Dear product owner, do you wish that you could share strategic direction, but with confidence?
Whymap is a practice that connects what you’re doing with why you’re doing it, facilitating meaning in your strategic communications.
It ain’t a novel idea, but after a decade of Agile Coaching, I’ve been told it’s a very helpful one, so consider this my gift to you. Happy perpetual Holiday-of-your-choice.
like a roadmap, but purpose-based
How It Works
Setup: It starts with an empty roadmap, with an x-axis of time (with columns headings of the “Now”, “Next”, and “Later” time horizons), and a y-axis of meaning (with a row heading per Key Result, determined later).
Input: The Product Owner establishes, then collects, the team’s Objectives, Key Results, and titles for the team’s larger bodies of work.
Action: Populate the roadmap’s row headings with the Key Results, grouping rows by Objective. In the cells at the intersection of these row headings and the column headings (the three time horizons), appropriately distribute the bodies of work, each framed as a product experiment aligned to a Key Result, with the intention of nudging this Key Result to its target value. (This framing adds purpose to the body of work, connecting that ‘What’ to a ‘Why’.)
Output: This populated Whymap facilitates telling a story of purposeful product experimentation and delivery, hopefully leading to meaning in your strategic communications, specifically via transparently answering, “Are we doing what we say we care about?”
Iteration: Much as other forms of a roadmap are living documents, a Whymap should be updated as feedback is received from completed bodies of work, with new bodies of work set with changes in Key Results. The low granularity of the time axis facilitates conversations to limit work in progress.
like a roadmap, but purpose-based
How It Works Better
The y-axis provides the organizing principle to the roadmap items, thus a most useful Whymap is dependent on a connected set of well-thought-out directional notions.
Vision: This is a noun, unique to the team’s desires. It is an others-focused, longer-term, aspirational statement. I like it having three components: a ‘Who’ (target set of people, whose lives the team wants to make better), a ‘Verb’ (what this target set does), and an ‘Adverb’ (how they do it differently in the desired future). My preferred format: “Imagine a world where [Who] [Verb, present tense] [Adverb].”
Mission: This is a verb, unique to the team’s abilities. It is an us-focused, longer-term, aspirational statement. My preference is that it starts with “to”, and it is the high-level action to bring about the vision.
Objective: This is like a vision statement, but shorter-term, and an outcome that is qualitative.
Key Result: This is like a vision statement, but shorter-term, and an outcome that is quantitative, acting as Acceptance Criteria for its corresponding Objective. Crafted similarly to how I would a vision statement, that ‘Adverb’ is framed as a variable with a target value, by a target date.
Body of Work: While not a directional notion, its framing can be drawn in relation to them: it is an us-focused, shorter-term, experimental output, unique to the team’s abilities.
Analogies can be drawn when analyzing how these ideas are constructed:
- Roadmap Items (our smaller efforts) are like incremental versions of the Mission (our larger effort).
- Objectives (the slightly better world) are like incremental versions of the Vision (the much better world).
like a roadmap, but purpose-based