and deliver the most value – to you and your users.
These themes can be long, spanning multiple releases, or short in duration and achievable in a single sprint. They’re rarely feature specific.
Let’s look at an example theme: helping customers to find the perfect product for their needs. This one theme would encompass several features a number of design and development sprints such as:
- Personalised product suggestions
- In-app product guides
- FAQs
- User reviews
Individually, those features aren’t particularly compelling. But together, they represent a significant step in building an exceptional retail and consumer app.