Navigating Roadmaps

The roadmap. It's a necessary evil of every product and every project. In an ideal world, our projects would follow roadmaps without deviating from them, and they would avoid all of the typical perils of adhering to roadmaps: resources gained and lost, technical debt, dependencies and blockers, changes from the top, and last-minute blowups. In the Drupal community, we're no strangers to constantly shifting roadmaps in our initiatives and our contributed projects.

In this session, we'll dive into why it's important to have a roadmap in the first place, even if it's vague and nebulous. We'll discuss how to build a roadmap that withstands the test of time and how to address limitations and pitfalls of that roadmap. We'll also explore how to deal with those unexpected situations when they arise and how to quickly pivot without losing time, money, or cachet.

Here are some of the things we'll talk about:

• Why a roadmap (for literally everything)?
• Building a roadmap
• Scoping roadmap items
• Estimation while guessing wildly
• Limitations and pitfalls of roadmaps
• Dealing with roadmap issues
• Pivoting
• Real-life roadmaps in the Drupal community

This session will benefit attendees who work with product and project management within Drupal and without, including initiative and contributed project roadmaps.