One of the roles of the Product Owner in Scrum is to hold the vision for the team about what needs to be built. This high-level vision statement allows the Product Owner to make decisions about where the product should be heading and what the priorities should be. They will often translate the vision for the product into a Product Roadmap, which can then be used to communicate to the team, including the broader group, where the product is headed and what level of investment is needed to deliver the features specified in the roadmap.

In this chapter, we look at several techniques for Product Discovery—User Story Mapping and Impact Mapping. Both of these methods are used to create an initial feature set which we can then break down into User Stories.  We'll then look at several techniques for prioritizing features/User Stories against release milestones, which will then allow us to create the initial Product Roadmap.

Finally, we'll look at Rolling Wave Planning, an adaptive planning technique where we only keep the immediate horizon (3 to 6 months) for the Product Roadmap very clear. This enables us to maintain flexibility for the less immediate horizon (beyond six months) so that we can respond to change.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics: 

• The importance of product roadmaps
• Product Discovery to create roadmaps
• User Story Mapping
• Using Impact mapping
• Using Spikes to reduce business unknowns
• Using Rolling Wave Planning for an adaptive delivery